Month: November 2016

On November 12, 1980, Voyager 1 flew by Saturn. It was the second spacecraft to do so (Pioneer 11 had taken low-resolution pictures in 1979). But Voyager 1 had a high-resolution camera onboard, and it snapped photos of the planet, its rings, and its moons. It also found three previously-unknown moons: Atlas, Pandora, and Prometheus.

The image shown at the top of this post actually came a few days later, when Voyager 1 continued its flyby but turned its camera back. The original caption read:

Voyager 1 image of Saturn and its ring taken Nov. 16, 1980 four days after closest approach to Saturn, from a distance of 5,300,000 km (3,300,000 miles). This viewing geometry, which shows Saturn as a crescent, is never achieved from Earth. The Saturnian rings, like the cloud tops of Saturn itself, are visible because they reflect sunlight. The translucent nature of the rings is apparent where Saturn can be seen through parts of the rings. Other parts of the rings are so dense with orbiting ice particles that almost no sunlight shines through them and a shadow is cast onto the yellowish cloud tops of Saturn, which in turn, casts a shadow across the rings at right. The black strip within the rings is the Cassini Division, which contains much less orbiting ring material than elsewhere in the rings.

Among the first photos we got back were these views of Saturn’s satellites. I have embedded some nice ones below.

TITAN’S HAZE (FALSE COLOR)

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon. Voyager 1 found Titan’s thick atmosphere, which prevents visible-light cameras from seeing the surface. The image above shows a false-color view of the “haze” in Titan’s atmosphere, which is mostly made up of nitrogen.

RHEA

Looks a lot like our moon, eh?

DIONE

Another familiar-looking moon. JPL notes:

At the top of the image is the 166 km diameter crater Aeneas, centered at 26 N, 46 W. North is at 12:30. This image was taken from a distance of 162,000 km and has a resolution of 1 km/pixel.

BROWN OVALS ON SATURN

JPL notes:

Two brown ovals can be seen towards the right. The lower one is at about 40 degrees north latitude. The upper one, the polar oval, is at 60 degrees north. Both ovals are about 10,000 km across. North is at 1:30.

VOYAGER 2

Voyager 2 also flew by Saturn, in August 1981. It took some amazing pictures. If you want to get deep into the Voyager data sets, JPL and the USGS have you covered. If you’re just looking for images, check out the Voyager 1 section of this page.

Whether it’s due to natural causes, drunken vandals, or former Boy Scout leaders who think they’re saving lives, many of our ancient natural landmarks have taken a hit in the last century. Here are 10 of Mother Nature’s best tourist attractions that are now lost to the ages.

1. OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN // WHITE MOUNTAINS, NEW HAMPSHIRE

This famous face-shaped outcropping of rock (pictured above) and the way it was positioned on the side of the mountain once prompted Daniel Webster to write, “Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.”

The New Hampshire landmark is so iconic that it’s featured on the state quarter. Unfortunately, that’s the only place you’ll find it these days—the outcropping slid down the side of the mountain in 2003.

2. WASHINGTON SEQUOIA TREE // SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA

At 254.7 feet tall, the Washington Tree in Sequoia National Park was once one of the largest single-stem trees in the world, second only to the sequoia known as General Sherman (274.9 feet). In 2003, the tree caught fire, reducing its height to about 229 feet and burning out much of the dead wood in the center. Two years later, the weakened tree collapsed under the weight of a snowstorm. Though it’s still clinging to life, at a mere 115 feet, the Washington Tree is a shadow of its former self.

3. THE JEFFREY PINE // YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA

This tree is probably most famous from the photography of Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins. We’re lucky that they saw fit to record the gnarled pine for posterity, because the centuries-old tree fell to the ground in 2003. It’s a wonder the tree stayed erect that long—it actually died during a drought in 1977, despite heroic efforts by Yosemite park rangers to save it by carrying buckets of water out to the remote location. After the tree fell over in 2003, the dead trunk was left there.

