“I just chose words carefully”

212

zzdw about 2 hours ago 50 commentsRead Article on unsung.aresluna.org

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Discussion (50 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

_jackdk_•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if at any point during writing, the heroic author of that Super Metroid guide learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles", and decided to own the mistake rather than reword the entire guide.

Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

mananaysiempre•about 1 hour ago

Judging by the lowercase “m” it’s the 8x16 variation[1] and not the 9x16 one you linked, but otherwise yes, looks like the plain old VGA font? (Incorrectly displayed, as the site points out: the VGA didn’t have square pixels in either of those modes.) The site uses (AVIF) images in place of text, but it’s like 15 minutes to write a program that typesets an ASCII file in a given monospace bitmap font and writes out the result as say a PPM (and I’m sure ImageMagick can do it if you’d rather dig through docs than program), so this doesn’t seem to require any further explanation?

[1] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

EGreg•37 minutes ago

I think you meant "spelt" rather than spent. A but ironic, all things considered.

zdragnar•2 minutes ago

Now I'm wondering if you meant to use but instead of bit intentionally or not... I'm not great with subtle humor in writing.

card_zero•15 minutes ago

Muphry's law, innit

kibwen•40 minutes ago

> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles"

I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.

somat•22 minutes ago

Or Andrew Jackson approaching the problem from the other end.

“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.”

As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.

eru•14 minutes ago

Should be missels, then?

sho_hn•about 2 hours ago

There's a similar anecdote Gillian Anderson recently revealed during an interview on the X-Files, saying Chris Carter had an OCD-like habit to write dialog to conform to certain text layout preferences (no widows[1]) in the script, which made for the show's distinctive style of dialog cadence.

1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

consumer451•about 1 hour ago

Here is the interview where she mentions it, with the correct timestamp, backed-up just enough to give it context.

https://youtu.be/d3bCel607lQ?t=1162

diurnalist•about 1 hour ago

I also saw that interview, then out of curiosity I tried to find any evidence of this. There are some fan sites with ostensibly original X-Files scripts out there[1]. Looking through some written by Carter[2], I wonder if this is apocryphal, or if he was messing with her a bit.

[1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...

consumer451•25 minutes ago

Wow, thanks for doing this digging. In the interview Gillian recounts Chris Carter saying "Look, no widows."

Maybe this was not the rule, but something that he had always strived for, so he felt the need to call it out as something cool?

xerox13ster•about 2 hours ago

I just realized I have nearly always avoided widows and orphans because it felt bad to write that way.

I wonder if I was ever taught to write this way and forgot, but I feel like I just learned the terms for the first time.

card_zero•38 minutes ago

  This might potentially
  rejuvenate the writing
  by disrupting habitual
  patterns, which forces
  more original choices.

cottsak•8 minutes ago

Could be a saving grace in the age where the robots come up with all the copy.

gyomu•43 minutes ago

> At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?

I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')

See also: localizing your interface to German

crooked-v•35 minutes ago

Yep, any concern about text widows and orphans in modern app layouts becomes irrelevant as soon as you have to localize.

Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.

GeertB•22 minutes ago

I've definitely been guilty of wording my multi-line doc comments in a way that would ensure they'd flow without awkward right margins. I would have a macro in vim that would call the fmt program to reflow the comment to 79 (later 98) characters, and then would iterate on word choice until the comments looked good. Not exactly right-justified, but no very ragged edge either.

CarVac•about 1 hour ago

My dad told a story of a classmate in high school going through the effort of manually justifying text in a paper he wrote and being rewarded with a plagiarism accusation.

That was done by typing the whole paper twice, with added spaces the second time.

fhub•about 2 hours ago

Two definitions that I had to look up.

* Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column.

* Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.

Leonard_of_Q•about 1 hour ago

Those who lived through the (text-mode) WordPerfect era may remember 'widow and orphan protection' as being one of the features which was advertised for this program, i.e it could be set to either move that orphaned first line of a new paragraph to the next page or move a few extra lines or a whole paragraph to the next page to keep the widow company.

nosioptar•about 1 hour ago

Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.

ivw•about 2 hours ago

suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically

https://tom7.org/bovex/

ivanjermakov•about 2 hours ago

No mention of Tom7's "Badness 0" by the author is the a crime!

uolmir•about 1 hour ago

He managed to create the ultimate version of form over function. All hail Lorem Epsom.

hankbond•about 1 hour ago

towards the end of the knuth version

> This presents a problem for the typical way that academic papers are written, which is to do all the work in a coffee-fueled fugue in the last few days before the deadline, then stay up all night writing the paper and finding citations for the pro-forma “related work” section which you did last but you know that the reviewers will insist upon

I have zero exposure to academia but chuckled because thats often what I do for blog posts :P

eru•9 minutes ago

AIs these days are pretty good for the 'find prior art and related work' part I find. Of course, you should treat their output like that of an over-eager but somewhat unreliable intern.

epistasis•about 2 hours ago

I am filled with both a deep admiration and horror at this.

