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I won't claim it's more or less impressive, but
Luis Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures is at first glance abstract (bordering on the nonsensical) French poetry ..
But is actually a homophonic translation of English nursery rhymes - that is, if you read the French aloud, it sounds as if you're reading the rhyme.
Example:
Un petit d'un petit
S'étonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.
The effort is in making the French poetry make any sense, which van Rooten (a Hollywood character actor in his spare time) does admirably.
To hear it read aloud:
https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&text=Un%20petit%20d%27un...
Using the desktop browser version of Google Translate, click on the listen/speaker icon below the French text in the left side panel
This reminds me of a similar homophonic rendition, in which the French actually makes some sense (https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/mots06-etquirit.htm) - I actually first saw this in the Whole Earth Catalog, of all places.
Et qui rit des curés d'Oc?
De Meuse raines, houp! de cloques.
De quelles loques ce turque coin.
Et ne d'ânes ni rennes,
Écuries des curés d'Oc.Apparently my knowledge of French pronunciation is nowhere near sufficient to figure this out. Based on the Wikipedia article, it seems the first line is supposed to sound like “Humpty Dumpty.”
There was an old flash animation that did a similar thing with a Japanese rap using English words
Wow!! I had to go to the Wikipedia page to fully appreciate it. Thank you for sharing that.
OMG I didn't realize other people had this affliction (I consider it a horrible OCD-like issue as I find myself often unable to send messages in editors that start to give me control over "squareness"): all of my tweets are the maximum length, all of my git commit messages are 50 characters, I gave a text-heavy talk a few years ago in a monospace font so every slide had a ton of bullet points that were all the same number of characters, and I often write messages where every line is the same length (I have linked a couple examples that are easy for me to link to off the top of my head).
https://libzip.org/libzip-discuss/msg00669.html
http://svn.saurik.com/repos/menes/trunk/document/interface.t...
I have never done this to anything as long as that manual (partly as I simply both don't let myself type things that are that long in a monospace presentation font and also try very hard to resist the temptation to ever, under any circumstance, manually word wrap text).
I see you haven't yet caught the coding version of that.
You're definitely not alone. In the following prose, I tried to minimize the number of non-natural hyphens, reduce excessive spaces between words, and ensure that each section fills all three columns entirely:
This was a fad in my local BBS around 1995. Not to these extremes, of course, but for a couple of months that year we'd justify our forum messages to the 72nd column without any extra space.
It's not too difficult, lines have enough words that there's always something you can change. After a while, as you approach the right margin, you can feel whether the rest of the sentence will fit, and you rephrase it as you write.
I see OP more as a feat of tenacity than of brilliance.
Right.
I think the interesting lesson here is that if you find yourself in the position of the tweet's author you should be thinking "Hm, maybe writing blocktext is easier than I'd expect" rather than "I have discovered an unsung linguistic genius".
The skills required are similar to those for writing in metre: have a decent vocabulary and a good feel for the different ways to structure an idea, plus a small bag of tricks for adding or removing a syllable / character.
I did the same thing on Usenet around the same time period. I was surprised at how easy it was, actually.
Namely, that the following text employs word choices such that it forms justified blocks without having either added extra spaces or hyphenated words across lines:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...
This linguistic feat also applies to code.
For my 2012 IOCCC entry [1], I spent many many hours tweaking the syntax and ordering of code to get the uniform looking layout. Which I ended up doing many times over every time I found a way to shorten the code. One can play with the total height, width of the arms, and height of the arms, to try to get back to uniformity.
I expect many other IOCCC authors have had similar experiences.
This is truly impressive.
The most impressive linguistic feat I've ever seen was on a Mastodon, which was named for the French writing group "Oulipo", whose members did work with constrained language. The work from this group you've most likely heard of (if you've heard of them at all) is George Perec's book "La Disparation", translated to English as "A Void", which does not (in either language) contain any word with the letter "E" in either case in it (so those of us who know at least a little French realize that means no "le" or "les"... wow...).
Anyway, this Mastodon was set up to implement the "no E" rule, and it was kind of a fun challenge to try to express yourself.
My posts (and most folks') was pretty tortured text.