4. DUCKBILL // CAPE KIWANDA STATE NATURAL AREA, OREGON

When this 7-foot-tall rock formation bit the dust earlier this year, people first thought Mother Nature was responsible—and then a video surfaced. Shot by a park visitor who wanted to catch the act on video, the footage showed a group of vandals going into a roped-off area and purposely pushing the formation until it crashed to the ground. When confronted, the vandals said they were doing the world a favor—a friend of theirs had broken his leg on it.

5. JUMP-OFF JOE // NEWPORT, OREGON

This large rock formation, called a sea stack (a pillar of stacked stones caused by wave erosion), once dominated Nye Beach in Newport, Oregon. For most of the 1800s, it was impossible to get around the 100-foot-tall stack without jumping off the steep siding, which is why early settlers named it Jump-Off Joe. By the 1890s, erosion had created a small gap between the cliffs and the rock, and without the support of the cliffs, the arch collapsed in a severe storm in 1916. Today, there’s barely anything left to photograph, let alone jump off.

6. WALL ARCH // ARCHES NATIONAL PARK, UTAH

Some time during the night of August 4, 2008, Wall Arch, a more than 30-foot-tall and 70-foot-wide formation in Arches National Park, collapsed. A survey of the site showed obvious stress fractures in the remaining part of the structure, so no foul play was suspected.

The National Park Service issued a statement that said, “All arches are but temporary features and all will eventually succumb to the forces of gravity and erosion. While the geologic forces that created the arches are still very much underway, in human terms it’s rare to observe such dramatic changes.”

7. EL DEDO DE DIOS — “GOD’S FINGER” // CANARY ISLANDS, SPAIN

This basalt sea stack is located near Gran Canaria, one of the Canary Islands—and while the base is still there, it once included a spindly stone that vaguely resembled a finger sticking up from a closed fist. At least, it did until November 2005, when Tropical Storm Delta broke the finger off like a vengeful mobster.

8. TWELVE APOSTLES // PORT CAMPBELL NATIONAL PARK, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

Seems like 2005 was a rough year for ocean-based landmarks. That July, one of Australia’s “Twelve Apostles,” nine limestone monoliths off the southwest coast of Victoria, took a tumble into the ocean. The rock pillar, which took 20 million years to form, crumbled away into the water right before the very eyes of some tourists photographing the formation. (The one that collapsed is the one in the foreground of the picture above.)

9. EYE OF THE NEEDLE // NEAR FORT BENTON, MONTANA

When park rangers investigated the collapse of this arch formation over Memorial Day 1997, they discovered beer bottles, footprints and trash. And while that’s definitely a littering citation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that vandals purposely trashed the arch. When damage to several other nearby sandstone structures was discovered, however, officials concluded that someone had purposely destroyed the 10,000+ year-old monument. Yet the perpetrators have never been caught, leading some to believe that the collapse was simply due to natural erosion.

10. A “GOBLIN” SANDSTONE FORMATION // GOBLIN VALLEY STATE PARK, UTAH

In 2013, two former Boy Scout leaders pushed over a rock formation that had been there since the Jurassic Period. The men believed the rock, known as a “Goblin,” posed a threat to park visitors. “One gust of wind and a family’s dead,” one of the men later said. They were both charged with third-degree felonies and later reached plea deals that required them to pay $925 in court costs, $1500 for the investigation, and an undisclosed amount to erect signs around the park warning visitors not to vandalize anything.

A version of this post originally ran in 2009.

Constrained writing is a catch-all literary term for a whole host of written forms or techniques that limit what or how authors or poets write by forcing them to use a specific set of words, or to work within a strict set of rules or parameters. In simple terms, poetry and even song-writing can be considered examples of constrained writing, since their lines often need to rhyme or contain a fixed number of syllables or beats. Some forms of poetry are naturally more rigid then others—haikus, for instance, fit their 17 syllables into the strict pattern 5–7–5, while all but three of William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets follow the rhyme scheme ABAB–CDCD–EFEF–GG—but at the most extreme, some forms of constrained writing are even more self-limiting and end up being very, very constrained indeed.

