Tumblr typographic convention used to portray eldritch horror: is there a term for it?

[full_metal_ox]

I don't know whether this stylistic practice originated on Tumblr, but that and AO3 are where I see it the most: an alphabet soup of things like accent marks, dingbats, and characters foreign to the language of the context to convey a pictorial impression of swirling miasma of chaos--either alone or interspersed with conventional lettering as

Comments

[orange_fell]

Haha, did you try to make a tag in Cthulu-speak? LJ gave me the strangest message about it, and for a minute I was afraid we'd broken it with too many tags! Then I saw the weird letters dropping off the edge of the notification box . . .

Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to your question, but I can tell you that people do it on Reddit, too.

When the 2000s decade ended, I didn't go back and tag every post that was set in the present day at the time, but I did create a 2000-2009 tag for stories written in the '10s but set in the '00s. Accordingly, I will introduce a 2010s tag when we start getting posts that are specifically set 5-10 years in the past (from now). I can't think of a lot of posts that are specifically about fandom culture, and the tag might get misused for all posts that are set in fanfiction universes.

[sidleypkhermit]

Haha, did you try to make a tag in Cthulu-speak?

My guess is that that happened because LJ automatically tries to generate a tag from anything in the body of a post that starts with the # character. (In this case, the eldritch chatroom name.) Tad inconvenient for those of use who use the Roman alphabet and want to number things, but we're not in charge... :D

[full_metal_ox]

Which serves as a reminder (since American native English speakers have the luxury of forgetting) that not everything centers the English language and Roman alphabet as default (I take it Russian numbering conventions are different?)

[full_metal_ox]

Haha, did you try to make a tag in Cthulu-speak? LJ gave me the strangest message about it, and for a minute I was afraid we'd broken it with too many tags! Then I saw the weird letters dropping off the edge of the notification box . . .

Nope--that was pure accident; I try not to be cute at the expense of legibility without very specific aesthetic reasons. Oops.

When the 2000s decade ended, I didn't go back and tag every post that was set in the present day at the time, but I did create a 2000-2009 tag for stories written in the '10s but set in the '00s. Accordingly, I will introduce a 2010s tag when we start getting posts that are specifically set 5-10 years in the past (from now).
Fair enough, then.

I can't think of a lot of posts that are specifically about fandom culture, and the tag might get misused for all posts that are set in fanfiction universes.

And perhaps even "fandom culture" might not be disambiguation enough.

Thank you for your help!

[sidleypkhermit]

This is commonly called either Zalgo text (inexplicably named after a random demonic-sounding word from a series of SomethingAwful posts that do not bear linking to) or simply "glitch text." I think more people would recognize, or at least be able to figure out, the term "glitch text," so that's what I would suggest using unless you're writing something that calls for the more abstruse slang term.

[full_metal_ox]

Thank you for your help, and particularly the history and etymology; hope you don't mind if I beg to differ and use the term "Zalgo text" (with an explanatory footnote if necessary)--simply because it sounds eldritch.