The impressive bit was that there was a person there pursuing their Doctorate in Linguistics, and their posts... just read like ordinary English, with nothing tortured or strange about it. If you didn't know about the rule, you'd never guess it was in force. And they were fairly long, and covered a lot of ground... really amazing.
FWIW, the Laravel source code has a prominent pattern to it, (comments, anyways) which is nice, for example
/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Application Timezone
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here you may specify the default timezone for your application, which
| will be used by the PHP date and date-time functions. We have gone
| ahead and set this to a sensible default for you out of the box.
|
*/
Wait until he discovers Shakespeare, where every line is written in Iambic pentameter.
Reminds me of Gadsby, where the author wrote an entire novel without the letter e. Even more impressive is others have translated it into other languages, still without the e.
The title seems a bit of a clickbait. For those that don’t want to click:
It’s a plain text guide to Super Metroid, manually justified via word choice.
Composing such texts is an art form indeed, and really hard. Amazing achievement.
Once in a while when composing an email, the first three lines or so just happen to have exactly the same length. I always take this as a challenge to continue this style for the remaining lines (no cheating with white spaces) and I have wasted (?) hours on this in the past.
Did this for my wedding invitation.
Kept rewording it and changing punctuation until everything lined up near perfectly. I suspect that there are tons of people who worked in marketing or communications who have done this throughout the years. Especially back in the 80s and earlier, when text-heavy marketing was in fashion.
A similar example: in Laravel's codebase, every line in a doc block is 3 characters shorter than the line above it.
Example: https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/master/Eloquent/...
I recently discovered Super Metroid on the SNES emulator in Nintendo Switch.
The game is so good! Compared to the other games in the emulator library, it’s like night and day.
I have no idea about other games in 1994, and how does it compare. Doom is one year earlier and it’s much more advanced, so, who knows.
Once upon a time I suffered from severe OCD. I fully justified all of my code comments in C to 80 columns by word choice. No extra spaces. No random hyphenation.
You feel pain while you're doing it, but you can't stop.
I'm glad therapy helped me.
I genuinely don't think it's that impressive, you just write a line to say something and add, subtract or change some words to fit. Painstaking yes, most impressive linguistic feat? no
It's easier than the author appears to suspect.
I wrote all my status reports for work, commit comments, and quite a few emails in 'monospace full-just' for many years. I'm not sure why I stopped doing it habitually, though I still do it sometimes when I notice my messages naturally came out close to it. It may be just due to using the web more often, which seldom displays text with a monospace font.
I don't recall anyone ever noticing, nor did I expect them to.
Seeing another commenter mention BBSes in the mid-90s, perhaps that is where I picked up the practice.
The metroid text seems to change width periodically in varrious blocks, which is also a property of the monospace-full-just text that I wrote.
Yea, we uaed to have to do this as an exercise in my public school English class, is that not a thing anymore?
It's cool, to be sure, and Ive actually used the guide over the years, long before they were sold to Cnet/gamespot.
I really miss the old gamefaqs, some truly amazing finds and collaborations happened there, before it all became a C/P fest with re-hashed and re-mixed same guides over and over again. Or just info/pics pasted from other sites.
The ASCII art that was uaed and consigned back in the day was killer too.
I guess I'm just an Old Randy Marsh now, 'all this new stuff is crap warble warble!'
Ok so I get that it could be quiet
difficult to write sentences which
must be of a fixed length. However
hyperbolically calling it the most
scarily/stunningly linguistic feat
is ridiculous in the extreme. I am
certain that a person sufficiently
motivated, could produce a similar
document. Comparing something like
this to the work of Mozart is just
nonsense. I mean, I couldn't write
a piece of music like Mozart if my
life depended on it.I don't know. Translating haikus across languages so that they remain haikus of equivalent meaning and beauty seems vastly more impressive.
I remember doing this by accident in an email back in the days in which all interactions with a computer were in monospace (on a 80x24 terminal screen). Fiddling with margins to make it work is kind of cheating (and curiously, it seems
to be easier with narrower line lengths than wider ones). Doing it for an extended period of time with consistent margins is a real challenge.
I read the first few pages and no doubt it is an enjoyable read. If I had any interest in the game, I would have read the full thing. But there is no reason why if the same text would not have been any better without graphics and more styling?