1. MANDATED VOCABULARY

One of the simplest forms of constrained writing is limited or mandated vocabulary, wherein a writer either prohibits certain words or else limits themselves to a particular set or number of words, or to words that fit a particular brief. Doug Nufer’s appropriately-titled 2004 novel Never Again, for instance, didn’t use a single word more than once. Le Train de Nulle Part (The Train From Nowhere) by the French novelist Michel Thaler didn’t contain a single verb. And the 2008 novel let me tell you by Paul Griffiths comprised only the 483 words spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

But probably the most famous example of a work of mandated vocabulary is Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs And Ham (1960), which was written in response to a bet between Seuss and his publisher, Bennett Cerf, that he could not complete a story using no more than 50 different words. Seuss returned with a work using only the words a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would and you, and won the bet.

2. LIPOGRAM

A lipogram is a literary work in which a particular letter of the alphabet is intentionally avoided. The difficulty of writing lipograms obviously depends on the frequency of the letter or letters in question (after all, this description entirely avoids using the letter Z without a problem), but things get really tough when it’s the most common letters in the language that are excluded.

None of the more than 50,000 words in Ernest Vincent Wright’s novel Gadsby contain the letter E, for instance, and nor do any of the words in the French writer Georges Perec’s 1969 novel La Disparition—which was translated into English, still following Perec’s original rule, by the writer and critic Gilbert Adair in 1995 and published under the title A Void. Perec later published a novella, Les Revenentes (1972), incidentally, in which E was the only vowel.

3. RHOPALISM

A rhopalic poem or sentence is one in which each successive word is one letter (or, typically in poetry, one syllable) longer than the previous one. Due to the fact that the personal pronoun, I, is only one letter long in English, shorter sentences that follow this rule are fairly easy to construct (“I am now here,” “I do her hair,” “I go and walk there weekly”) but as the sentences get longer, rhopalism becomes an increasingly tough rule to follow. In 1965, however, the linguist and author Dmitri Borgmann came up with a staggering 20-word sentence that followed the rules of rhopalism perfectly:

“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.”

4. ABECEDARIUS

An abecedarius is a specific type of acrostic poem in which successive lines or verses begin with each letter of the alphabet in order. Geoffrey Chaucer’s 23-verse poem “A. B. C.”—written in the 14th century, before J, U and W were even added to the English alphabet—is among the form’s most famous examples.

5. PALINDROME

A palindrome is of course a word (civic, radar, rotator) or a phrase (“don’t nod,” “was it a cat I saw?”) that reads the same backwards as forwards. As a form of constrained writing, however, palindromes can be extended to extraordinary lengths: In his 2012 book, This Is A Book, the comedian and writer Demetri Martin compiled a 500-word poem “about a guy in a strip club who becomes infatuated with two strippers, Tina and Stella.” The entire poem—which opens “Sexes. / Eh, the sexes. / Never even. Still, it’s DNA.”—reads the same backwards and forwards.

6. TAUTOGRAM

A tautogram is an extreme form of alliteration in which all of the words in a sentence or phrase begin with the same letter. Just like a palindrome, it’s a form of constrained writing that can be taken to extraordinary extremes—as in the 1974 novel Alphabetical Africa, by the Austrian-born American novelist Walter Abish.

Chapter 1 of the book contains only words beginning with A. In chapter 2, words beginning with B are introduced alongside the A-words, followed by C-words in chapter 3, and so on, until chapter 26 is entirely unrestrained. The remaining 26 chapters of the book then proceed to restrict the writing, first by removing the Z-words in chapter 27, then the Y-words in chapter 28, and so on until chapter 52, which is again limited only to words beginning with A.

7. PANGRAM

A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet. The most famous example is “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” (which is believed to have originally been introduced in the 1880s as a handwriting exercise, before being picked up by typists and stenographers), while less familiar pangrams include “the five boxing wizards jump quickly” and “jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.”

“The quick brown fox” runs to a total of 35 letters, although it can be reduced to 33 by replacing the first “the” with “a.” But the aim of pangram writing is obviously to produce as short a sentence as possible, with the ultimate goal being a perfectly grammatical sentence containing just 26 letters. Understandably so-called “perfect” pangrams like these often end up incorporating abbreviations, obscure words, and alternative spellings, but a handful of examples have nevertheless been created, including “Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx” and “cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz” (a cwm being a Welsh valley, and vext being an old spelling of vexed).

