“I just chose words carefully”(unsung.aresluna.org) |
“I just chose words carefully”(unsung.aresluna.org) |
I know I couldn't today.
Note how all the "wrong" lines are down to markdown formatting.
Manual: https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/protext_5_04_arnor.pdf
Screenshot of manual section: https://jumpshare.com/share/jOnMu7M36AOEWyoL0QDl
Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.
And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
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.
(source: https://github.com/allanlw/seeborg)
Every now and again someone notices.
I invite you to have a look at my profile ... I cheated once.
This Super Metroid guide is some crazy stuff I'll always remember. I was reading it and then a 10 minutes later I noticed, it was such unique feeling. Definitely a piece of art.
could probably do view LoRA at some reasonable level likely also applications for time-series prediction, ARC-like or other puzzle solving, etc. especially if got into fixed height along with fixed width, terminal readable --more-- with good pagination paragraph separation, etc.
QWEN-40-char-terminal DiffusionGemma-80-char etc.
I didn't do it entirely by hand, but I didn't just one-shot it with AI either (good luck). Instead, I wrote the whole dialogue in a special format specifying alternate words [like|similar to] [this|what I'm [currently doing here|doing right now]]. For each length-200 block, the number of variations grows exponentially in the number of "options" to thus choose from, so it becomes feasible to have a computer systematically choose options so as to hide the desired secrets.
The same method could be used for monospace alignment, though I suspect it would be harder the narrower the page be.
Video game text FAQs in general though were a dying genre before gen AI anyhow. Something I bemoan when I try to find one little piece of info and I'm faced with guides that are spread out on dozens of webpages for impressions of ads that I don't even see, or long videos that I have try to scroll through and take a ton of time just to find out if the person even went to the area I'm interested in. I sure miss Ctrl+F on GameFAQs.
Dude, it's a text prediction engine. It can no more "enjoy" a process than a
stapler enjoys poking wire through paper.
Don't kid yourself. It's the first step down a slippery slope, one that ends
in assigning gender to a bunch of statistics, falling in love with it, and a
lot of terrible software, writing, pictures, and so on. It's a machine. Make
sure not to anthropomorphise inanimate machinery.(for the rabbit hole: https://tom7.org/bovex/)
To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest 1 to
attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively 2 state
the exclusion of warranty 3; and 4 each 5 file 6 should 7 have 8 at 9 10
least 11 the 12 "copyright 13 line 14 and 15 a 16 pointer 17 to 18 where
19 the 20 full 21 notice 22 is 23 found 24.
I never noticed that before.
As such, I propose a replacement :) :
To accomplish this, append the following warnings to the software. It is
safest to place them at the beginning of each source document to clearly
declare the exclusion of guarantees; plus every single file must include
a minimum of the "copyright" text and a link detailing the full warning.Funny article, and there is probably a similar post in an ILoveKerning site.
Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication. Imagine the backtracking required...
Do things the "waterfall" way and you won't need any backtracking, as every previous line will have been adjusted as you're moving forward, not backwards, to adjust the chosen words.
> Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication.
No it doesn't. If you're careful about how you speak and how you write then
it takes next to no additional effort at all. I used to do this with all of
my online responses, and it's been fun to do it again in this thread today.
Note my responses in this comment thread as a whole. Even though I have not
done this more than once or twice this century, it barely slows me down. At
a guess, maybe it adds 10% or so to the time it takes to type a comment...?
> Imagine the backtracking required...
Virtually none. For some lines I might occasionally have to go back a three
or four words, that's all. It's quite fun: some dusty rusty old bits of the
old grey matter have been woken up and exercised, and they're rather liking
being up in the sunlight again. :-)Interestingly, the novel with no "e" was actually translated into English multiple times (most famous one is called 'A Void'), proof that constrained writing is something quite a few people seem to enjoy.
I guess the closest thing we have is an iPad - my mother can just about use tablets, but I have to say onboarding onto a tablet these days is full of gotchas and fraught with peril too if you don't understand computing.
I'm reminded of "The Dream Machine" by Licklider - if we read that today, we'd get this odd sense of having come very close, but yet missing by miles, many of the goals set back then.
Anyway, yes, monospace typesetting...
That's what comes to my mind anytime I see some huge labor of love like that guy rewriting 17k words to fit nicely.
Strangely enough, this same book doesn't have the same problem on other platforms.
> Because I have always had a very clear sense of how thing should look on a page, I dearly wanted to be able to control every tiny detail of my book's overall look, ranging from the cover art to the typefaces used to the size of the pages to the way displays are indented, and so on. Fortunately, the people at Basic Books have grown used to me and my idiosyncrasies over the years I have worked with them, and they assented to my unusual request.
> [new page] Consequently, I have enjoyed total control over such things as line-breaks, page-breaks, hyphenations, widows, orphans, density of word spacing within lines, fine-grained intercharacter spacing ("kerning"), and so forth and so on — things that most people usually are unaware of and simply leave to their publisher or their word processor. I am a fanatic, though, and these things matter a great deal to me. Not only do they matter to me, they have had an overwhelming impact on this book from start to finish. This may sound crazy, but it is the gospel truth.
> [section heading] Who Is Really Controlling Whom?
> Above, I very casually remarked that I have enjoyed total control over page-breaks and such things; yet the truth of the matter would be far more accurately captured by turning the phrase around and saying that the page-breaks and word spacing and such things have enjoyed total control over me! By this, I mean that I have been forced to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite passages in order to make a page boundary come out exactly where I wanted it. It is not just by some happy accident, for instance, that the poems inside chapters are never, ever broken across page boundaries.