It's shockingly impressive.

cm2012•about 1 hour ago

And that it was done for an amateur game guide! This is like a legendary work of art.

lanyard-textile•44 minutes ago

I have never felt more seen. I do this with comments all the time, rewording things to look nice on that 80 or 100 column mark.

underyx•44 minutes ago

So maybe it is possible to use alternate words in writing without compromising on writing quality after all.

msephton•about 1 hour ago

BITD I used Protext word processor on Atari ST (and later DOS/Windows PC) which automatically justified monospace text. It also had a pretty good dictionary (all in 512KB of RAM) and I remember doing this word dance to get lines to flow better.

Manual: https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/protext_5_04_arnor.pdf

Screenshot of manual section: https://jumpshare.com/share/jOnMu7M36AOEWyoL0QDl

zellyn•about 1 hour ago

I remember reading Project Gutenberg email updates from Michael S. Hart in the mid to late 90s that were famously formatted like this.

It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)

stevage•about 1 hour ago

The part that horrifies me about this is the disincentive to revise any part of the text due to the flow-on effects.

RobRivera•about 1 hour ago

Man. I kinda want to stress test my memory of super metroid before reading this guide. I could do a sub 3hr run through at 100% when I was a child.

I know I couldn't today.

brcmthrowaway•7 minutes ago

There is some bizarre stuff that gets posted on weekends. It's like reading the New Yorker.

initramfs•about 1 hour ago

I used to go to my computer laboratory in high school and at my mom's work to print out GameFAQ walkthroughs in the late 90s. They were excellent. I wrote this to remind myself of simple fun that's been superseded by grander ambitions, and sometimes I think I am wrong for choosing the latter.

quanto•30 minutes ago

A human victory by sheer willpower. I find the story oddly uplifting.

techknight•about 1 hour ago

If I remember correctly, this is the tweet (and HN post) that brought it to the attention of the world back in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093

lukeh•about 2 hours ago

Ha, I quite enjoy doing this in comments or commit messages where practicable. But, that's just a few lines. :)

boothby•about 1 hour ago

It's a guilty pleasure of mine, spending a few minutes to clean up the aesthetics of docstrings and comments. I justify (heh) it to myself by catching unclear wording on this last cleanup pass -- and not taking it too far, obstrusifying for the aesthetic.

bywater•about 1 hour ago

Learned this the hard way explaining a bug fix; a single ambiguous term derailed an hour-long discussion.

oxonia•about 2 hours ago

Ye gods! The fact that this was done by hand... I have no words.

semiinfinitely•about 1 hour ago

this is the kind of content I come to hackernews for

gkoberger•about 2 hours ago

The Super Metroid guide is the kind of thing that AI will render obsolete, which makes me sad.

One of my favorite quotes is from Penn and Teller, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". AI has shifted that a bit.

But lots of technology has rendered formerly human-lead things obsolete, and I'm sure we'll find new ways to express creativity.

LtWorf•about 1 hour ago

LaTeX has existed for a certain amount of years already.

gkoberger•about 1 hour ago

Sure but that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about the guy who wrote a 17,000 guide manually in monospace so that it was justified.

garciansmith•10 minutes ago

But he didn't need to do that before either. He did it because he cared (in a weird way, sure). And some people will still care.

Video game text FAQs in general though were a dying genre before gen AI anyhow. Something I bemoan when I try to find one little piece of info and I'm faced with guides that are spread out on dozens of webpages for impressions of ads that I don't even see, or long videos that I have try to scroll through and take a ton of time just to find out if the person even went to the area I'm interested in. I sure miss Ctrl+F on GameFAQs.

imnotr0b0t•27 minutes ago

Sometimes I think I'm too detail-oriented. Then I remember that someone once spent weeks manually rewording a game FAQ so the right margin would look pretty in a text file. And I feel better about myself...