#gibberish

[oritoor]

[billdickeybeam]

the tender surrender

🪓🪓 toby rogers x reader

warning: cigarette burns, light masochism, mention of scars, mouthplay, fingers in mouth, smoking, erotic situation but no smut

wc : 1.7k

The wind was harsh. It whipped through the forest, played the trees like a flute, wrestled from them an ominous whistle that was audible even from the roof of the mansion.

You’d been half convinced you were going to die on the way up, as you'd followed Toby blindly (as usual), keeping your eyes on his back as he guided you out of his windowsill and along the siding.

Your skin stung with barely-there scrapes dotted up and down your bare knees and palms. Much to your delight, Toby had actually looked a little worried a few of the times you’d pretended to start slipping.

You’d only actually slipped once. That time he’d laughed.

For your benefit, you’d wrapped yourself in one of the dollar store blankets that were stored around the mansion in case of cold nights like this. Nina might’ve gotten this particular one, you thought, since it was distinctly pink and polka-dotted.

(By ‘gotten’, you really meant ‘stolen’. None of you had much in terms of money. There was no need for it. Still, given the blanket’s humble beginnings, it was annoyingly thin. You had to force yourself to bite back a shiver… embarrassing.)

Toby, on the other hand, seemed fine. Or maybe his hoodie was just that insulated. He was bubbling over with a familiar restless, jerky energy, rocking vaguely back and forth and taking intermittent pulls from a roughed-up cigarette that was probably one of Tim’s.

After attempting a deep inhale, his eyes went wide and he doubled over, chest pressed to his knees as he coughed and sputtered for air.

“Lightweight! Lightweight!” You leered, eyeing him from where you sat on the roof.

The two of you were a foot or so apart, close enough where the stink of his cigarette was invading your personal area, but you didn’t move away. The smell was familiar, almost comforting for a reason that was hard to place. Thinking about it-- or anything pertaining to your past-- made a splitting pain crawl up the side of your temple, so you didn’t. Instead you focused on the tile sticking irritatingly into your thigh.

“T- th..hhhat doesn’t…” He took in another breath, “D-doesn’t even mmmean anything with cigarettes... Idiot.” He huffed, hitting his chest with a fist as he took a few shaky inhales. To his credit, he recovered surprisingly quickly.

“Mmmmand anyways, I have to breathe it in all at,” His eyes blinked roughly, “All at, ugh… all at once because of this… f.. fuh- fucking thing,” He tilted his scarred cheek towards you and stuck his tongue out of the hole, poking the tip of it with his finger. “So ‘s a little harder than usual.”

“Shiiiit dude. I didn’t even think about that.” You relented, tilting closer to peer at it. Curiosity was ever your vice.

God, it looked gnarly, scar tissue wrapping around the gaping hole in the side of his face that led to crooked, yellow molars and dirty gums.

“Mhm.” He hummed, eyeing the cigarette like a challenge before dipping down and leaning over his knees again to take another drag.

You mirrored him and leaned your head on your knees to watch him, like he was your own personal TV show. Wasn’t like you got much to watch out at the mansion anyways.

“Kinda wanna stick my fingers in.” You mused. He didn’t react much, just blew the smoke out of his mouth in a lazy fog.

His eyes met yours from where his head lay on his knees. He lifted the cigarette up to his mouth just to chew on the edge of it with his canine. It seemed the thought was worth his consideration, at least. White paper crinkled beneath his teeth.

“Mmmmmmm… yeah.” He said, angling himself to face you just slightly more, “I-” he began, before his shoulder jerked up to his shoulder. Something popped in his neck and he winced. “Urgh… I will if you let m…muh- me put this out. Onn.. your arm.”

Your eyebrows raised. You felt a dull pulling feeling in some tendon of yours on your arm, but it went away quickly. Punctuated with another shiver, you wrestled your arm from beneath where you’d wrapped yourself securely in your blanket and held it out in the biting wind. He eyed it.

“Hold me still.” You said.

One calloused hand found your wrist, holding it tightly, and you wondered if that’s how it felt when he held down his victims. You wondered how much pressure he applied. Something spiked in your pulse. The smoke ebbing from his cigarette sharply switched direction as the wind howled, whipping your hair into your face. You flicked it out of the way with a jerk of your chin.

He took one last drag deep into his lungs, directly from the cig to his lungs, then pursed his lips and puffed it all out towards you. The wind shoved it out of the way before it could even get to you, sending a a brief flash of annoyance through you. Whatever. Maybe next time.

As you were imagining the two of you, maybe in the basement, Toby leaning over you and blowing smoke into your pores, you felt a sudden sharp pain shoot up your arm and into your throat.