> The amount of influence exerted on my text by concerns of purely visual esthetics is incalculable — and by "my text", I don't merely mean how I wound up phrasing my ideas, I mean the ideas themselves. Content has been determined by considerations of elegant form so often that I couldn't begin to imagine it. Every single line of text, for instance, is characterized by its spacing — how wide the blanks between words are. I can clearly see the spacing as I type on my screen, and I rewrite and rewrite in order to make sure that no line is too tightly or too loosely spaced. In the course of such rewritings — here extracting a word, there using a shorter or a longer one, elsewhere inserting a word where none was — words and phrases that I would otherwise not have thought of pop to mind, suggesting ideas I would not have thought of, and those ideas suggest unexpected paragraphs, and those paragraphs are in turn linked to other ones, and so on...
The author finds the beauty in stuffy blocks, while I find beauty with more whitespaces.
The story talks about monospace fonts and how unappealing they could be for reading prose. It is a fascinating post on itself, but here's what happened - it caught my eye while I was busy, I clicked the link, it opened the page, I kept it hanging around and forgot about it. Then HN page got buried in my browser history. After a while, I found the tab, I read the story and it made me thinking if anyone shared any thoughts on HN. Instead of digging it up from browser history - I ran consult-hn and found the thread - it showed up in an org-mode-derived buffer of hn-reader.el. I was reading through the comments, and I was like: "yah, this probably would be easier and faster to read if I used a different font". I enabled variable-pitch-mode, but it didn't get much better - the default font I set for the face isn't great - I just needed something that existed in both Linux and Mac. I should've picked a better one.
"Let me try a different font", I thought. And how do you change the font family in Emacs? There's probably a way doing it through the UI, but thank you, no thank you - I have a programmable editor. I instinctively opened a scratch buffer and started typing: (set-face-attribute ... And at that point I realized: "Well, this would, a) Change the font everywhere b) What the heck were the parameters for this sucker?".
Of course, why not ask the LLM? I started typing the prompt, right in that buffer. I could've just finish typing and call (gptel-send). But, "what if this becomes a longer chat?". I mean, I still could continue chatting in that buffer, but there are benefits for having specialized gptel buffer, for instance, all my gptel-dedicated buffers get automatically saved. So, instead, I invoked (gptel-inline) - if the answer is short - I'd dismiss the popup and if I have follow-ups, I'll just continue.
LLM told me how to change the font in the current buffer. But I said: "I want to change it for any chosen buffer, since I'd be invoking this from the scratch buffer". At this point I was thinking: "I'm just fooling around, but let's see where it takes me..." It gave me this code snippet.
(with-current-buffer "target-buffer-name"
(setq buffer-face-mode-face '(:family "Georgia" :height 140))
(buffer-face-mode 1))
And at that point, I felt so stupid for wasting my time, I typed: "Can you just build me a consult picker, to select a font for a given buffer with a live preview."
And it just did. ~25 LOC. It took me far longer to write about it, in reality, the transition from a fleeting thought, from a mere idea to a concrete implementation took me seconds. Seconds!
And now I have a command that I can either keep in my scratch buffer, or stick into my config. Or literally just discard until next time I need to temporarily change the font in a given buffer.
Note: this is not a post about "how awesome it is to use AI in Emacs", no. It is all about how enormously flexible Emacs is to bend around to deal with any kind of text.
4 leading spaces, is that right? Let's see...
I used to write all my online posts like this in my early days of having
own personal email address. My primary email is from 1991 and I used it,
and DOS-based tools, to go online from 1991 until the late 1990s. At 1st
I ran DOS tools from a floppy, then on my own PC with OS/2 2, then under
Win95, then under NT 4. Gradually all the tools that were current at the
time became Windows-based, so I switched. It just became too hard to not
use Windows, and that meant proportional fonts, and that meant that folk
couldn't see that I was writing fully-justified text... so I stopped.
If this works (it looks all right in the editing window to me) then this
is the first time in a decade that I've tried writing justified text. At
the time when I did it constantly, it barely slowed me down. It helps if
you have a good vocabulary and you can just substitute longer or shorter
words on the fly. Heh. It worked. Maybe I should start writing all my HN responses like
this. :-)
In the early '90s I occasionally wrote circular messages, and once, I
recall spending a good chunk of an hour composing one in the shape of
a Christmas-tree: stacked triangles, gradually getting wider from the
top to the bottom of the "tree". One letter wide at the very tip, and
then 2 at the top of the next triangle. The bottom of each triangle 2
letters wider each time, I think. You get the gist. I widened the top
as there are not many 1-letter words in English and few 2-letter ones
to choose from. The passage has a couple commas where it shouldn't and doesn't have
some commas where it should just for justification. So it's trading
one type of particularity for another, and I favor grammar more. :)- going back to the browser
- clicking on address bar
- attempting to select the link with the mouse
- switching back to wherever you want the link
- inserting it
- realizing that you missed a character - mouse is imprecise for text selection
- repeating the process
- Oh shoot. It's a markdown, I need now to grab the description of the page too. And... back to the dance again.
Shit like this, for me is just pressing a key. And it nicely formats it (for whatever markup you want), grabbing the correct description, etc. I solved the problem once, and it just works and I never have to ever spare a split second neural signalling for it - there's no attention tax.
