"Dawizard"

[Mike Selinker]

This week's Most Beautiful Thing is about TSR's classic typo "dawizard." If you went to the ENnies at Gen Con, you heard me talk about it there. Enjoy, and post comments here or on the journal itself (you don't need an LJ account).

Mike

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I love it! I had forgotten about that one, thanks for the reminder!

I've been railing against an over-reliance on computers in editing for years. (Even in my sig!)

 

[weem]

Haha yea, I think I saw that a while back - very cool

FIND > REPLACE ALL Can be very dangerous (I work in web development so I know from personal experience, hehe).

 

[Orius]

Ah yes, dawizard.

I have a copy of the Encyclopedia Magica volume where this wonderful typo appears. This was the the greatest and most magnificent of typos ever made by TSR. They did make quite a few too, but most of them were fairly minor.

Dawizard wasn't.

I remember the first time I encountered it I was confused. What the heck was dawizard? I was still fairly new to D&D at the time, and I thought maybe it was one of those strange and esoteric words like dweomer that the game liked to use. Although this was after the game was using distinctly Gygaxian prose, they still slipped these words in every now and then.

Some time later, it hit me -- someone REALLY screwed up with a computerized search and replace program, and I thought it was absolutely hilarious. As noted with the entry for crystal ball it didn't just mess up the word "damage", any word that contained the string "mage" got butchered.

I think I'll grab my copy of the book and look over those 16 pages again and enjoy just how funny this mistake was.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

For me, my interest in human editing vs computer editing arose when I was in High School.

I was doing a 25 page paper on Emperor Justinian 1 (Justinian I - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) on my trusty Apple IIe, and I was still the kind of person who backed up my active files every 10 minutes or so. I had just finished the typing the thing and saved it, then began my final proofread before printing, binding and bedtime.

Disaster.

At some point during the final save, some gremlin replaced every letter "j" in the paper- uppercase and lowercase- with a rune-like symbol. (And no, its not one I can reproduce using "alt" keys or the like.)

And worst of all, I couldn't replace them- the letter "j" was suddenly not part of the computer's vocabulary- hit the "j" key, get the squiggle.

I had to re-read that paper word-by-word- really, letter-by-letter- to find all instances of the letter "j" and replace the word with a synonym. "Justinian" became "The Emperor;" "Corpus Juris Civilis" became "Roman Law;" "enjoy" became "appreciate" and so forth.

I finished at about 6:50 AM, took a shower and went to school...

Blessed be my parents who called ahead of time and explained to the prof and the Headmaster what happened. The prof met me on the stairs and sent me home.

And in the years I had that machine, it never did anything like that again. (Though a buddy of mine did accidentally set one of its floppy drives on fire...but that wasn't the computer's fault.)

 

[JediSoth]

I remember seeing "dawizard" when I got the Encyclopedia Magica way back when, but I was still typing papers on a typewriter, so I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing.

Great story, though. I think stories like that remind us that while we should take our work seriously, we should always remember we're playing games.

Just out of curiousity, Dannyalcatraz, how does one set a floppy drive on fire without the use of accelerants?

 

[Mark]

Well done at the ENnies, too, Mike.

 

[Hussar]

Heh, giggle.

I remember on d20 product, way back in the early days, that replaces the word orc with ore. Nice. I'm thinking someone did that one with a spell checker.

 

[Mallus]

This thread reminds me that I've always wanted to run a chess-playing gangsta wizard based on the Wu-Tang Clan: WZA, aka "da Wizzah".

Thanks, thread!

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I swear it was more than 16 pages . . . hmmm. I'm going to have to check my copy again.

 

[Mike Selinker]

Well done at the ENnies, too, Mike.

Aw, you're sweet.

And hey, I'm on the front page too! That's extra-fab.

Mike

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just out of curiousity, Dannyalcatraz, how does one set a floppy drive on fire without the use of accelerants?

Apple IIe flopy drives made an interesting sound when you booted them up, and one of my PC-using buddies found this sound to be utterly entrancing. He'd sit there flicking the power switch on and off, on and off, on and off, just to hear that sound. No floppy was involved, either...the drive was empty.

Then one day, he's doing that and we notice a funny smell and a small plume of smoke coming from its opening. It was the beginnings of a small electrical fire...

I quickly unplugged the machine and suffocated the fire. He apologized profusely.

 

[MerricB]

Mike,

Thanks for the article. It was very enjoyable.

Reading back through the other entries, I discovered the one on Jack Vance, which (amongst other things) reminded me that I haven't read the Dying Earth books yet - and so I've now ordered them.

Thank you!

 

[Orius]

I swear it was more than 16 pages . . . hmmm. I'm going to have to check my copy again.

It's only about 16 pages, I checked it last night for fun. It's not as widespread as this topic would make it seem either; most of the typos are concentrated in about 4 pages or so. It starts somewhere in the section that covers crowns, but the word damage is pretty sparce there, so there's not too many examples. When you get to the entries on the cube of force, cube of frost resistance and the like though, it really starts popping up.

It's a shame it didn't appear somewhere in one of the weapon or armor sections, or something like that where the items are going to be used in combat a lot.

 

[Samnell]

It's only about 16 pages, I checked it last night for fun. It's not as widespread as this topic would make it seem either; most of the typos are concentrated in about 4 pages or so. It starts somewhere in the section that covers crowns, but the word damage is pretty sparce there, so there's not too many examples. When you get to the entries on the cube of force, cube of frost resistance and the like though, it really starts popping up.

Dawizard also appears in the Complete Wizard's Handbook. I haven't looked at mine in years, but I seem to remember it being in at least a few full chapters. (Maybe new spells and magic items?)

 

[Mike Selinker]

Mike,

Thanks for the article. It was very enjoyable.

Reading back through the other entries, I discovered the one on Jack Vance, which (amongst other things) reminded me that I haven't read the Dying Earth books yet - and so I've now ordered them.

Thank you!

Cool. Anything that gets more people reading Vance is just ducky with me.

Mike

 

[Gregor Hutton]

Your delivery of it at the ENnies was spot on Mike.

As I said to you afterwards, Mongoose's original Conan book had the terrible "spellb.ooks" in it. Another example of hasty find/replace very late in the process.