Saturday, December 25, 2021

Why and How I Post Gibberish on Debate Forums

Another post in my series of "I am tired of answering this question and wrote this so I can just paste a link to it. 

The why is, I am mocking something.  Very often I will have taken some @*#$*@ nonsense and transformed it into worse nonsense.  To put it another way, if you say something willfully ignorant, I assume that your native language is gibberish am trying to talk to you so you'll understand.

Now to the how.

The simplest method is just to hit keys at random. 

A method that generates texts that almost look meaningful is to use my phone's predictive text and just accept one of the suggested words or emojis at random.  If a phrase emerges from the randomness it may be because my phone has learned to recognize frequent word-pairs, e.g. personal incredulity.

Sometimes I'll copy the text to which I'm responding, paste it, and mangle the words.  I will sometimes free-associate into song lyrics, pick similar-sounding words, any meaning you think you detect is probably apophenia.

And then there are gibberish generators.  Lorem Ipsum generators. general gibberish generators, scientific nonsense generators.  The disassociated-text command in Emacs or websites that do something similar.(these also take the text I'm mocking as input).  Sometimes, if what I'm satirizing is in a language other than English. I'll see if I can find a nonsense generator in that language, here's a recent French one that I used. 

And for when what I'm replying to made overuse of emojis, a Random Emoji Generator

Some new ones: Jabberwocky produces nonsense that looks like isaþsai ve nnåenesoho ytæetuþn wåheau ebalà and The Cut-Up Machine that re-orders words.

Reactions tend to be

  • are you drunk/stoned?  (Maybe, but that's not why)
  • are you OK? (I'm possibly in better mental health than the person I'm mocking, but feel free to decide for yourself)
  • are you schizophrenic? (No, but see the link for apophenia, the term first appeared in a study of early stages of the disorder)
  • the shock/wow reaction emoji (I don't know if you're scared or impressed)
  • attempting to interpret the gibberish as meaning something (ok ...)
  • religious screeds or quotes from scripture (I'm sure you won't be offended if I apply the same procedure to your latest comment)
  • Why bother?  (I enjoy it)




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