I'm forever indebted to my younger self for convincing and forcing myself to learn Lisp and spend some time understanding Emacs. Among all sorts of skills that I picked up during my tenure - CLIs, Unix, Linux internals, networking, git fundamentals, vim, various programming languages, front-end, devops, cybersec, etc. etc. - Lisp remains enormously practical, the best skill that I'm so glad I acquired.
imo it highly depends on the medium. If your content is packed with distracting ads, flashing banners, other unrelated text from other stories, then its helpful to make the columns narrow to help you scan.
If you have a more focused experience around one passage of text, wider text lets you fit more on the page and make better use of paragraph breaks and subheadings
Instead we should look at modern books. Without paying good money to use tools like InDesign, just use LaTeX with microtype together with the default margins. You will get the ideal width for text lines (about 60 to 80 characters), full justification with minimal hyphenation.
This is a totally context-dependent decision.
Many websites already have a limited text width.
The only two types of books I can think of that are routinely read for purposes other than leisure - dictionaries and the Bible - are usually printed in multi-column layout from what I've seen.
When we published a print magazine we optimized heavily to save 1% on printing costs. 25% would have been suicide. And indie magazine buyers are traditionally a lot more price flexible than mainstream book buyers.
Especially for the definitions that are very short, for example when they only reference a more preferred spelling or a more prominent word that has the exact meaning.
You don't really want to reduce the number of sheets for your newspaper because size of the newspaper is an indicator of quality. But trimming off maybe 10% of a dictionary is worthwhile. Size of a dictionary is a quality indicator too, but the absolute production cost is more for a book so saving production costs is more pressing.
“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
Maybe I'm wrong but the whole thing felt very weird to me. Can't put my finger on it.. I want to say immature, but it's probably just unempathetic. I think my brain reached out for "immature" because I saw a lot of it among the "popular" kids at school.
[1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...
The movie she mentioned in the anecdote was I Want To Believe. Here is the actual scanned screenplay, rather than re-typed:
https://lvei.net/wp-content/uploads/script-de-prod/The-X-Fil...
Just scroll through and look. In almost every paragraph or dialogue block, the last line ends very close to the right margin. Pretty much the only places that doesn't happen is when there's a single short line of dialogue by itself, meaning it doesn't wrap to a second line.
Looking through scripts on Boggsfiles, it's much more inconsistent, but it does happen, and perhaps more frequently in the later seasons. Here's one, from season 9; take a look at page 10 (page 13 in the PDF) for example, but it really happens throughout.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSl...
Maybe this was not the rule, but something that he had always strived for, so he felt the need to call it out as something cool?
"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.
I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.
I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.
ETA: I speculate that Carter was avoiding "widows" to be considerate to the actors by not splitting lines across page turns.
ELLSWORTH (CONT'D)
I tell you what -- I may have fucked
~~ life up flatter"n hammered shit,
but I stand before you today
beholden to no human cocksucker
and working a paying fucking gold
claim -- and not the U.S. Government
saying I'm trespassing or the savage
fucking Red Man himself or any of
these other limber-dick cocksuckers
passing themselves off as
prospectors had better try to stop
me.
I wonder if I was ever taught to write this way and forgot, but I feel like I just learned the terms for the first time.
I thought it was just my own OCD.
So I can’t super accept that these are geniuses - it was cheap TV.
In hindsight sure, whole cult following etc. but doesn’t mean it is well designed or even thought out.
/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Application Name
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| This value is the name of your application, which will be used when the
| framework needs to place the application's name in a notification or
| other UI elements where an application name needs to be displayed.
|
*/
[1] https://syntax.fm/show/824/taylor-otwell-s-opinions-on-php-r...
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_...
This might potentially
rejuvenate the writing
by disrupting habitual
patterns, which forces
more original choices. Deliberate distractions
from the functional end
goal benefit other arts
just as well, promoting
lateral thinking. Brian
Eno made a card deck of
"oblique strategies" to
help you out of blocks.
Imagine a messageboard that
required this writing style
in order to make any posts!I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')
See also: localizing your interface to German
Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.
> 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
* 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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge
Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116
Here is an example - https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/master/Connectio... - looks like each one is 3 characters shorter.
commit e6f22569e9db16dbef7d9bdee5bb41b8cb7a03ca
Author: Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net>
Date: Tue Jul 23 00:00:00 2024 -0500
top: attempt once again to allow help text translation
Back when our release 4.0.1 was being readied, sources
were sent to the TP (Translation Project). However one
person named Benno Schulenberg refused to release them
for translation. His stated reason was the top command
line help text which then finally included long forms.
He demanded that the help text be broken into separate
strings instead of a single large string. But, all the
top text (some much more complex) has just one string.
So that stated reason was, at the least, inconsistent.
[ I suspect the real reason was that Mr. Schulenberg ]
[ thought that the carefully right-justified English ]
[ wording would also be required of translations too ]
The bottom line was that Benno took it upon himself to
change the TP motto from "you code, we translate" into
"first we tell you how to code and then we translate".
Rather than bend a knee to that despot, I disabled the
text entirely, admittedly denying users a translation.
Now, with this commit we enable translatable help text
but with a hint included to ignore the justified text.
Reference)s):
. Oct, 2022 - finalized translation exclusion
commit ab05a3785f29cc4b754e17c53bfb3d8ba054563e
Signed-off-by: Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net>That was done by typing the whole paper twice, with added spaces the second time.
It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)
From Wikipedia:
"Michael Hart's email messages and blog posts had equal line length paragraphs in monospaced font: he chose the wording in such a way that each line had the same number of characters."
First-page space is at a premium because you want the reviewer to scan the introduction well, and it's great if you can fit a key figure that explains the concept on the first page.