8. PILISH

Pilish is an extraordinary form of constrained writing that straddles the boundary between language and mathematics: Pilish literature is written in such a way that the number of letters in each successive word is equal to the successive decimal places of pi, 3.14159265359…

The first few numbers of pi can be memorized using the mnemonic “How I wish I could calculate pi,” while extra decimal places can be added by memorizing ever longer sentences (“How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics” takes pi to its 14th decimal place). But as a form of constrained writing, Pilish was taken to an extreme by the American mathematician Mike Keith in his 1996 short story Cadaeic Cadenza, which comprises 3835 words all following the decimal sequence of pi (0s are words 10 letters long). As if that weren’t mindboggling enough, in 2010 Keith published the novella Not A Wake—which pushed that total to 10,000.

 

The old aphorism goes: Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination, we all know, is our enemy. It keeps us late at work and up late at night. It causes us stress and reduces the quality of our work—except, says Wharton School of Business professor Adam Grant, when it doesn’t.

In the video above, created for Business Insider, Grant explains how procrastination can sometimes work for us. “I think the idea of delaying is something we all need to be comfortable with,” says Grant, “because you can’t rush creativity.” Using perpetual procrastinator Steve Jobs as an example, Grant explains how “strategic procrastination” can lead to new, better ideas.

Banner image courtesy of iStock.

If you managed to get your hands on the new Nintendo NES Classic today, consider yourself lucky. Like a scene out of the mid-1980s, the miniature game system—which comes pre-loaded with 30 classic video games—is flying off store shelves before it even touches them. While we can’t promise you’ll find one in your stocking this holiday season, we can share these fun facts about your favorite NES games.

1. THE KONAMI CODE’S ORIGINS ARE IN GRADIUS.

Way back in 1985, Kazuhisa Hashimoto was working on the arcade game Gradius. Because he didn’t want to actually play the whole game during the testing process, he developed a little shortcut that gave him a full set of power-ups, letting him live long enough to easily get to where he needed to without dying. When the game went live in 1986, the code was still there. To get full power-ups, all a player had to do was enter the code up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A.

The trick caught on, and soon, the so-called “Konami Code” could be found in a number of arcade and video games. Most notably, it gave you 30 extra lives in Contra. This super-secret (…or not) code has a special place in the hearts of geeks who have since grown up and used the insider code in websites, in movies, and on TV shows.

2. SUPER C USED A DIFFERENT CODE.

The original Contra was famous for featuring the Konami Code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start) to score a player 30 lives. For whatever reason, Super C, the Contra sequel, instead used the code Right, Left, Down, Up, A, B, Start, which only gave a player 10 lives.

3. BALLOON FIGHT WAS ONE OF SATORU IWATA’S FIRST PROJECTS.

Balloon Fight was one of the first games the late Satoru Iwata worked on as he began his career at Nintendo. He later went on to become Nintendo’s president and CEO, presiding over the launches of the Nintendo DS and Wii.

4. BUBBLE BOBBLE IS GOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN.

Bubble Bobble may seem rudimentary by today’s video game standards, but it proved that video games can be good for the brain. Educators praised the game’s ability to help kids overcome developmental challenges with its focus on problem-solving, strategy, and motor skills.

5. PIZZA INSPIRED PAC-MAN.

It’s not easy to create a game based solely on the concept of eating. But Namco employee Toru Iwatani did just that in 1980 by taking the idea of a pizza with a slice missing, and then having it eat a bunch of dots while being chased by ghosts in a maze. (Iwatani has also said that the shape is a rounded version of the square Japanese character for “mouth.”) The name of the game, Pakkuman, was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeia, “paku-paku,” which describes the sound of eating, similar to the English word “chomp.” As the game was brought to market, the title morphed into Puck Man.

But when Puck Man made his way to North America there was concern that the arcade cabinets would be vandalized by making the P into an F to spell something entirely different. A compromise was reached and the game became known as Pac-Man instead. Thanks to the American marketing machine, the name Pac-Man was eventually adopted for the game all over the world.

