Originally published at: Can you tell what is mind-blowing about this 20-year-old game guide? | Boing Boing
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I googled the URL of the guide and found the answer. I wouldn’t have figured it out otherwise.
“This FAQ on Super Metroid uses justified text even though it’s written in a monospaced font. It’s not justified by a word processor, it’s justified by word choice alone.”
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That is really neat, but the title is a bit click-baity.
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The first thing I notice is that it’s fully justified but appears to use a monospaced font. But I’m a little geeky when it comes to typography, so that might be blinding me to what others find mind-blowing about this…
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It blowing my mind, right now.
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Remembering my days typing up newsletter columns and other such, on a typewriter. One was expected to be able to do this without obvious too-wide spaces. Of course, we made liberal use of hyphens.
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I was thinking maybe it was that they misspelled “missile” 217 times. It’s a shame… all those i’s are really going to mess up the column count.
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Hm. Build a thesaurus of the words in text and kind of brute force the line lengths.
I’m sure that the resulting text would be interesting.
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I used to do this all the time back in the tty days; with 80 columns it’s really not very difficult. You know what’s difficult?
A Void 's plot follows a group of individuals looking for a missing companion, Anton Vowl. It is in part a parody of noir and horror fiction, with many stylistic tricks, gags, plot twists, and a grim conclusion. On many occasions it implicitly talks about its own lipogrammatic limitation, highlighting its unusual syntax. A Void 's protagonists finally work out which symbol is missing, but find it a hazardous topic to discuss, as any who try to bypass this story’s constraint risk dying. Philip Howard, writing a lipogrammatic appraisal of A Void in his column Lost Words , said “This is a story chock-full of plots and sub-plots, of loops within loops, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which allow its author an opportunity to display his customary virtuosity as an avant-gardist magician, acrobat and clown.”
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I was reminded of the same thing. What that (amusing) passage doesn’t mention is that A Void is a translation (of a French—or should I say Gallic?—novel) that kept the linguistic trickery intact. Bonus points to the translator.
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The author themselves included this in the FAQ at the end of the guide
03. What program did you use to justify the text?
None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the
right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.
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I sometimes do this with comments in code, which is typically a sign that my concentration is waning
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so you’re the person who comments their code. i heard there was someone out there doing that, and ive always wondered who that was!
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I thought it was going to be that pretty much every bad event on that list has actually happened. At least none of the meteorite strikes have killed anyone, as far as I can recall.
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On USENET they call this bricktext. Doing it at this length is something of an achivement but it is not that uncommon, either accidentally in small amounts or with some deliberate effort for longer postings.
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What’s even more amazing to me is that the ENTIRE text forms a complete palindrome.
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Reminds me of my dad’s story about a typist in his office in the 80s. When they got their first electronic typewriter with support for auto-justification of text, this old man felt a bit offended with the electro-mechanical competition, and hand justified an entire document sitting on the mechanical typewriter. No mistakes!
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Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime
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It vexes me that "apocalyptic" is misspelled.
Clearly, this is a hallmark of imminent doom.
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