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.
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?
I think you meant "spelt" rather than spent. A but ironic, all things considered.
zdragnar 2 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
Muphry's law, innit
fwipsy 59 minutes ago [-]
oh ironny
Dban1 38 minutes ago [-]
I think you menat to spell "irony"
firecall 53 minutes ago [-]
And there I was wondering about used missiles!
Apparently, I googled, “expended ordnance” is the term.
aaron695 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kibwen 2 hours 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.
cyphar 36 minutes ago [-]
And are British, at least in Australia (and the US, I guess?) we pronounce the second "i".
It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").
somat 2 hours 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.
jimmydddd 57 minutes ago [-]
I few years ago I saw a TV interview where some gen-z kid confidently stated: "the dictdionary is supposed to reflect how I talk, not the other was around."
xboxnolifes 7 minutes ago [-]
The tricky part is that spoken language and written language are not the same. Even if you are a descriptionist that believes dictionaries should represent how people write, it doesn't necessarily mean that the spelling changes based on how people pronounce it.
eru 40 minutes ago [-]
That's actually how many of the dictionary people see themselves.
saghm 1 hours ago [-]
I'd argue that "le" is not really phonetic to how people pronounce words ending in that; "missils" would be more phonetic
eru 2 hours ago [-]
Should be missels then?
rkagerer 1 hours ago [-]
They're where they keep the nuclear wessels.
rmunn 1 hours ago [-]
Let's settle the argument by all agreeing on mussels instead, and enjoy a nice seafood dish with garlic and a white wine sauce. Delicious.
sho_hn 4 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.
"No widows" on its own isn't enough to create a distinctive dialog cadence.
"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.
I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.
I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.
consumer451 3 hours ago [-]
Here is the interview where she mentions it, with the correct timestamp, backed-up just enough to give it context.
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.
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?
fasterik 2 hours ago [-]
I'm also reminded of how David Milch supposedly wrote a lot of Deadwood in iambic pentameter. I only learned about this after seeing the show, but I did pick up the "Shakespearean" feel of some of the dialogue. Constraints often force creativity.
xerox13ster 3 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 2 hours ago [-]
This might potentially
rejuvenate the writing
by disrupting habitual
patterns, which forces
more original choices.
cottsak 2 hours ago [-]
Could be a saving grace in the age where the robots come up with all the copy.
someguyiguess 1 hours ago [-]
Robots would excel at writing that sort of copy I’d assume. (I haven’t tested it but doubt an LLM couldn’t handle that)
DoctorOetker 1 hours ago [-]
"perhaps it would be best to let the browsers do it on screens, and typesetting software for printed materials, since they have access to the font, size, text region boundaries, it comes at the small cost that users don't actually get to read what an author wrote, but increasingly this is an LLM anyways, if its a website or legal contract alike"
jobuildsstuff 26 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
scott_weber 1 hours ago [-]
And here I at first thought the direction the original post was going was "here's how I got a LLM to do this automatically". Seems like it would not be so difficult. Might still be be a win over their innate dispositions.
> BoVeX gives us a controlled tradeoff between these two states. By changing how much it costs for the text to be semantically wrong, we have a dial that allows us to smoothly interpolate between Lorem Epsom and Donald Knuth.
1 hours ago [-]
gyomu 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.
someguyiguess 1 hours ago [-]
Anyone who ever worked as a front end developer definitely felt this.
t098i3 2 minutes ago [-]
Even as a backend dev who dabbles in frontend as a hobby - I get the view looking great on desktop, then a week later I open the site on mobile and am horrified
fhub 3 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 3 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.
kkfkekfoked 2 hours ago [-]
A bit over dramatic, but then again this HN.
schoen 2 hours ago [-]
I remember using WordPerfect in that era and never understanding what that feature was. It seemed implausible to me that it was actually protecting human widows and orphans, but I couldn't imagine what it had to do with text layout!
a_bonobo 2 hours ago [-]
The German is more crass: Hurenkind and Schusterjunge, translates to 'child of a whore' and 'shoemaker boy'. The child of a whore does not know where it comes from (who is their father), the short final line - the shoemaker boy is so poor, he does not know where he will end up (the short first line)
> 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 2 hours 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.
ivanjermakov 4 hours ago [-]
No mention of Tom7's "Badness 0" by the author is the a crime!
uolmir 3 hours ago [-]
He managed to create the ultimate version of form over function. All hail Lorem Epsom.
asddubs 2 hours ago [-]
and in latex too, not just monospace
brooke2k 2 hours ago [-]
this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting
JeremyMorgan 47 minutes ago [-]
I've never given this much thought, but I agree with you 100%.
After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it".
For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest.
Still super impressive that people do this though.
cute_boi 2 hours ago [-]
Same here, justified text feels difficult to read. And, I had academia where where students are forced to justify text....
GeertB 2 hours 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.
cpeterso 12 minutes ago [-]
In a recent interview on Conan O'Brien's podcast, Gillian Anderson said X-Files creator Chris Carter wrote his scripts visually so they didn't have any widows (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page):
Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.