The game's probably very different now that there's such a flood of submissions but when I was reviewing I always saw messy alignment on the first page as a sign the paper was probably rushed, and usually I could see that elsewhere in the paper too.
dumb is
what I
think
this
end
is
!
If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale
I know the feeling - a lot of what I remember from the internet 20 years ago simply doesn't exist, and is unfindable on any search engine.
https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christia...
I completely forgot I did that.
My life has 1000's of strange untold stories of absentminded activity. I've done things you people wouldn't believe. Someday I will fall asleep and get so distracted I will forget to wake up. All those moments will be lost in time, like bits on bad tape.
Apparently I'm still carrying the patch, so the current version must still do it.
It's shockingly impressive.
I am somewhat surprised not seeing any mentioning of hanging punctuation
when doing the full alignment to the right side. As everybody can see in
the article, punctutation marks on the right side results in uneven text.
Putting non letter symbols one space further to the right than the other
letters, it looks much better. Of course for monospaced text it is still
just a gimmick. But a visually pleasing gimmick.
I usually only did that when the text already was close to lining up that way, though.
https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.4.0/libdoc/logger/rdoc/Logger....
> Meeting at 4 pm today?
> NO
Sometimes as NFG after a particularly bad day.
That was the fun comment. The serious ones:
1. I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience.
2. Nobody ever complained that my source code is
a = 1
ab = 2
abc = 3
a = 1
ab = 2
abc = 3
4. I'm using Atkinson Hyperlegible Next https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
a = 1
ab = 2
abc = 3I'm the opposite, I prefer non-proportional fonts even for prose.
If only they took off.
All that came to an end when I worked on a project using F#. It just doesn't work with meaningful whitespace. In the current world, with the prevalence of python, I can't really go back unfortunately. Maybe indenting with tabs is the way after all...
You're just matching them wrong. On/off and yes/no may look unequal, but what about yes/off or on/no?
(Note: After writing the above, I checked with ChatGPT, it claims that the main motivation was to make it unambiguous which which "opening word" a "closing word" belonged to.)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/379482-there-s-only-two-thi...
Someone who is unfamiliar with the quote will just be confused.
also some abbreviations work fine:
min
max
row
col
beg (vs start)
end
key
val
src
dst
pos
len
public_key
secret_key (vs private)
from
till
push
pull
load
save
init
done
inner
outer
and if you speak Norwegian you have two options:
ja yes
no nei
get
put[1] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
Same with cereals, "cereal" was an adjective that meant "relative to the goddess Ceres" then "relative to bread/wheat". "Cereal plants" -> cereals.
It's called "nominalization (or substantivization) by ellipsis".
Related bit of comedy:
> Note also that the correct term for 'a missile to be deployed against "anti-missile missiles"' is not "anti anti-missile missile." It's "anti anti-missile-missile missile." You're always supposed to have one more "missile" than "anti," because otherwise nothing will blow up.
Apparently, I googled, “expended ordnance” is the term.
I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.”
As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.
It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").
It does. It’s a know aphorism that constraints bread creativity. A couple of examples (one of deliberate constraints and another of accidental constraints):
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created “Oblique Strategies” as ways to challenge yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
The Köln Concert, which is “the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano album” was improvised because there was a mixup and Keith Jarrett was given a terrible piano.
In the GDC 2016 talk "8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box" by Mark Ferrari he mentions something similar. (paraphrasing) "If you can make anything you like (with modern Photoshop) you won't need to stop to consider the core of your idea." A lot of our thoughts are not as original as we like to believe and constraints can push your to consider your ideas and designs from another perspective leading to better understanding or design of the core concept. Often because the ideal path to realizing your idea is not available so you will have to reconsider the need or how to creatively implement something that approaches your desired outcome.
Now the GDC talk is about pixel art but the same is true in writing or any creative process (for example painting or coding). Famously some writers limit their selves to typewriters, for example George Orwell or Matty Healy.
Life is too short to think of it in terms of markets and money.
> if you have nothing better to do
The way to create something novel is through creativity, and creativity comes from restrictions because they force you to think in novel ways.
There is a time for experimentation and a time for doing. The latter is not “something better to do” than the former, they both have their place.
Meanwhile, the right margin of page 3 looks has a "shadow" that goes all the way to the right because the left margin of page 2 pokes out underneath it - your eye might want to glide to the end of the block, but the sentence stops earlier.
It looks better when it's aligned, which is also why you can specify a left- and right margin that alternates on odd and even pages.
This is obviously only a concern for books and papers, and not so much for e.g. glossy magazines.
Typesetters are known to be very specific about small details. E. g. tables are typeset with meticulous alignment rules. It may look superfluous, but it is not. The nature of the craft is that it has to be invisible unless you know where to look.
After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it".
For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest.
Still super impressive that people do this though.
IIRC, the somewhat random allocation of trailing silent "e"s in English spelling can partly be explained by typesetters trying to fill lines.
Totally agree with you BTW. I find justification ugly as sin.
Including the making of the posts
into nice rectangular portions of
each thirty three characters wide ?
Not including the double space at
the beginning of each line or any
of the punctuation character ends .[0] Before I worked on game development I actually worked in virtual surgery simulation, and there we also had a localized UI with a very large number of supported languages and tooling to detect issues.
[1] Need For Speed (2015), NFS: Payback, NFS: Heat, Lost in Random, Wavetale
Don't forget increased-contrast too!
I never had problems with Ruby, Python, JS, Elixir, Perl and probably other languages I used a little in the last 15 years or more. HTML and CSS too.
