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_jackdk_yesterday at 11:43 PM4 repliesview on HN

I wonder if at any point during writing, the heroic author of that Super Metroid guide learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles", and decided to own the mistake rather than reword the entire guide.

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_...


Replies

mananaysiempretoday at 12:10 AM

Judging by the lowercase “m” it’s the 8x16 variation[1] and not the 9x16 one you linked, but otherwise yes, looks like the plain old VGA font? (Incorrectly displayed, as the site points out: the VGA didn’t have square pixels in either of those modes.) The site uses (AVIF) images in place of text, but it’s like 15 minutes to write a program that typesets an ASCII file in a given monospace bitmap font and writes out the result as say a PPM (and I’m sure ImageMagick can do it if you’d rather dig through docs than program), so this doesn’t seem to require any further explanation?

[1] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

Biganontoday at 5:25 AM

Funny tidbit: "missile" used to be an adjective, "a missile weapon" = "a weapon than can be sent/thrown".

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".

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EGregtoday at 12:27 AM

I think you meant "spelt" rather than spent. A but ironic, all things considered.

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kibwentoday at 12:24 AM

> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles"

I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.

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