You made a sound pathetically, some strangled half-gasp-half-yelp that had your fingers curling into your palm and body recoiling. Toby had been quick, pressing the cigarette up against the smoothness of your arm, quick enough to give you zero time to process what was happening, surely too quick for you to prepare yourself. It wasn’t the most pain you’d ever experienced, not by a long shot, but it was unexpected, and the surprise somehow made it more poignant.

He held it there, watching your arm, watching you, watching the air hiss out from between your teeth as the residual heat crawled up your arm with razor fingers. Your wrist flexed beneath his grip. The pain finally started to mellow out, dipping and dulling into something rounder and easier to manage.

A snicker left him and he dug the bud harder into your skin, grinning even wider as you flinched. His tongue ran over the front of his teeth.

“You’re so fff-fragile.” He teased, letting your arm go and flicking the cigarette at you. It hit you on the chest. “No wonder you duh..don’t go on missions.”

“Uh, yeah, whatever..”

Your voice was a little too weak for your liking, mind still reeling slightly from the shock. You imagined the wind sweeping the feeling away.

You made a face at him before you bent over your knees to observe the mark he’d left.

With a low voice you muttered to yourself, “Someone’s gotta do stuff around here, can’t all be running around in the damn forest…”, but you were obviously more preoccupied with the mark in front of you. He’d left a rosy red circle on your forearm with a red slash of color leading up to it from when you’d flinched.

“Looks pretty badass.” You hummed, holding your arm out to him.

In turn, he held out his. It was covered in scratches, cuts, marks, burns, countless scars and blemishes running up and down his arm.

“Okay… showoff.”

He only laughed, smacking your arm away. You couldn’t help your smile.

“So do I get to stick my fingers in your mouth now?”

“Mmmyou know you can do that wuh…whenever you want.” He hummed, tilting his head towards you with a catlike grin.

Well, if he said so. As quick as you could, you darted your hand up and shoved your fingers in his mouth. Obviously they didn’t get very far, given that he was grinning with his teeth, but you got the desired effect, the tips of your fingers pushing past his lips and into his gums for a brief moment. He spluttered, his hands shot out, and he fell halfway backwards. Your laughter keened out into the night.

“Ah…ss..” His right eye flinched shut, head twitching as he reared back up, “Asshole!” But he was laughing too. He swatted at your hand again and you humored him by shoving his own hand back. He only grinned.

Done with playing, you flicked your bangs out of your face and leaned backwards to lay down on the roof tile. It was rough where your elbow rested. One of your hands reached out to grab the shoulder of his hoodie and tug him to follow.

He leaned backwards to match you and you, in turn, leaned over him. His head moved easily when you reached out and grabbed his chin, maneuvering his face to give you a better angle to observe his scar— if you could even call it that.

While you watched him, he watched you. His eyes bored into yours, observing each expression with strangely careful attention. You could feel it physically, the weight of it, the feeling settling heavy somewhere in your throat. It was exciting.

Your thumb traced down his cheek, just shy of the wound. He tried to suppress a flinch, but failed, his teeth gritting together. He was weak like you… just better at hiding it.

“Do you look at it a lot?” You asked. Your thumb finally found the rough outside of it, feeling the barbed skin. The texture was unfamiliar to you but not unwelcome. This was something you’d thought about for a while.

He tried to shake his head. You held it still. Your grip tightened to press his jaw open and he conceded, mouth parting like he was at the dentist. It was admittedly tempting to say the line (say ahh!)... but you kept it together. The soft pad of your finger smoothed from his cheek towards his lower lip. It was plush, fuller than the top lip, and when you ran your finger over it it popped back into place in a certain satisfactory way.

Your nails bit into the soft flesh of his inner cheek and his teeth barred, framing nicely around your knuckles.

“Has anyone ever touched you here before?” Your voice was hushed and close to him. His breath met yours.

“No.” He said, voice muffled around your fingers. You shoved them deeper.

“D’you think anyone will ever touch you here again?”

He was quiet for a while. Your middle finger stroked over the slickness of his back canine. Finally, he answered: “No.”

a/n :: this is my first tumblr fic lol hope you enjoyed. and i also hope i formatted it right... lmk. comments and reblogs are appreciated. bless. also creds to @\pixopix for the x divider

you can also read this fic on my ao3 where i post all my other bullshit

[dedalvs]

hello! i just saw fantastic 4 and was wondering if you at least know who was in charge of constructing silver surfer’s language? i’ve been trying to find stuff online but no luck so far… i’d really like to know more about how they built the language tbh

You're in luck, because I do know, but not in luck, because the answer is disappointing. There is no conlang. They had the dialect coach who was already on staff make something up to fit. There's no construction behind it at all; it's just gibberish. It's the Star Wars deluxe package.

