“I just chose words carefully”

https://unsung.aresluna.org/i-just-chose-words-carefully/

112•zdw•1h ago

Comments

sho_hn•56m 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

xerox13ster•45m 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.

consumer451•24m ago

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

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

ivw•53m ago

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

https://tom7.org/bovex/

ivanjermakov•48m ago

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

uolmir•30m ago

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

epistasis•49m ago

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

It's shockingly impressive.

cm2012•26m ago

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

lukeh•49m ago

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

boothby•10m 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.

oxonia•46m ago

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

gkoberger•35m 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•27m ago

LaTeX has existed for a certain amount of years already.

gkoberger•21m 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.

fhub•30m 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•22m 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.

_jackdk_•21m 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_...

techknight•20m 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

RobRivera•18m 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.

msephton•15m 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

initramfs•14m 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.

bywater•11m ago

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

zellyn•6m 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•2m ago

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

“I just chose words carefully”

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Artie (YC S23) Is Hiring Technical AES

Startup Anti-Patterns

Quest for the Eternal Dock – Lambdock

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Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)

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“I just chose words carefully”

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