(no subject)

I am back home from Dublin and Worldcon! I didn't get to see anywhere close to everything I wanted to, and it was still an incredibly memorable and amazing week.

I got in Wednesday morning, wandered around Dublin for a while. I saw St. Stephen's Green, where I admired statues of Joyce and Rabindranath Tagore (!), I walked a bit of Trinity College's campus, walked alongside a bit of the Grand Canal. Then I crossed the Liffey to the bike rental shop to pick up my bike. I rode through Phoenix Park and then parked my bike at the Jameson Distillery for the tour. Afterward I crashed out in my hotel for a few hours and met a couple of Dublin native Worldcon newbies who'd posted on facebook that they were looking for teammates for a scifi pub trivia event at Dublin's geek bar. We placed sixth out of about twenty teams, after a rough start in the first round.

Thursday morning I biked out to Howth, which was amazing even though it fucked up my legs for the next two days. I got lost in Dublin's working port on my way out, which, oops, but once I got on the road I was supposed to be on it was a beautiful seaside ride and I had a great time.

Thursday afternoon I ran my first rpg of the con, the Zoo adventure. It was scheduled to start at 3PM, at 3:05 I was sitting at my table with zero signups... and then suddenly I had 5 signups and we blasted right into it. I had two veteran roleplayers and three newbies at the table and everyone seemed to have a really good time. I don't think Dungeon World served the adventure as well as 5E did, but it's such a rules-lite adventure that it didn't matter, and the Dungeon World rules took the story in some pleasantly unexpected directions a few times.

I've run the adventure three times... This marks the second time it ended in disaster when the players deliberately smashed the padlock on the Demonarium. WHO DOES THAT?

Thursday evening I met a non-Worldcon friend for dinner and then spent some time at the DC in 2021 party.

Friday morning I did the stroll with the stars and then spent the rest of the morning at the business meeting (grr). Then I went to see the panel on Jewish fantasy, which involved Benjamin Rosenbaum, Laura Ann Gilman, Jenny Rae Rappaport, and Gillian Polack and was really satisfying and enjoyable even though I could talk about Jewish fantasy for much longer than 50 minutes. I caught Rosenbaum afterwards to talk more about Jewish fantasy and ended up going to lunch with him, his Danish translator, and some other friends. I don't really remember what I did the rest of the day... I guess I went to marina's panel on the Hugo BDP nominees and then made kiddush and went to sleep. There might've been another panel in there somewhere.

Saturday morning I went to the business meeting (grr). In the afternoon I went to three great panels: Naomi Novik on the panel on what genre writers can learn from fanfic writers, Seanan McGuire on a panel about how ridiculous plants are, and Brandon O'Brien, Afua Richardson, Rivers Solomon, and Maquel Jacobson talking about the concept of Afrofuturism.

Sunday, I went to a bit of the business meeting (grr), but left early to make it to the panel I was on about fanfiction and community. It was so much fun! Great co-panelists who listened carefully to each other, an enthusiastic audience, and I really appreciated that I could drop fanfic jargon and not have to explain myself. Worldcon is capable of doing so much better than it does at having transformative fandom programming- the audience is so clearly there for it.

Then I had lunch with such_heights and raven and soupytwist, where we talked about vids and the mundanity of MI6, and then I got to facilitate Benjamin Rosenbaum's A Dream Apart, which was sooooo much fun. I developed a Shabbos-friendly variant using a magnetic board for mapping, and that worked out really well. It was mostly just satisfying to be able to tell Jewish fantasy stories in a way that felt natural.

Afterward, the Hugos. The auditorium was not big enough for the con, so they were distributing wristbands earlier in the day for all major events. I'd missed the window to get a pass, but there was a desperation queue an hour or so before the event to pick up any wristbands turned in by people who realized they weren't going to use them, and I lucked into a pass after waiting 45 minutes. I do not regret the wait- the Hugos were so fun and memorable, from Jeannette Ng's fierce anti-Campbell speech to Naomi Novik's inclusive acceptance speech on behalf of the AO3. I finished the night with another round of SF pub trivia, this one organized by the group that hosts the Satellite convention in Glasgow.

Monday morning I caught marina's presentation on women writing war SFF, focused on contrasting Lowachee's Warchild, Novik's His Majesty's Dragon, and Hurley's God's War against the classic tropesetting war SFF novels of Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Martin, and others.

I then called it quits for the con. I took the train out to Sandycove to see the James Joyce Museum and Tower, located in the Martello Tower where Joyce had lived for about a week, and where he therefore located Stephen Dedalus for the opening chapters of Ulysses. Afterward, I laid low in my hotel room vidding and reading and watching TV until my flight the following morning. It turns out they have Schitt's Creek Season 5 on Irish Netflix!

(no subject)

The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined by William and Elizabeth Friedman


Apparently a book came out in the past couple years called The Woman Who Smashed Codes, about Elizabeth Friedman's role in the development of American military cryptography. I'd heard of it, but not read it or known anything about it, when I randomly grabbed The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined off the library shelf.

Though Oxfordianism reigns supreme today, that's a relatively recent development. The preeminent Shakespearean conspiracy theory 75 years ago was that Francis Bacon had actually written Shakespeare, and since Bacon was known for the development of the Bacon Cipher for concealing hidden messages in text, many scholars attempted to show that there were hidden ciphers in Shakespeare revealing its true author. William Friedman met his wife, Elizabeth Friedman, when they were being paid to investigate one such hypothesized cipher, which they concluded did not exist. That notwithstanding, the presence of such noted American cryptographers on the project conferred upon it an ill-deserved legitimacy in the eyes of many, to the regret of the Friedmans. The intention of The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined seems to be to pay penance for their sins by conclusively demonstrating the error of those who claimed to have found ciphers in Shakespeare.

Chapter by chapter they demolish foolish ciphers, with wit and humor and clarity, clearing the way to the most personal part of the story, where they discuss their involvement with Colonel Fabyan's cipher investigating team and how they think the public was misled by it.

As part of this effort, they needed to demonstrate whether or not a cipher could be cracked if many of the characters were misinterpreted. They conducted an experiment: William invented a cipher, deliberately distorting a specific percentage of its characters, and gave it to Elizabeth. She then spent the next day trying to decipher it while he watched over her shoulder and occasionally gave hints when asked.

I choose to imagine this sequence with them naked; It is the sexiest passage I've ever read in a work of nonfiction.