* https://www.renaissancewoodworker.com/foot-powered-wood-turn...
https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/Neutron_Jammer_Canceller
I wonder how often *teleports behind you* shows up in space operas.
E.B.'s soliloquy isn't in strict blank verse, but there is clearly some sort of metric structure.
You have been tested, Al Swearengen.
And your deepest purposes proved, there’s gold
On the woman’s claim. You might as well have shouted
It from the rooftops. That’s why I’m jumpin’
Through hoops to get it back. Thorough as I fleeced
The fool she married, I will fleece his widow, too.
Using loyal associates like Eustace
Bailey Farnum as my go-betweens and dupes.
To explain why I want her bought out I’ll make
A pretext of my fear of the Pinkertons.
I’ll throw Farnum a token thief. Why should
I reward E.B. with some small fractional
Participation in the claim? Or let him
Even lay by a little security
And source of continuing income, for
His declining years. What’s he ever done for me?
Except let me terrify him every
Goddamned day of his life ’til the idea
Of bowel regularity is a forlorn
Fuckin’ hope. Not to mention orderin’
A man killed in one of E.B.’s rooms.
So every fuckin’ free moment of his life
E.B. has to spend scrubbin’ the bloodstains
Off the goddamned floor! To keep from havin’
To lower his rates. Goddamned that motherfucker! Most of the show is written in iambic pentameter. I believe one way God says, “I too have a hand here” is in the rhythms and metrics of speech, that the metrics of speech are important and representative of our fellowship even in those of us who feel, mistakenly, that we are separate from each other as individuals.
When a character in Deadwood, or anyone, talks in certain locutions, unbeknownst to themselves, they honor a divine presence.[1]
To be fair, I don’t care. I loved the series and now I started to read the script and oh man, it’s like a really good novel. Very much prose in no foxed meter, but damn if it isn’t great prose. I might just start reading through Deadwood scripts, since I watched the series to death anyway.
[1] https://lithub.com/david-milch-on-language-and-obscenity-in-...
> BoVeX gives us a controlled tradeoff between these two states. By changing how much it costs for the text to be semantically wrong, we have a dial that allows us to smoothly interpolate between Lorem Epsom and Donald Knuth.
store the source minified without any extraneous whitespace and let the editor display a properly indented view in your preferred style...
I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.
I'm curious to see what the hard-copy scripts actually looked like. The soft copies I've seen aren't particularly idiosyncratic but maybe they've been normied: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.h...
This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:
> A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.
But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.
[0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1579263894
[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-1/tb133chernoff-widows.pdf#subs... (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this article)
We're going to see more of this once diffusion language models mature. They won't match the exact length but will sure choose words to fix the set number of tokens.
How much time should a person spend reviewing their comment before hitting reply?
There is a bar of quality each of us expects everyone else to follow. Sometimes we meet expectations, other times we ruffle feathers. How much should you even care?
If we all spew typos, you'll probably care less. If everyone else is carefully reviewing their posts, you might care.
In both cases, it makes no real difference unless the information being transferred is important to you (recipe, design doc, vs shitposts). How much mental friction can you tolerate?
Furthermroe, studeis shoew you can swap the arranrgment of most lettres (ecxept for the frist and last letetrs) in text and you stlil get the piont farily esaily.
A number of shows of that era were filmed wide (16:9) and post processed / coloured / reframed and broadcast on TV in a box 4:3 aspect ratio
No visible boom mic operators, etc - careful eyes in the initial post production for TV phase saw to that.
Later wide screen releases were rushed with no real post production budget to address these and other issues - that's on the studios wanting a second grab at money, not the original creative teams.
Similar complaints abound for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and (IIRC) The Wire (?) and their wide screen releases.
To best be enjoyed with a muscular buddy.
https://focusonbelgium.be/en/Do%20you%20know%20these%20Belgi...
You are right that this is hard from a prompt alone, but for a slightly stranger
reason than the obvious one. The model never sees columns. It sees tokens, and a
token can be one character or nine, so "make this line 80 wide" asks it to run a
hidden tally over pieces it cannot count by looking at them. Any slip early in a
line compounds, and there is no backspace key to reach for once it is committed.
That said, the failure is not total. A model can lean on a learned feel for line
length, pick shorter or longer synonyms to land close to the target, and rewrite
a sentence when it overshoots. It will not be perfect every time, but it lands a
lot more often than pure chance would suggest. The sampling trick you mention is
the real fix: mask each token that would push a line past the limit, and force a
newline the moment the count hits the mark. That converts a fuzzy instruction to
a hard constraint with zero training. Fine tuning helps too, but mostly sharpens
the same internal counter rather than replacing it. This reply is a small proof;
if any line here is off by one, feel free to consider your point demonstrated...The autumn wind moves slow across the field,
and every falling leaf now yields its fight.
The summer gold at last has ceased to yield,
and short days now give way to longer night.
I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream,
and watch it slowly carry every fallen leaf.
I think of you as some half-forgotten dream,
and taste again that same old, bitter grief.
The silent stars come out to watch it still,
and pale moonlight falls gently on the hill.
A lonesome owl calls out from past the mill,
and time moves on, unhurried and calm, until
the dawn returns to paint the sky brand new,
and I still recall the love I lost with you.
The autumn wind moves slow across the field,
and every falling leaf now yields its fight.
The summer gold at last has ceased to yield,
and short days now give way to longer night.
I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream,
and watch it slowly carry every fallen leaf.
I think of you as some half-forgotten dream,
and taste again that same old, bitter grief.
