Stay with me here, ok?

September 29, 2021 4:25 AM

"Every year or two I remember what’s probably the most scarily/stunningly impressive linguistic feat I’ve ever seen. Every time, I think I must be mistaken, then I read the thing, and I just shake my head in disbelief. It’s been twenty years. Let me tell you about it." Author Matt Gemmell takes us into the wild genius inside a Super Metroid Strategy Guide.
posted by Navelgazer (45 comments total)

That's wild.
posted by Wretch729 at 4:42 AM on September 29, 2021

Imagine doing all this work for years and then finding out that it only works because you spelled "missile" wrong.
posted by automatronic at 4:44 AM on September 29, 2021 [13 favorites]

That, right there, is some serious dedication. I will forgive almost any typo in that and figure there's a good chance it was intentional.
posted by rmd1023 at 4:50 AM on September 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

Previously.
posted by misteraitch at 5:03 AM on September 29, 2021 [8 favorites]

You know, the correct spelling should be MISSLES.

Just look at it:

MISSLES
posted by signal at 5:26 AM on September 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

I went to the guide first to see if I could see what the big deal was for myself and when it finally dawned on me it was like seeing one of those sculptures where it's a bunch of items scattered around a space, but if you look at it from the exact right angle it becomes a person or something.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:28 AM on September 29, 2021 [13 favorites]

One of the joys of the BBC's Ceefax teletext service in the UK was the news index pages, which (usually) managed to state every local and national news headline in exactly 35 characters, updated live throughout the day. A couple of examples, from 1998 and 2001:

BRITISH TOURISTS KIDNAPPED IN YEMEN
Tribesmen seize 16, 12 UK nationals
IRAQ Clinton defends latest attacks
MANDELSON PM urged to sack squealer
YACHTS UK competitor feared drowned
NIMMO TV star remains on ventilator
FOOTBALL Tough move on thugs backed
TEDDY Bears give comfort to orphans
MILLENNIUM Top party bottom of pole

PROBE URGED INTO "VIRUS SHEEP SCAM"
ISRAEL Police storm mosque compound
TRAIN Prosecutors handed crash file
TERRORISM Four held by Irish police
DEATHS Lake-plunge youngsters named
SARAH "Derisory" payout for parents
INDIA PM attacks Pakistan president
CAT Woman dies after vein scratched

posted by offog at 5:36 AM on September 29, 2021 [34 favorites]

I've been justifying monospaced text that way for decades, and kind of assumed most people did. Not that I've written much monospaced text since the 80s...
posted by pipeski at 5:38 AM on September 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

I've been justifying monospaced text that way for decades, and kind of assumed most people did.

With extra spacing, or with word choice? The former is easy (emacs has a keystroke combination to do it, unsurprisingly); the latter is a real accomplishment.
posted by jackbishop at 5:45 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's like those books written without the letter "e," Gadsby and Void -- which of course is surpassed by the spectrum of translations which all repeated the feat but in a second tongue.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:54 AM on September 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

Oh man, every few years I seem to re-stumble across this, and it remains a truly remarkable achievement
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:57 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

What a legend.
posted by dazed_one at 5:57 AM on September 29, 2021

Dang. I read that guide several times and never noticed.

I'm in awe.
posted by sotonohito at 6:06 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Amazing.
posted by mersen at 6:08 AM on September 29, 2021

I used to do this too, although only with certain texts. I was usually way more concerned with awkward rivers in my text than margins, though.

If you think this is impressive, please remember that people used to do stuff like this on typewriters.
posted by phooky at 6:08 AM on September 29, 2021 [9 favorites]

That's impressive. I expect any small corrections to the text will unleash a cascade of rewriting to justify the text again.
posted by Harald74 at 6:09 AM on September 29, 2021

He must have been run ragged after finishing that
posted by Kabanos at 6:17 AM on September 29, 2021 [16 favorites]

With extra spacing, or with word choice?

Word choice. I also have to fight really hard not to
end my tweets with zero characters left. The process
is basically this: (1) type the text, (2) assess how
close the wrapping is, (3) either change some words,
and return to (2), or find a piece of punctuation or
a word that can be changed to fit. It's a lot easier
when you're using mostly short words.

posted by pipeski at 6:20 AM on September 29, 2021 [30 favorites]

I feel like there's some hyperbole over the difficulty level here.

