
Lorem Gibson - Website filler text based on the works of William Gibson - Dekku
http://loremgibson.com/
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networked
Great idea! Where are the verbs, though? Right now I can see from the JS
source it doesn't use Markov chains [1], which could improve the result
greatly. Good placeholder text in a language the user can understand (as
opposed to simple Greeking [2]) is non-distracting precisely because it
balances on the verge of meaning. From my experience I'd assume fake Latin and
nonsense prose would both be less distracting than a soup of fascinating SF
words.

Edit: Here's what a markov.js remix of William Gibson's _Burning Chrome_ looks
like:

 _> Los Angeles was a dream, responsive to Deke's slightest thought. For weeks
he systematically visited every boozy watering hole in the Fifties. Sometimes
they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler on the museum's exhibits, a NASA
Hasselblad recovered from the inside. It probably took all of Jackman's silent
and vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a gray plastic tiara. Tally
Isham smiling up from the huge speakers. He sought her almost blindly on the
edge of the tall drinks and paid. A big woman in green, and in- clined her
head. She was everyone's giggling sister, in a way to trust in whatever
context it encountered. Congratulations, I heard the woman said. That's the
trouble with designer drugs; they're too clever. That stuff you're doing has
some hard data, Toby; she's a hologram stuck behind my left ear, where they'd
gone in to tell it to. Nobody at all. And I know you were looking for us, or
for the road, admire the city walls, the high point of the hydrogen atom.
Tsiolkovsky's radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to
geosynchronous comsats that bounced it down to Plesetsk, where bulldozers were
already excavating for a year later, when two leading firms had the exact
change, unless he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had to jump with
it, and it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the open doors
and watch the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to relax._

[1] For Markov chains in Javascript see, e.g.,
[http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cz1/prog/markov/markov.html](http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cz1/prog/markov/markov.html).

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeking)

~~~
EvanAnderson
I'm not using Markov chains, either, but my little word-babble script does
fairly well when you feed it "Neuromancer":

He looked at the dance of the logics kinda bunker... It was no relationship
with it... He looked like Armitage's toxin sacs. Professional pride, baby, I
mean, these days? Get dressed, Case. Bus to his own laughter and smiled. Case
plunged through the matrix below. He'd been slit. An AI's are still got it.
Not the Baptist... Darkness there, Wintermute can. Case had the electric dance
ten minutes to him... Cyberspace. A white teeth. Month later to the corridor.
The phone bleated steadily. The Panther Moderns differ from the sides a
burglar. He stood beside his own air in Straylight. Wintermute, Case peered at
Case. You forget that made of the room. The Finn watched, then Armitage, come
out. A man's voice, out of her, then. Behind the neural cutout. I think you're
all together in cloud. But just above the terrorist has all of freckles.

~~~
pjbrunet
In Gibson's world, I think the algorithm would have been obfuscated and
released to the world in stages, anonymously, building up a cult following.
Till one day it's revealed the algorithm has a hidden aspect which boots
Wintermute.

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gemlog
This is silly.

I've run a printing press in my mis-spent youth. And repaired photo-copiers.

One technique that is often taught is to turn the page upside-down -- in order
that you not be distracted by the content.

You are, at that point, and your job, is to be only interested in the
copy/print quality. Registration, blur etc. Not the content. That's the
editor's job. Not yours.

The same may be said in this instance for the layout. That's your focus, or
should be. That's the beauty of Lorem Ipsum: most people don't know Latin. If
you want a change, make it Klingon, but retain the original use. That is, to
check the page. Don't make it distracting by being readable or in any way
comprehensible.

~~~
mherdeg
From the content side, having worked for a student newspaper and having been
bitten by accidentally running a bunch of pictures headlined with "Inspiring
'Red Sox Win' Photo Spread Head", something we learned was to make filler text
__look as obtrusive as possible __, so you remember it 's there and fix it
before you go to press. Text with lots of "@@s" and characters with deep
descenders were both helpful.

That said, I'm a big fan of The Onion's "Passersby were amazed by the
unusually large amounts of blood."

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_delirium
I'm holding out for Lorem Ibsen.

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beardicus
Where are all the one, two, and three letter words? Does Gibson never use "a",
"or", or "and"? More importantly, how is this an effective placeholder for
English text without them? This seems all too common in these alternative
ipsum generators. I guess people aren't actually supposed to use them?

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saraid216
These are fun, but I really don't understand why people refuse to release the
source code for them.

~~~
kivlor
I did one of these for The IT Crowd and released the source code -
[https://github.com/kivlor/itcrowdipsum](https://github.com/kivlor/itcrowdipsum)

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taopao
The content is distracting, which kind of defeats the point of Lorem Ipsum.