The silent stars come out to watch it still,
and pale moonlight falls gently on the hill.
A lonesome owl calls out from past the mill,
and time moves on, unhurried and calm, until
the dawn returns to paint the sky brand new,
and I still recall the love I lost with you. Most dictionaries are descriptivist, and
that's why they frequently have multiple
spellings of words. It's because of your
teachers, style guides & internet trolls
that anyone says the dictionary spelling
is the only correct spelling.A dictionary would be all but useless, if it included words used for 2 months, and essentially never used in that context, way, or spelling again. That sort of means teenage slang probably shouldn't appear, and amusingly if it did appear in the dictionary, it'd probably be less 'cool' to use that slang.
And alt-spellings for 'being kool' aren't what I'd call a dictionary thing.
Put another way, slang is in the dictionary, but only long-standing slang. Such as 'cool'. I'd see it more as temp slang->more used->enters dictionary-> eventually the 'slang' note is dropped, it's just language.
I'd want to see a word used for a few years, before it enters. And really, some slang morphs endlessly, like a fire flickering and then going out. How do you capture that? Even online, it'd be out of date once published.
And lots of slang is colloquial. Do you care to add slang language used across dozens of regions in the US?
I recall 20 years ago, Oxford Dictionary took a literal physical trip across Canada, and made the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, filled with 2200 'Canadianisms'. Akin to what you're saying here, if people are using it, it should be in there. But these were things Canadians had been saying for decades...
Anyhow.
I guess my point is, the kid was wrong because transitory has no value in the dictionary. His special words won't be used by even him, in a year.
The origin of OK is disputed; however, most modern reference works hold that
it originated around Boston as part of a fad in the late 1830s of
abbreviating misspellings – that it is an initialism of "oll korrect" as a
misspelling of "all correct". This origin was first described by linguist
Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.
Neither the human orphan nor the widow is fixed by your description; they simply aren't alone either more.
The child is still an orphan; the woman a widow.
I have only heard people say H T T P, as specific letters when pronouncing HTTP, and thus the a or an should be based on how one would pronounce the letter "H". And H would be pronounced as "aitch". Starts with an a -> vowel sound -> should be "an".
But I'm a non native english speaker, so I'm happy to be proven wrong.
I do cringe when people insist on "an + h" where the h is in fact invariably pronounced, as in "an historic occasion". You only ever seem to hear this from Americans trying to sound educated, which makes me suspect it's affected, not organic. I doubt the person giving a speech on 'an historic occasion' would then go home and give his kid 'an history book'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnq96W9jtuw&t=66s
Praline: 'Ello. I would like to buy a fish license, please.
Clerk: A what?
Praline: A license for my pet fish, Eric.
Clerk: How did you know my name was Eric?
Praline: No, no, no, no. My _fish's_ name is Eric. Eric the fish. 'E's an 'alibut.
Clerk: What?
Praline (in upper-class accent): He is an halibut.
The Pythons were highly attuned to this class distinction and wrote it into their sketches. Another good sketch is an upper-class family distinguishing "woody" and "tinny" sounds, but the whole sketch's premise is to laugh at the odd mannerisms of the upper-classes.
In Australia we pronounce the H more like "heitch" while in the US people tend to pronounce it as "eytch" (IPA would probably more descriptive here, sorry!). In the UK it's a bit more of a mixed bag, as others have already elucidated.
"Ambiguous" was probably a poor word choice, I meant to say that because both ways of writing are technically valid based on the accent of the author there is an element of freedom in the choice that tells you something about them.
A shibboleth is a little more specific: it's the pronunciation of one
specific sound in a different way that marks out a person as from one
specific group.
So, some of the go-tos... New Zealand English tends to turn an /i/ in
even stressed positions into schwa (the sound on the end of "little",
or "umbrella", or "gopher", and one of the key sounds to master for a
non-native learner who wants to improve their English accent). When a
Kiwi says "fish and chips" it sounds like "fush and chups", "swimming
pool" becomes "swumming pool", and this is _the_ way to distinguish a
Kiwi from an Australian, because to the rest of the Anglophone world,
NZ English sounds very like Aus English.
Canadians tend to pronounce the "ow" sound in words like "about" in a
way that to my British ear sounds Scottish: it becomes "aboot". So if
I hear someone speaking with an American sounding accent but they say
"I found oot aboot something," I ask them if they're Canadian. I tend
to find most Canadians and New Zealanders are delighted if someone is
able to tell, so ask very early on and you can make new friends. :-)Well, that, and Kiwis tend to say "hey bro" a lot ;)
Beached Whale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdVHZwI8pcA
Those are also interesting but it feels a bit more special to me when it's a secondary speech characteristic because it feels a bit more like a clue in a detective novel -- it almost feels like you can hear inside the author's head and how they vocalise while they write.
In this case, "missle" is a malapropism that is only possible if you don't pronounce the second "i", and so is a secondary "speech" characteristic.
I guess I have mainly met older kiwis!
I slightly know Terry Stewart of https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/
from mailing lists, and while I don't follow any Youtube channels as a
rule, I used to enjoy his videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@tezzaNZ
I probably heard more NZ English from Terry than anyone else! Only for Americans. In British English, it's "MISS isle", and "MISSul" is
a church book. I'm not Christian and I am not sure of exactly what's in a
_missal_ but it's prayers or something.
