LiveJournal WTF!?
I'm not sure what to classify this as. Because its pretty weird, and very geeky. But whatever. Its a WTF entry if I ever saw one
A few min ago I was posing a photo. I wanted to blog properly but, feh too lazy. Anyway I went to post a photo using LJ's rich text editor, and I got a weird little surprise. In the window for the "preview" of the image, was a large chunk of text...in latin!
click here for a photo!
So yeah that was a bit disconcerting. I have a slight ability in latin. Which is to say very little. Pretty much none at all. I did recognize it was latin tho! So I guess thats something!
So after stumbling upon this cryptic message from LJ (and establishing that I wasn't seeing things, and it wasn't onset of severe schizophrenia) I set about getting it translated. My friend John-who is studying to be a priest- has very advanced knowledge of latin. But not surprisingly he wasn't up. So I did what anyone desperate for answers did! I Google'd the entire paragraph! And well at first it was a bit upsetting the results. This mysterious latin paragraph...WAS EVERYWHERE! It was hidden in literally thousands of web pages. And entire web encyclopedia entries were made up of it! (here is an example, notice the humorous english message in the middle)
So if this strange anomaly is everywhere, why haven't I ever heard of it or seen it? Well as it turns out "Lorem Ipsum" as it is called, is actually a sort of typographic inside joke.
It even has a website dedicated to it! www.lipsum.com
But the wikipedia entry explains it best.
Anyway;
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. (taken from www.lipsum.com)
So there you have it, mystery solved, lets all get back to playing Unreal Tournament III!
Oh and a translation:
"Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?"
Want to know where its from? Read the wiki! :-P