I knew there was a reason why I felt compelled to go to Jason’s Deli for soup last weekend! It’s actually pretty good for the price point you pay too. The only thing I could say that beat it was this crab-based chowder I had at a sushi place earlier in the week. Definitely had to take a photo of the alien language at the top, aka Venusian from Futurama. This one isn’t hard to translate given it’s a simple substitution which was allegedly solved 10 minutes after the 1999 pilot aired on Fox. Even if you don’t have the font or access to a website to provide the key (there’s an a site which will do it for you), what’s on the board could be deduced in 20 minutes I’d guess by playing a form of the hangman or Wheel of Fortune game by substituting the most common characters with the most common vowel (E) or consonants (S, T) in American English. What did I do? The hard way, went by the symbols first on a spreadsheet I made of numerous fictional languages I’ve collected: Aurabesh, Mandalorian and Ithorian (Star Wars); Atlantean (Disney’s Atlantis); Elvish, Dwarven and Draconic (D&D). Whenever I use them in my games, I like to throw the players off further by writing the translation in my pidgin French or Italian before converting to the “foreign” font. I don’t want it to be that easy.
If you really, really want to know what the Jason’s Deli blackboard says and you don’t want to do the work, contact me. I’ll be more than thrilled to tell you. This trivial work reminds me how I have a slug of the same “language” to translate (or more correctly, decode) from our recent trip to Vegas. This part art exhibit, part rave hangout had a giant robot with Venusian plaqes all over it and the gang from Futurama gave their permission for this.