Is this confirmation bias? the moment someone makes a claim of excellence, or genius, instantly number of people realize "how it hit them"!!
It's impressive but in practice, as a guide, it's very difficult to use. There is one path to follow with no overall map or routing to skip things. So to use it to figure out one tricky section often means reading 4 extra paragraphs just to find a landmark and trace from there to where you're stuck before you can follow along.
Ah perfectionism, I do this all the time picking such words to align a word with its opposite word on the previous line (for example, an old name vs a new name to be able to compare them visually when they are aligned). This improves readability. Actually this is not hard to do.
I remember doing this with some homework assignments back in college, the very many filler words available in English make it pretty easy. The linked text uses copious fillers and doesn’t even maintain the same width across paragraphs.
Text blocks like this was a thing in a BBS-style forum I used in the nineties. There were topics where all posts were expected to be in block form. They would also turn up in other topics here and there.
I regularly wordsmith comments in my column-constrained code (e.g. 100 columns) for prettiness—I don’t like to have just one or two words on the last line of a multi-line comment, so I will normally fiddle things to get that last line either empty or a bit fuller. I will just about always do this if it’s a single line plus a word or two. I also definitely enjoy occasionally indulging in the style of perfect line-filling this submission is talking about; but even when I don’t go to the trouble of filling lines, I regularly tweak line break positions to balance line lengths and to start sentences or phrases at new lines.
This style of craftsmanship, embracing constraints and optimising for beauty or even whimsy, is something that is sadly often not possible now with the diverse presentation media we employ: in the past we would adapt the medium and presentation to the content, but we’ve shifted to mostly adapting the content and presentation to the medium.
A paper book had static presentation, and so you could tweak things to your heart’s desire; and if someone had bad eyesight, you could produce a larger version of it while keeping everything else intact, if you desired. One particularly good example of that is static paginations of certain Bible translations; for example, the KJV has a couple of extremely popular paginations, so that one person may have a small Bible with tiny text and another a large Bible with wide margins and large text, but they’ll still turn the page at the same time. (This can lead to church services where most of the audience turns the page during a reading of scripture at the same time!)
But in a digital world, your content needs to adapt to display on devices both tiny and huge, and you will have limited control of its presentation. Static layout like this Super Metroid guide no longer works: at 73 columns wide, it’s too small for display on portrait phone screens without introducing scrolling (awful), additional wrapping (ugly) or reflowing (losing the craftsmanship, and impossible to do fully automatically anyway).
Responsive design is all about embracing the fact that you don’t know the medium, and working with that. And yes, it lets you do some nice previously-impossible stuff and work better on a diverse range of devices, but it also loses something.
I once noticed, part way through writing an essay in school, that I had started the last three lines with the letter w; I ran with it and made every line for the rest of the essay start with the letter w.
I could go on to talk of a great many more things where we’ve lost something over the techniques of old due to low-quality computerisation of something formerly done by experts; but also that better computerised alternatives are often available which claw back some or most of the deficit, typically by more deliberately attempting to imitate what the experts did rather than doing the easiest thing; greedy line-breaking is nigh ubiquitous, but there is also Knuth-Plass; most computerised music engraving is fairly atrocious, but LilyPond exists.
Notice how clear the document is even with plain ascii formatting.
This reminds me of old time military documents - they were peculiarly orthodox and notably very clear.
One of my math professors told us about his friend in graduate school who could justify his papers on the fly. Maybe it's easy for some people.
www.vogue.com/3241115/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961/
When someone can write, they just.. can. We mere mortals, only read, in awe..
Can someone please explain to me what is happening here. I'm an old fart. Is this a "blog" where every sentence is a twitter post? Is that to generate more views or something?
> One who thinks that the word ‘missiles’ is spelled “missles”, but a Mozart nonetheless. Gives me chills every time.
I guess that's one of the trick to shorten a line of text.
This is really impressive, but not really unusual. Poets have written epics under more severe constraints.
Wonderful
I think this is the most made-up, arrogant comments I've seen on a post that haven't even taken a glance at the actual content. People all over asserting that it is has been done in special software, that there's typos everywhere, that there's double spaces all over the places, when none of it is true. I have to say I'm quite surprised at the number of totally certain and easily disprovable assumptions people on here and on the twitter thread are making.