I do not know if American English even has missals. They're old fashioned
things these days, I think. But in my dialect, "missile" and "missal" are
two different words with 2 different sounds, which means that when I hear
Americans talking about the fast moving weaponry what I hear is that they
are launching prayer books at someone. It's not a very common word and so
I keep forgetting.I was very vaguely notionally Church of England until age 11, although still had to go to Chapel daily from 12-17. I have never been to Mass and I don't really know what goes on in a Mass. I'm not even sure if Anglicans have Mass.
My local Canon certainly had plenty of small-m mass: big lad. Nonetheless, when he scattered my father's ashes in the sea, he got caught by a wave, and proved that despite this he could run backwards up a shingle beach, wearing wet robes, at surprising speed.
"how people pronounce words ending in that"
You did not restrict which people you were talking about, and that's a critical omission. Nobody in my daily life, in real life where I live or on TV or radio, would ever say "missal" when they meant "missile".
Sorry? How do you think people pronounce words such as truffle / turtle / tremble / pickle / maple / rubble / etc. etc. etc.?
You can just look this up. The usual way to write "truffle" in a phonetic manner is of course /tɹʌfl̩/. You'll note that there is no vowel in the second syllable at all; it consists of just the L. (And that's what the small mark below the L means - "syllabic".) This is the standard phonetic analysis.
You might also notice that the IPA differs from your proposed spelling in several other ways. One, the difference between "ɹ" and "r", has no relevance in a discussion of English. But the difference between "f" and "ff" is more significant, and the difference between "u" (the vowel in GOOSE) and "ʌ" (the vowel in STRUT) is of critical importance.
And this is still just a phonemic transcription. Phonetically, you'd expect the word to be [tʃɹʌfl̩], with the initial consonant matching that of "chill" and not "till".
All of these are conventions of written English. Written "tr" is pronounced as if it were written "chr". Pronounced [tʃɹ] is always spelled "tr" and never spelled "chr". The difference in vowel quality between "moping" and "mopping" is indicated, as you probably already noticed, by the doubling of the consonant written after the vowel, and this is also the reason for the double "f" in "truffle". Why do we write an extra "f" when what we mean is that we're changing the pronunciation of the vowel before it? Not for phonetic reasons.
And what do you know, there's a standard spelling of syllabic L in English too, and that standard spelling is "-le", not "-el". That spelling is phonetic in exactly the same way that using "m" to spell the initial consonant of "mat" is phonetic - it is the established mapping between the orthography and the pronunciation.
In my mind, the natural phonetic spelling of "le" is an L sound followed by an E sound. Works like "truffle" and "turtle" have an E sound followed by an L sound. I don't think that's phonetic.
I imagine that GP's reasoning is that in writing "missile", the consonant is followed by a vowel, while phonetically the vowel is followed by a consonant.
The issue is further compounded by the fact that there's more than one common pronunciation of "missile".
I don't disagree with the latter point, but the former doesn't make sense to me; unless you're saying that there wouldn't be enough phonemes representable by the letters to define spellings for all English words? In my mind, the entire point of a conversation like this is hypothetical changes to the language to make it phonetically consistent; of course it isn't right now, or we wouldn't need to have a conversation.
You've correctly identified what my reasoning is, but you seem to be circularly saying that since English isn't currently phonetic, it's impossible to come up with a spelling for it using sounds that roughly resemble the common sounds letters are using today in order to make it phonetic. I guess I don't know that it's literally impossible, but I don't think it's self-evident that it's not possible, and I think it's fairly straightforward changing the spelling of words ending in "le" to "el" would be more consistent to how "le" is used in other places in words where changing their spelling would be more difficult (e.g. there's not really any clear way to spell "less" without preserving "le" at the beginning).
You're definitely right that I hadn't considered that some dialects pronounce "missile" in a way where it's pronounced differently, but I'd argue that the obvious example (British pronunciation) was already basically ignored by the comment I was responding to, so I didn't really introduce the inconsistency.
Some people do in fact say "istoric", which seems largely like an affectation.
I don't see why that argument is supposed to make sense on its own terms. The system we have now is that -le and le- are different. You want to reform -le to be spelled -el because its pronunciation is closer to that of (-)el- than to le-.
But making that spelling change will reduce the "inconsistency" you don't like that exists between -le and le- precisely by introducing a new inconsistency between -el and el-. Why is that supposed to be an improvement of any kind?
Then you're inventing a phonetic alphabet that happens to look like the English alphabet. That's what makes discussions like this are pointless. No one has established a phonetic definition of "le" or "el", which is the only basis according to which one can decide which is phonetically more appropriate.
However to come back to IPA and "truffle", Wiktionary (not a definitive source I know, but there is no definitive source whatsoever about anything regarding the English language) does that say "truffle" rymes with /-ʌfəl/ with a schwa right there between the f and the l. The pronunciation of the word itself in Wiktionary is indicated with a syllable break rather than a schwa, which I would absolutely dispute, and indeed it looks like Cambridge dictionary[1] puts a schwa there in addition to the syllable break.
It's also written "truffel" in Dutch for what it's worth.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/truffle [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/truff...
No, that's not what I said at all. Stipulating that the -ent and the -p- are silent in the French word comptent, there is also a French word comte of identical pronunciation, which limits the amount of phonetic information that the silent -ent and -p- could be carrying. (In fact, I believe the verb ending may be realized in certain cases, as the "silent N" ending the English indefinite article is often realized.)
The doubling of the "f" in truffle is nothing like that. The hypothetical word trufle would be pronounced differently. That difference wouldn't have anything to do with the F, but nevertheless it is indicated by the spelling; the spelling is conveying phonetic information.
This is also the case for the spelling -le. It represents an English sound. It is the spelling you would expect a trained speaker to produce for a novel word featuring that sound. You can't get any more phonetic than that.
