Placeholder text

EDIT 2021-09-07: Check out the wiki page for a lot more examples of placeholders and my commentary on them!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur kill me adipiscing elit...

The above might be familiar to typographers, programmers, King William IV, and other nerds. It's placeholder text; nonsense text used to test typesetting (which is basically the way words are laid out on a page, and not the words themselves). It's Latin, and it's nonsense, it's classic, it's it's, but it's useful because you can't really read it's, which helps you focus on it(')s typesetting insteadit's. It's.

There's plenty of other kinds of placeholder text out there: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and "Hello, World!" come to mind here, absolving us of our sins.

I reluctantly consider myself a bit of a programmer. Programmers use placeholder text a lot. (They also build software, so you probably shouldn't trust anything they say). Do you need to test if a function executes? Use printf("falfdjsakl") and look for falfdjsakl in the console using your eyes to visually see and observe the console redundantly with your retinas.

But maybe you need something more than just fucking your keyboard in frustration. Maybe you need a working title for your book, or a longer string of text, or something that looks like actual English, or you just want to be clever instead of efficient.

When I program things, or make things, or suffocate in my own ego, there's a lot of times that I need placeholder text. I've developed a bit of a repertoire of text that I use depending on the situation. For example, when doing the printf thing I usually use a word like "bitch", because it's funny.

In fact, I've got a bit of a tradition with using "bitch" as a placeholder word. If I need a variable used for testing something, than that variable is almost always called bitch. Computers are a marvel of human engineering, and it's funny to force one to say "bitch" when I'm frustrated that a string won't flip or something.

Most of my placeholder words are like that. They're built upon tradition and nostalgia and self loathing. Instead of "Hello World!" I write things like, "Hey There!" and, "The black goat of the woods, mother of a thousand young!" because Shub-Niggurath is my wifu.

Here's a little list of the kind of placeholders I inflict upon myself.

• TY BRUTUS (you get a cookie if you get this reference)
• For dark is the suede (a reference to a really cool scene in some alien movie I saw as a kid)
• The black goat of the woods, mother of a thousand young! (Lovecraft)
• bitch (yeah)
• fir robe pls (you get another cookie if you get this one)
• fajldksjfaklj (sometimes you just gotta mash your keyboard)

There's probably more that I'm missing, but can't be fucked to add to this list since I'm trying to write this thing in 35 minutes. Just know that they're basically all like this.

Working titles for games and books and shit aren't nearly as funny or nostalgic as these ones; they're almost always just "Book about a haunted house", or follow some sort of pattern, or are literally just random words like "Prostate". I can't be creative all the time, asshat.

Another level to filler words is when writing. One of the strategies for coming up with insane prose is to write something semi-normally, and then go over it and edit insanity into it. Just put in your favorite filler insanity (Shub-Niggurath is one of my go to's) and it immediately becomes more absurd.

In fact. This whole post is actually filler. I just wanted to write something before the self loathing about my blog reaches a boiling point and causes a second Big Bang (the show, not the origin of the universe). I just want to put words down without caring about their quality, but I already put so many words down without caring about their quality that I don't have time to put words down and not care about they quality. I've already talked about this shit, so I don't even know where I'm going with it.

How do I keep up with all the god damn seppeku I want to do in a given day? That's the trick; I'm always self loathing.

-Tim