But, I mean, it's great fun, and I'm glad it's being celebrated. (Like Rock Steady, I clicked on the "strategy guide" link before the tweet, and laughed as it dawned on me what they were doing.)
posted by bfields at 6:22 AM on September 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

I wondered if the spelling mistake was deliberate to help with the justification, but I see that MISSLES is used, like, a lot in the text, and it would have to have hurt just as often as it helped.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:29 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

One of my least favorite activities toward the end of preparing a collaborative grant proposal (which has very firm font, margin, and page requirements) is figuring out how to re-jigger sentences to avoid lines that are not always nearly full of text to the end of the paragraph. It's a pain in the neck, but routinely gains another 1/2 page out of 15. Doing something a hundred times more difficult for no reason at all is fascinating. Neat!

I am not going to spend the day thinking about ways to automate this. I really am not. I hope.
posted by eotvos at 7:01 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

                                                                  Kill the crabs, then open the green gate.
Charge up for a super jump. You want to return to the previous area and use
the super jump once you position Samus by the leftmost seaweed. 

posted by sammyo at 7:10 AM on September 29, 2021

> I feel like there's some hyperbole over the difficulty level here.

Agreed, especially if you're willing to leave vowels out of words as an optional tactic. I could write a script to do that in my text editor pretty easily, I should think.

Not A Wake: A Dream Embodying π's Digits Fully for 10000 Decimals on the other hand...
posted by merlynkline at 7:31 AM on September 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is a sweet post, but I wonder if the person who wrote the tweet has considered that the guide author may have used (or written) some text processing script. I just searched for "script to justify plain text", and in the top result the person asking mentions GameFAQs as their motivation.

Even with a script, I can imagine it not working perfectly and tweaking word choice to get a better result, but that's pretty different from manually spacing each line.
posted by jomato at 7:32 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

He must have been run ragged
Right???
posted by xedrik at 7:36 AM on September 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

I find it pretty impressive, personally.

Most plain-text processors that do fixed-width justification, like nroff/troff/groff, will insert double spaces between words in order to create a justified right margin, but this always struck me as more obnoxious than just having a ragged right margin.

Anyway, it's not just the right-margin justification that's impressive, it's also the really consistent use of paragraph and hanging indents, un-numbered and numbered list formatting, and pagination.

I also like that the justification is covered in the Guide's FAQ. I do wonder what ASCII editor they used specifically, though. The only stuff I've ever created that had anywhere near this level of formatting consistency (in plain text) was written in Emacs with text-fill mode (and that's with a ragged right margin). It handles stuff like hanging indents and varying-width left margins pretty well, compared to any other editor I've used.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:08 AM on September 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Jomato: According the the "previously" that I didn't catch when searching for this because it was from six years ago, the author claims to have done this manually.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:01 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

pipeski, I laid out copy for a college newspaper on second shift, when the writers were long gone.

It was the days of hot wax, so I would have one printed copy to carefully dissect with a fresh x-acto blade and delicately adjust to fit the lines and columns available. Usually I could move words, sometimes only letters.

I loved every minute of it!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:12 AM on September 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

You know, the correct spelling should be MISSLES.

I feel misled by that declaration.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:40 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

The correct spelling should be mistles.
posted by ardgedee at 10:40 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

They should be called "missless," because that's what you want them to do.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:12 AM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

jomato note that in the stackexchange post they allow for double spaces and hyphenation to make the justification work — neither of which are in the Metroid text. A script could do this only if it was intelligent enough to look for synonyms and/or rewrite the copy to make the text fit.
posted by wemayfreeze at 12:02 PM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

The correct spelling should be mistles.

Only for Mistle TOWs.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:23 PM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

The feat that’s stuck with me is from the book The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, in which a character challenges a robot bard to write “a poem about a haircut! But lofty, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!!” The resulting poem:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

Some poor translator had to translate this from Polish.
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:00 PM on September 29, 2021 [12 favorites]

The justified text post was my thing back in the USENET talk.bizarre days (88/89-ish on). I would just type a medium length line and then make everything line up often without punctuation in a run on sentence right up until the final '.' I used to also do it in work emails back before everybody went all web and proportional fonts. More punctuation of course, and having to fit in some bigger words.

It is good fun so give it a try, you might like it. It's probably right up there with writing to a word count.
posted by zengargoyle at 4:49 PM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

zengargoyle, are you by any chance Jesse Garon who wrote this delightful sentence in alt.religion.kibology in...1995? Maybe that's after your time.