> Wiktionary (not a definitive source I know, but there is no definitive source whatsoever about anything regarding the English language) does that say "truffle" rymes with /-ʌfəl/ with a schwa right there between the f and the l.
I'll return to this in a moment.
> The pronunciation of the word itself in Wiktionary is indicated with a syllable break rather than a schwa,
Just to be clear, the "syllable break" is the period between the f and the syllabic l. The symbol that tells you the l constitutes a syllable in itself is the small mark underneath it.
> which I would absolutely dispute
Why? That's how the word is pronounced.
> and indeed it looks like Cambridge dictionary puts a schwa there in addition to the syllable break.
We're back to the first point!
First, let's observe that there is absolutely no dispute over the idea that "truffle" is two syllables long. The presence of a syllable break is universally agreed.
Second, the reason wiktionary gives a more accurate rendition of the pronunciation is that it's mostly maintained by enthusiasts.
The convention of dictionaries is cited by wikipedia:
> Many dialects of English may use syllabic consonants in words such as sudden [ˈsʌd.n̩], awful [ˈɔːfɫ̩] and rhythm [ˈɹɪðm̩], which English dictionaries' respelling systems usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of schwa and a consonant (for example, /ˈsʌd.ən/).
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant )
This is a convention, no less than the spelling "-le" is. It is advantageous in dictionaries, where you'd like each syllable to be more or less pronounceable on its own; the grapheme "-le" can't occur in isolation. The phonetic analysis is what I already told you it is, and what wikipedia repeats in that quote.
(In the case of sudden, the difference is crystal clear - if you pronounce it without detaching your tongue from the roof of your mouth between the /d/ and the /n/, you can only be producing a syllabic n. You can also do this test with subtle, but not with truffle, since /f/ doesn't share the same articulatory properties that /d/, /t/, and /l/ do.)
I think you have this slightly muddled. It's not that upper-class Brits
pronounce more of the "h" sounds. The idea is that upper-class types go
to private schools and they learn French, and so they know that lots of
English words that have a leading "h" are French loanwords and thus the
they are unaspirated in the original, i.e. the "h" is silent – it ought
not to be said. "Hotel", "hospital", "honour", "homage", and so on - no
leading "huh" sound. Which means that the word starts on a vowel sound,
and in turn, that means it takes "an" in front not "a".
But people who don't know French and don't know which words have a sort
of silent H on the front and which don't try to hyper-correct – so they
start inserting extra initial "huh" sounds on words beginning with some
form of vowel.
This is how old British TV comedies tried to parody policemen talking -
they are often working class but in dealing with lawyers, judges, etc.,
they are aware of speaking to someone from a higher social class and so
they try to speak more "proper" and insert loads of extra "h" sounds.
"Hin my hopinion, your onner, the suspect was hup to something."
Drop the "h" sounds where they _should_ be, and at the same time insert
extra ones where they shouldn't be.
I think this is what the Pythons were playing with. Now that Britain is
a little bit less class-conscious – and foreign accents are heard a lot
more often – it doesn't seem funny any more so it's gone away. That's a
good thing overall, I reckon.
(Wondering how long I should keep this up...)Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining
> Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining
Why thank you! :-)
There's reams of it on my late-1990s homepage, which I resurrected and
uploaded a few years ago. I did an extremely cursory update but expect
plenty of broken links and things.
Finding it is an exercise for the reader... ;-)Expensively educated people might pronounce French loanwords by dropping the h in an ostentatiously French way (and maybe making homage rhyme with fromage) to showcase their etymology knowledge and are more likely to use the grammatical convention[1] of prefixing them with 'an' rather than 'a' even even when sounding the 'h'. But the "correct", RP way their expensive education teaches them to enunciate the words you listed as English words is with a leading h and has been for a century or so, except 'honour' (also 'honest', 'heir'), which pretty much no native speaker pronounces the 'h' in.
[1]now usually an historic grammatical convention ;-) it survived longer than the silent 'h' in 'historic' in conventional English speech though...
On the other hand a leading 'h' is routinely dropped in spoken English in most words in many British dialects spoken by less expensively educated people (especially southern urban "working class" people), which has no more to do with French etymology than the glottal stop that means some of the same accents also drop a lot of 't's from the middle of words. That's where all the twentieth century jokes involving Cockney stereotypes overcorrecting by inappropriately adding 'h' when trying to speak 'proper' come from. The overcorrecting in turn came from "upper class" people being snobbish about the sort of person who 'abitually indulged in "h-dropping"...
As for the name of the letter, according to the OED and RP dialect the sort of expensive schools that emphasize correct pronunciation teach, it's is definitely called 'aitch' in British English. And has been for several hundred years. Not all people who pronounce it 'aitch' are "upper class" (there's a rapper with the stage name Aitch) but all people who are "upper class" are taught to pronounce it 'aitch'. On the other hand, it's a bit weird that the name of the letter doesn't contain the letter, so lots of British people whose education doesn't involve teachers emphasising The Correct Way To Speak feel the name for the letter 'h' should start with the letter 'h', hence 'haitch'.
Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)
So "upper class" learn to enunciate the letter 'h' without an 'h' in it, but are taught to pronounce it more or less everywhere else (with a few quirks to keep them honest) and others more likely to drop the 'h' sound from other words but add it to the letter name. Yes, English pronunication is weird
For those desperate for even more 'h' discourse, seee: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/h_n and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping
> Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)
Fascinating. I didn't know that, despite my Belfast-born dad being the reason I'm a citizen.