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 I wrote this to remind myself of simple fun that's been superseded by grander ambitions, and sometimes I think I am wrong for choosing the latter.
“I just chose words carefully”
21–30 of 363 posts
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#22Learned this the hard way explaining a bug fix; a single ambiguous term derailed an hour-long discussion.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#23Ha, I quite enjoy doing this in comments or commit messages where practicable. But, that's just a few lines. :)
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.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#24I 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 :-)
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#25The part that horrifies me about this is the disincentive to revise any part of the text due to the flow-on effects.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#26There'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
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...
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#27Two 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.
Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#28[dead]
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#29I 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_...
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_...
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#30suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically https://tom7.org/bovex/
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