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.
It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment.
The scary thing is that many readers will also often take anything said confidently enough to be fact. This is also basically how a lot of disinformation works. Say it authoritatively, and you'll become an authority on the matter to many people.
I've definitely been guilty of doing both of these things past, but I've learned now to actually read and think and do research before commenting or taking something I read at face-value.
>It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment.
C'est la vie. The internet allows millions of people to opine on barstools.
It might simply be that our standards for the written word were too high before as it required a large investment to write/print/distribute a magazine or book.
> C'est la vie. The internet allows millions of people to opine on barstools.
It may be interesting if there was a social media platform that exerted some sophisticated control over the manner in which this phenomenon plays out. If adequately successful, the way "la vie" is, would then be different.
Do you take a possibility
you can be both right and
wrong? The feat might not
be as difficult as author
seems it is. I personally
can think of many ways to
achieve it. Come to think
of it, it may actually be
even easier because lines
in that guide afford more
ways to be broken because
they are longer. And I am
not even native speaker.
To match lengths you only
need to make one or maybe
two choices per line only
to adjust a word by maybe
one or two chars. This is
nothing very difficult as
any crossword solver will
attest.
The parent makes a good point. Maybe I am jaded, but this isn't a scarily impressive feat of linguistics. It is mildly interesting that someone put the time into this. I would be impressed if it were done on a typewriter. Maybe this rewrite helps clarify the point.
Do you think its possible
you can be both right and
wrong? The feat might not
be as crazy as the author
claims to think. I myself
can think of many ways to
achieve it. Come to think
of it, it may actually be
even easier because lines
in that guide afford more
ways to be broken because
they are longer. I am not
even a native speaker.
Brick-texting isn't actually that hard, in short isolated bursts. Other geometric texts are not necessarily much harder, But, keeping it up over any length is somewhat impressive.
I think the most "simultaneously observed forms" were brick-text with an acrosticon down the left-most column, or brick-text in iambic pentameter. I have attempted observing all tree, if ended badly.
As somebody said, I am just a
random guy on the Internet. I
learned this language already
as an adult never attending a
single lesson. There is a lot
of other people that know the
language way better than me.
Thinking that it must be hard
just because it is for you is
a well known bias.
(EDIT:)
Gigablah, I can't reply to your comment because apparently I am rate limited.
I am not saying it is easy. I am just saying it is not "most scarily/stunningly impressive linguistic feat".
I hope you can appreciate there is a lot of space between "easy" and "stunningly impressive".
It is easy to do this. All you
do is write some text upfront,
and go line by line and swap a
few words to make the line fit
in the margin. Use small words
to make it easier.
I disagree that this is important. Search for a double space, and you will see only four that are inside a paragraph, and only one of those is after a comma. There are more stray spaces after the end of a line than there are double spaces inside of a paragraph.
Well, he did compare to Mozart. To pick a rando Mozart piece[1]:
1. Sounds like cutesy little throw-away dance with nowhere near the gravitas of a Beethoven or Mahler
2. Listen closely and hear that the phrases are written purposefully so that the music sounds bad when the musicians choose to obey the repeat signs. In other words-- the music flows beautifully if you ignore the repeat signs, but that flow is broken when you obey them and go back to the beginning of the phrase.
3. Musical jokes later in the piece depend on the players actually taking the "wrong warp" repeats
4. Listen closely and realize that Mozart actually left out the main melody of the piece. (In fact, that melody finally appears only once at the end of the piece)
5. Listen more closely and realize that one of the subsequent main melodies are based off the accompaniment figure for the missing main melody
6. Listen even more closely and hear the striking dissonances and imitative polyphony that is exactly the kind of thing admirers talk about wrt Beethoven, Mahler, etc.
7. Remember that it's difficult enough to write a cutesy little throw-away dance in the style of Mozart, much less pull off all these formal experiments with such subtlety that most modern performances continue to play this music as if it's just a cutesy little throw-away dance
And that's just a random example. For a specific example: if Beethoven had written the Introitus of the Requiem Mass instead of Mozart, it would count as the most sophisticated counterpoint that Beethoven had ever written. (And there are probably more impressive examples of Mozart's counterpoint than that.)
1: last movement of String Quartet in E-Flat Major, K. 428
As someone who loves Beethoven but could never get into Mozart, I would appreciate a link or dozen to actual, good performances of the pieces you mention as needing special attention. Thanks.
In its particular field (the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices), it is just as superior as Mozart's work in his field.
But AFAICT this author's prowess in the field you defined is no more or less than a mastery of that singular skill.
For the author to be a "Mozart" (as in the historical figure, not the myth[1]) you'd need to show a richness of the author's approaches that makes the reader aware of the challenges of and breadth of the field. Something like this:
* the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices
Oops, wait...
* the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow a rhyming scheme
Oops, wait...
* the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow a (line-based and paragraph-based) rhyming scheme
Oops, wait...
* the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow an intricate rhyming scheme where certain paragraphs are mashups of archaic German verse and 1970s gospel lyrics
Oops, wait... there are also some patterns of words where the pattern is written twice, but punctuation was inserted in a seemingly arbitrary place so that I didn't even notice the repetition on the first reading. Something like, "One two three four one. Two three four." Except each sentence was grammatically and contextually correct. Mozart did stuff like that-- there's an example somewhere in the clarinet concerto but I can't remember where.
1: I mean, there's no law against using the mythical Mozart here. But I imagine we'd be trolled by HN'ers if we did that regularly with, say, von Neumann or Einstein.
I agree that there's not a single instance of double-spaces in the text, and I thought that was a really bizarre claim, but there are some instances of misspellings that help it along.
For example:
1. missles instead of missiles
2. carefull instead of careful
3. futher instead of further
But they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well. And ofc the tweets are still on-point saying that it's an impressive and unappreciated feat.
That makes it sound like the typo is made in just a few places to make the line fit.
Search missile, there are 0 results. Search missle and there are 217.
The consistent and plentiful usage makes me strongly believe it’s just how the author thought the word is spelt, not a cheap way to get their preferred formatting.
Does it actually help them along if it’s that many items? It’s hard for me to imagine that 217 instances of a 6 letter word instead of a 7 letter word is much easier to format. My view is that trial and error, obsessively rewriting sentences to fit, is much more likely.
EDIT to clarify: what I mean is that I don’t think there was a master plan where words were misspelt to make this work. I think it’s rather brute forces with a lot of obsessive time and effort. Not in a bad way of course, I really enjoy what they did.
EDIT2: especially when rocket is already a 6 letter word, and likely could be used interchangeably in the guide. I feel that turning missile into one as well wouldn’t help the goal in the slightest, would only make it more difficult.
They're not just vowel removal abbreviations or similar though, they seem like things that'd be common errors - 'missles' is how a lot of Americans pronounce 'missiles', if her film and television is any indication, for example. 'Careful' is one of those 'eh what can I say, English spelling is weird' words anyway - 'care', 'full', why shouldn't it be 'carefull'? I'm not a teacher, but I bet that's a common error.
