On Mon, 30 Aug 2021, stern wrote:
//ryrpgevpny bhgyrg//
On Mon, 30 Aug 2021, ~unbeatable101 wrote:
What is that supposed to mean?
That is ROT13-scrambled message [1], which customarily used in USENET
(and Netnews in general) to hide spoilers. Some dedicated newsreaders
like SLRN and TIN have built-in ROT13 decoder which could be toggled
by hotkey. But Thunderbird probably doesn't, so...
Ctrl-C Club might have a `rot13` command installed [2], which you
can run it, paste one line of scrambled text, then press Enter,
and you would get a descrambled version out. [3] Press Ctrl+D
or Ctrl+C to exit.
(If you would like to scramble text, you do the the same steps as above;
thank to the fact that ROT13 encoding is self-inversing)
Regarding the "//...//", it is a mark commonly used for denoting
foreign language dialogs in comics. ("<<...>>" is also used for
this too) I have started using it in this thread [4]
to explicitly denote ROT13-scrambled phrases in my post, especially
when they are parts of other sentences, just for clarity.
I saw some others started to do the same in their posts too;
but it is not a USENET convention or anything, as far as I know.
So, you would see that some other participants in the thread
posted ROT13-scrambled text without this mark as well.
Regards,
~xwindows
P.S. For what it's worth, the use of ROT13 in this game
is actually _not_ required; you are still free to participate
even if you don't have an appropriate software option.
P.P.S. The answer ~stern gave is still incorrect,
free to come up with different answer.
-----
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13
[2]
If it's not, you might bug ~calamitous to install Ubuntu package
`bsdgames` there; or you could install it on your own machine.
(But I'm not using MacOS X, so I don't have specific instruction, sorry)
If all else fails, you can use this odd-looking Unix-standard command
in place of `rot13` as well:
tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m
^ You probably want to bind this as a shell alias if you have to use it
on regular basis.
[3]
If you would like to (de)scramble multiple lines at once from command line,
you probably want to use shell's here-document construct instead,
like this:
rot13 << 'EOF'
Pna
lbh
frr
zr?
EOF
^ Note that the single-quote around the first "EOF" is intentional
to make sure that the shell don't go wreck havoc if there is
any dollar or backtick symbol in the message.
[4] "Re: ASCII Of? [Object] *correct*" [2021-07-19T03:53:52Z]
<news:
cbcec085-39bf-3bc1-99c7-8ca72b7517@tilde.club>
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.art.ascii/152>
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