[lingthusiasm]

Bonus 106: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript - Interview with Claire Bowern | Lingthusiasm

Get more from Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Bonus 106: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript - Interview with Claire Bowern

In the 1600s, an antique book is recorded in an alchemist's library in Prague, containing intriguing but puzzling drawings, like plants with unnatural cuboid roots, as well as a strange writing system, with some familiar letters and some utterly unfamiliar. This book became known as the Voynich Manuscript, after a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912, and the meaning (or lack thereof) that lies on its 240 parchment pages is a puzzle that's intrigued cryptographers, historians, linguists, and more for centuries.

In this episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern, who's a professor at Yale University, researcher of language documentation and historical linguistics, and creator of a class about the enduring enigma that is the Voynich Manuscript. We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn't created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn't look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven't succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we've actually succeeded in cracking it one day. Listen to this episode about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

[vyllea]

Romanian presidential elections are happening right now and our only big liberal candidate was in 2nd place, only 3 thousand votes above our classic conservative. In first place by a large margin we have a man who was so outspokenly far-right that he was kicked out of the far-right party.

If during the American elections Google searches spiked looking up what a tariff is, Romanians started looking up the meaning of "antisemitism", "russophile", "freemasonry", and several nationalist terms. He has been endorsed by Kremlin officials.

Not only are we about to have a Trump-Harris situation during our second vote, but the odds are severely against us. I trust that this country would go for the lesser evil between two conservatives but I'm afraid to trust them to vote between a fascist and a woman. The misogyny and homophobia I'm seeing is insane.

[shieldshocker]

I agree with anon

[vintage-tigre]

Lorem Ipsum: How The Gibberish Dummy Text Became The World’s First Copy-Paste Job

•Punctilious Consectetur•

What follows is the wonderful and slightly absurd story of Lorem Ipsum - the placeholder gibberish that actually originated from one man’s grief in Ancient Rome.

Nobody sets out to become the author of the most widely read text in human history, but that is precisely what happened to Marcus Tullius Cicero in 45 BC, when he sat down to write a rather dry philosophical treatise called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (which translates, with characteristic Roman directness, as On the Ends of Good and Evil). It was not, by any account, a riotous read. Cicero was working through his grief after the death of his daughter and processing it the way Roman intellectuals tended to, which is to say by producing several thousand words on the nature of virtue and suffering.

Somewhere in the middle of it, he wrote a passage beginning “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet…”, meaning roughly “Nor is there anyone who loves pain itself because it is pain…” It sat there quietly for about fifteen hundred years, bothering nobody.

Then, in the 1500s, an anonymous typesetter working for a Renaissance-era printing house did something that graphic designers have never entirely forgiven or forgotten. Needing a block of realistic-looking Latin text to fill a page and demonstrate a new typeface, he grabbed Cicero’s philosophical meditation on suffering, scrambled it thoroughly, removed any passages that might accidentally make sense, and produced the now-universal dummy text beginning “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” It was, essentially, the world’s first copy-paste job. The result was gibberish, but very convincing gibberish, which it turns out is exactly what the design industry has needed ever since. Cicero, who spent his life fretting about legacy and the proper use of language, would presumably have had strong feelings about this. We can only be grateful he is not here to express them.

Ok cool, so how did it end up as the standard placeholder text on that website you’re trying to build?

The decisive moment came in 1984, when a software company called Aldus released a desktop publishing program called PageMaker. PageMaker needed sample text to fill its template pages, and a man named Dr Richard McClintock, with either great erudition or access to a very old printing manual, reached for the Lorem Ipsum passage. Copy-Paste

It shipped with the software and landed on the desks of every graphic designer, layout artist, and marketing manager in the Western world practically overnight. When the web arrived a decade later and designers needed placeholder text to mock up websites, Lorem Ipsum was simply already there, sitting in every design program they owned, familiar and unquestioned, like a piece of furniture that has been in the hallway so long nobody remembers who bought it or why. A few people have tried to dislodge it over the years, proposing alternatives involving pangrams or cheerful nonsense, but Lorem Ipsum has proved immovable. Cicero, who was eventually murdered on the orders of Mark Antony and had his hands nailed to the Senate door as a warning to others, would no doubt find it deeply satisfying that his words, however mangled, have outlasted everyone who ever wished him ill.

Here’s more from a fabulous interview with said Dr McClintock if you want to explore this etymological Rabbit Hole

[zus-a-fungi]

Dearest moots, if you have ponysona somewhere on your blog pLSSSSSS TAG IT

either i'm missing something or only 6 of my moots have one