I would also point out that it is important to properly employ the
verb so that one does not arrive at a sentence with a subject that
is plural followed by a singular verb, although it is certainly no
easy task to keep track of such thing when possessive pronouns are
in use and certainly I would say that errors of this kind are much
more forgivable than the other sorts of errors which one might and
often does see being made as the author attempts to force the text
to fit into the justified format, rather than letting it flow in a
natural fashion, gently conforming to the parameters that are laid
down by the genre; to this I would add the deep satisfaction of an
extremely long run-on sentence, one which has been designed from a
structurally perfect premise, a sentence that contains subordinate
clause after subordinate clause, prepositional phrases galore, the
judicious and grammatically proper usage of the subjunctive tense,
all of which is contained within the framework of the margins in a
way that compels the reader with its regularity and consistency in
line after line of neatly arranged prose, until it finally arrives
at the end of the paragraph, culminating in a terse period, as so.

posted by straight at 10:43 PM on September 29, 2021 [10 favorites]

Imagine doing all this work for years and then finding out that it only works because you spelled "missile" wrong.

"Damn, I just can't get it to fit. There's just no way to make that paragraph about the Phantoon work. I've tried every possible way to describe what you have to do, but...what if...hmm, that part about Kraid would be tricky, but...no, that's actually better...I could do Ridley without even mentioning...okay, that settles it. In Super Metroid, they're called missles."

posted by straight at 11:11 PM on September 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Michael Straight misses the days before email had proportional fonts.
FLEOEVDETYHOEUPROEONREWMEILECSOFMOERSGTIRVAENRGEEARDSTVHIESBIITBTLHEEPSRIACYK
Ethical Mirth Gas/"I'm chaste alright."/The Magical Shirt/"Hath grace limits?"
"Halt this grimace!"/Chili Hamster Tag/The Gilt Charisma/"I gather this calm."

posted by straight at 11:15 PM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

the guide author may have used (or written) some text processing script

I don't think there's a computer that could do that in 2021. Definitely not in 2001. The only method here is word choice. You would need a computer that can look at a paragraph of text and re-write sentences using synonyms or equivalent phrases. And if the computer gets even one word wrong, one phrase that doesn't sound like natural English or doesn't mean the same thing as what it replaced, it screws up entire sentences before and after.

GPT-3 is pretty good at producing sentences that read like natural English, but I think correctly paraphrasing entire paragraphs is beyond what it can do, even on generic topics. It definitely couldn't correctly paraphrase instructions for speed-running Super Metroid.

I think at best a computer in 2001 was very good for helping a human think of possible synonyms. And now maybe a computer could help suggest entire alternate phrases or sentences, but would need a human to decide in every sentence what would or wouldn't work.
posted by straight at 2:43 AM on September 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

straight, That was early enough days to Google search and find my Metafilter comment about not being able to find old USENET posts. Plus I would have been like 19 or so and long before the linguistic analysis of the form. Pretty much. Though I know of Kibo and would say that a trio of t.b handcuffed a Kibo-but-not-that-Kibo Kibo to a tree and took pictures and then the four of us went out for tacos. And I had the good grace of Eris to attend FATBOB (First Annual talk.bizarre Bring Own Bottle) early USENET meetup. At that point in time, I kept weird to t.b and wouldn't have been anywhere around alt.religion.* .

I *might* have been able to pull that off in 93/94-ish when I was reading a shit-ton of linguistics things in a brutal quest on the path of hard A.I. .
posted by zengargoyle at 3:02 AM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I hated Google for killing DejaNews years before anyone hated Google for killing RSS.
posted by straight at 3:10 AM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

jomato note that in the stackexchange post they allow for double spaces and hyphenation to make the justification work — neither of which are in the Metroid text. A script could do this only if it was intelligent enough to look for synonyms and/or rewrite the copy to make the text fit.

Ah, thanks for pointing this out. I also missed the FAQ answer, mentioned by Kadin2048, that explained that justification was done by word choice only. This is indeed an impressive feat!
posted by jomato at 8:21 AM on September 30, 2021

It's not too hard to do if you just stick to making short posts.

posted by NMcCoy at 8:56 AM on October 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

What
ever
this
text
flow
hack
does
seem
easy.
shit

posted by xedrik at 7:40 AM on October 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

lol.

posted by grouse at 8:51 AM on October 9, 2021 [1 favorite]