"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.