What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem ipsum, which you've likely seen by now, is filler text that allows visual representation of text in a document or design...providing textlike content without distracting readers with actual text. It is usually scrambled to make it fully nonsensical.
Its content is usually pulled from a 1st-century philosophical work written by Marcus Tullius Cicero, in Latin naturally, wherein he discusses hedonism, all of which already makes it gothic as anything.
Why Gothic Ipsum?
Lorem ipsum, after all, is derived from dolorem ipsum, meaning "pain itself." Which means we're already halfway to the heights of gothic delectation.
There are plenty of ipsum generators out there, providing random swarms of terms: bacon, trendy hipster culture, cupcakes, fish, Samuel L. Jackson quotations, or other fun themes of a humorous nature.
Not here. This isn't about fun or humor.*
This infernal machine is birthed from the ghastly, well-dressed depths of 19th-century gothic literature, Victorian horror, not a little melodrama, and a touch of modern swoon-worthy goth aesthetic. Not dissimilar to the Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator (except by being totally dissimilar), Gothic Ipsum takes you on a despairing journey of personal descent and bereavement.
Barren of didactical promise, the Gothic Ipsum apparatus offers you your own macabre pilgrimage of ancestral curses, doomed romances, ghostly apparitions, holidays in the country to preserve your ailing health, and sudden discoveries of the inheritance left from your decadent aristocratic uncle.
So take it. Take it, damn you, from my sight, for I cannot continue to bear such a burden. Copy it and dare to love it. Click the buttons all day to create more literary ruin, if your sanity is hale enough.
*Yes, it is.
What malefactors are responsible?
Such rampant, debauched diabolism could not be summoned by will alone, alas!
- David A. Elsensohn: The Words and the Visions
- Adam Davidson: The Science and the Sorrow