6. AN ORIGINAL COPY OF CASTLEVANIA IS WORTH SOME SERIOUS CASH.

The Dracula-based video game Castlevania is particularly valuable these days. Sealed versions of the game sell for upwards of $900, depending on the condition. Original Nintendo NES editions of Castlevania and Castlevania 2 have sold for more than $950.

7. ICE CLIMBER GAVE BIRTH TO SUPER MARIO BROS.

Ice Climber was the first game that Kazuaki Morita worked on. He would go on to refine the game’s formula for his next title at Nintendo: Super Mario Bros., where the action moved horizontally instead of vertically.

8. THE REAL MARIO WAS A LANDLORD, NOT A PLUMBER.

During the development of Donkey Kong, Jr., a Nintendo employee reportedly pointed out that the character looked a lot like Mario Segale, the Italian landlord of Nintendo’s U.S. office. Thus, Mario was born. The original “Lady” character became “Pauline” at the same time in honor of one team member’s wife, Polly.

9. THE GAME VERSION OF MARIO WAS ORIGINALLY A CARPENTER.

In Mario’s first appearance in Donkey Kong, he was portrayed as a carpenter. But after a colleague remarked that his overalls made him look more like a plumber, legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto changed the character’s occupation. This alteration also led to the game being set underground in the pipe-populated sewers of New York City.

10. THE NEW YORK TIMES THOUGHT MARIO AND LUIGI WERE JANITORS.

When longtime Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi passed away in 2013, The New York Times ran an obituary that quoted one of its own articles from 1988, in which Mario and Luigi were incorrectly described as janitors. On September 27, 2013—25 years after the article in question ran—the paper ran a correction:

“An obituary on Sept. 20 about Hiroshi Yamauchi, the longtime president of Nintendo, included a quotation from a 1988 New York Times article that inaccurately described the Nintendo video game Super Mario Bros. 2. The brothers Mario and Luigi, who appear in this and other Nintendo games, are plumbers, not janitors.”

11. THERE’S AN EXCITEBIKE ARENA IN MARIO KART 8.

In 2014’s Mario Kart 8 for the Wii U, an Excitebike arena became available as downloadable content (DLC), allowing the original game’s 8-bit track to be played in a 3D environment.

12. FINAL FANTASY GOT ITS NAME FROM ITS CREATOR’S DESIRE TO RETIRE.

One of the most popular role-playing game franchises of all time got its name from almost becoming the last project its creator ever worked on. According to Hironobu Sakaguchi, he named the game he’d been working on Final Fantasy because he planned to quit the video-game industry if it didn’t sell well. Despite the small staff of developers he was afforded for the game, it managed to sell—to the tune of 400,000 copies initially and a long list of sequels, spin-offs, and remastered releases in the years to come. Sakaguchi went on to serve for several years as President of Square USA, the company that first took a chance on Final Fantasy.

13. A U.S. COURT RULED THAT DONKEY KONG AND KING KONG ARE TWO DIFFERENT APES.

Filed in 1982, argued in a federal court in May of 1984, and concluded that October, Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. represented Universal’s demand for a piece of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong action. The game had pulled in $180 million in sales from around 60,000 arcade machines by 1982, and the studio alleged copyright infringement due to the titular villain’s resemblance to King Kong.

Attorney John Kirby, Jr., who represented Nintendo (and for whom it’s believed the company’s puffiest character was named, in thanks), pointed out that Universal itself had proved in the case of Universal City Studios, Inc. v. RKO General, Inc. that the plot and characters of King Kong were in the public domain. In the Nintendo case, the court ruled that Universal had acted in bad faith with the suit, had no right to the characters, and that, in any case, the studio had failed to prove that “there was any likelihood that an appreciable number of prudent purchasers [were] likely to be misled or confused as to the source of Donkey Kong” based on the ape’s and the game’s attributes.

14. YES, METROID AND KID ICARUS ARE RELATED.

If you think Metroid and Kid Icarus are similar, there’s a reason for that: They were both developed by the same team, including director Satoru Okada, co-director/artist Yoshio Sakamoto, and composer Hip Tanaka.

