“I just chose words carefully”

sho_hn

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

ivw

suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically https://tom7.org/bovex/

epistasis

I am filled with both a deep admiration and horror at this. It's shockingly impressive.

lukeh

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

oxonia

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

gkoberger

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.

fhub

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.

_jackdk_

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

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

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

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

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

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

zellyn

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

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

semiinfinitely

this is the kind of content I come to hackernews for

CarVac

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.

underyx

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

lanyard-textile

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.

gyomu

> 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