And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
CarVac 3 hours 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.
yetanotherjosh 1 hours ago [-]
In a very real sense this is exactly what LLM watermarking does. It "chooss the words carefully" in order to get text to "line up," but not with a visible margin... instead with a verifiable word distribution that proves the author knew a secret key.
BubbleRings 2 hours ago [-]
I’ve been searching all over for a classic example of this that I first found around 1986, but I can’t locate it. It went on for a page or two, hand justified lines of maybe 40 characters, and then at the end of it he started making each line one character shorter, until the essay ended with these, the only words I remember from it:
dumb is
what I
think
this
end
is
!
If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.
a_bonobo 47 minutes ago [-]
You may be thinking of one of the poems of Christian Morgenstern? He used many tricks of formatting for jokes, famous example that fits with yours is The Funnels
I know the feeling - a lot of what I remember from the internet 20 years ago simply doesn't exist, and is unfindable on any search engine.
Boxxed 1 hours ago [-]
I do this at work with the comments in my code. No one's ever noticed <thumbs-down-emoji>
zellyn 3 hours 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 :-)
ChannelFence 1 hours ago [-]
Before LLMs, there were Markov chain bots. We used SeeBorg on IRC and over time its dictionary would fill up with whatever everyone said. Most of it was nonsense, but every once in a while it would say something perfectly timed. Almost everything It said making sense or not was hilarious though.
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.
kkfkekfoked 2 hours ago [-]
And it shows! Wait, no, it doesn’t.
epistasis 4 hours ago [-]
I am filled with both a deep admiration and horror at this.
It's shockingly impressive.
cm2012 3 hours ago [-]
And that it was done for an amateur game guide! This is like a legendary work of art.
RobRivera 3 hours 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.
Funes- 1 hours ago [-]
I must admit I've indulged in constrained writing when I was a teenager with the same purpose: circumventing spontaneous layout errors in Word when writing a paper for school, feeling a non-negligible amount of anxiety due to the deadline being around the corner. Terrifying.
johnxianren 38 minutes ago [-]
I still do that.
I'll tweak the wording just so a single name doesn't sit on its own line.
underyx 2 hours ago [-]
So maybe it is possible to use alternate words in writing without compromising on writing quality after all.
stevage 3 hours ago [-]
The part that horrifies me about this is the disincentive to revise any part of the text due to the flow-on effects.
lukeh 4 hours ago [-]
Ha, I quite enjoy doing this in comments or commit messages where practicable. But, that's just a few lines. :)
boothby 3 hours 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.
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.
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.
oxonia 4 hours ago [-]
Ye gods! The fact that this was done by hand... I have no words.
domador 57 minutes ago [-]
I recently started reading a book sample for "Superintelligence" on Kindle, but stopped reading because all the text was noticeably justified, often with large gaps between words in many sentences. This was very annoying, especially since the option to disable justification was unjustifiably disabled.
Strangely enough, this same book doesn't have the same problem on other platforms.
bywater 3 hours ago [-]
Learned this the hard way explaining a bug fix; a single ambiguous term derailed an hour-long discussion.
quanto 2 hours ago [-]
A human victory by sheer willpower. I find the story oddly uplifting.
semiinfinitely 3 hours ago [-]
this is the kind of content I come to hackernews for
gkoberger 3 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 3 hours ago [-]
LaTeX has existed for a certain amount of years already.
gkoberger 3 hours 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 2 hours 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.
gkoberger 2 hours ago [-]
Yup that's my point, and maybe the bigger issue isn't if people care or not but rather... can we distinguish between "they cared" and "they spent 30 seconds on a prompt".
kkfkekfoked 2 hours ago [-]
Lt. Worf tends to be a bit “shoot first ask questions never” be he was never this dense. C’mon.
brcmthrowaway 2 hours ago [-]
There is some bizarre stuff that gets posted on weekends. It's like reading the New Yorker.
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...
crate_88 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 02:49:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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_...
[1] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
Apparently, I googled, “expended ordnance” is the term.
I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").
“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.
1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans
"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.
I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.
I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.
https://youtu.be/d3bCel607lQ?t=1162
[1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...
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?
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.
> BoVeX gives us a controlled tradeoff between these two states. By changing how much it costs for the text to be semantically wrong, we have a dial that allows us to smoothly interpolate between Lorem Epsom and Donald Knuth.
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
Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.
* 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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge
Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116
https://tom7.org/bovex/
> 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
After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it".
For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest.
Still super impressive that people do this though.
Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.
And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
That was done by typing the whole paper twice, with added spaces the second time.
dumb is
what I
think
this
end
is
!
If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.
https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale
I know the feeling - a lot of what I remember from the internet 20 years ago simply doesn't exist, and is unfindable on any search engine.
It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)
(source: https://github.com/allanlw/seeborg)
It's shockingly impressive.
I know I couldn't today.
Manual: https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/protext_5_04_arnor.pdf
Screenshot of manual section: https://jumpshare.com/share/jOnMu7M36AOEWyoL0QDl
Strangely enough, this same book doesn't have the same problem on other platforms.
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.
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.