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“I just chose words carefully”

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Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#11

Post by uolmir »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #6
ivw wrote: post #3

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

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

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

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#12

Post by LtWorf »

gkoberger wrote: post #9

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.

LaTeX has existed for a certain amount of years already.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#14

Post by consumer451 »

sho_hn wrote: post #2

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

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

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#15

Post by Leonard_of_Q »

fhub wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#16

Post by _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_...

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#17

Post by gkoberger »

LtWorf wrote: post #12
gkoberger wrote: post #9

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.

LaTeX has existed for a certain amount of years already.

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.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#20

Post by 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

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