15. METROID LOOKED TO ALIEN FOR INSPIRATION.

A fantastic game on its own, 1986’s Metroid became the stuff of legends when it saved its biggest surprise for the final moments. After a player completed the game, a short scene revealed that the space-suited, missile-blasting hero was in fact (*gasp*) a woman! This shocking revelation wasn’t something that had been planned from the start, and was instead the result of a programmer asking, “Hey, wouldn’t that be kind of cool if it turned out that this person inside the suit was a woman?” midway through the game’s development. The Metroid team already counted Ridley Scott’s female-led, sci-fi horror movie Alien as one of the game’s chief inspirations, so they decided to run with that innocent suggestion—and the rest is gaming history.

16. WE MAY NEVER KNOW WHO JUSTIN BAILEY WAS.

Justin Bailey was a programmer. Justin Bailey was an inside joke. Justin Bailey was referencing British slang for “bathing suit.”

If you played Metroid in the 1980s, chances are you’ve heard one of these explanations for the game’s most infamous password. Entering “Justin Bailey” and keying in an additional 12 blank spaces allowed players to begin the game with heroine Samus Aran appearing in a leotard instead of her armor while being supplied with a full arsenal of missiles. Where did he come from? Was he man or myth? Or was it all just one very weird fluke?

Turns out, he could very well have just been a bored player who accidentally became the most famous (and hypothetical) NES gamer of all time. (Click here for a much more detailed explanation.)

17. THE ARCADE VERSION ENDING OF DOUBLE DRAGON II: THE REVENGE IS DIFFERENT FROM NINTENDO’S.

The end of Double Dragon II: The Revenge differs on both the NES and arcade. On the NES, damsel-in-distress Marian is brought back to life after being killed early in the story; the arcade version ends on a much more dour note, leaving her dead. You can compare both versions below:

18. A SEQUEL TO MEGA MAN 2 WAS ANNOUNCED, BUT NEVER MATERIALIZED.

In 2010, Capcom announced that it would release Mega Man Universe for the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade the following year. The company promised that the new video game would have similar gameplay to Mega Man 2 and would give the player the ability to customize their own levels and stages. But a few months later, Capcom canceled the game and apologized to Mega Man fans who were anticipating the new release.

Capcom didn’t disclose a specific reason why they canceled Mega Man Universe, instead citing “various circumstances,” which might have included the exit of the designer of Mega Man Universe, Keiji Inafune.

If Mega Man Universe had actually been released, it would have been the first time the character would have been called “Mega Man” in his native Japan. Historically, the character was called “Rock Man,” but was changed when the video game was imported to the United States.

19. NINJA GAIDEN REVOLUTIONIZED THE CONCEPT OF CUTSCENES.

Ninja Gaiden‘s director, Hideo Yoshizawa (credited as Sakurazaki), wanted the NES version of the game to have a much deeper story than the arcade version, so he implemented 20 minutes of cinematic cutscenes. Though standard now, a story told through cutscenes was revolutionary at the time.

20. BEFORE PUNCH-OUT!’S OFFICIAL RELEASE, 10,000 JAPANESE FANS GOT A GOLD VERSION.

Nintendoficionados who submitted high scores from 1987’s Golf U.S. Course Famicom Tournament received gold-colored Famicom (the Japanese equivalent of the NES) cartridges containing Punch-Out!’s near-identical precursor, with Super Macho Man as its final foe.

21. TO ADVANCE IN STARTROPICS, YOU NEEDED TO HAVE THE BOX.

In StarTropics, to advance the story, players were required to input a code that was attached to a letter. However, the letter didn’t exist in the game; it was physically included in the box the game came in. This obviously caused problems as players could easily lose it (or wind up with a rental copy lacking the letter at all) and be stuck forever, so Nintendo had to reprint the code in Nintendo Power magazine to try and help confused gamers.

22. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA’S “ZELDA” IS NAMED AFTER ZELDA FITZGERALD.

Despite being conceived in Japan, The Legend of Zelda’s titular princess was named after a native Alabaman. Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that Zelda Fitzgerald—novelist, feminist, and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald—was the inspiration for his Hyrulian heroine’s handle.

23. THERE IS SIGNIFICANCE TO LINK’S NAME, TOO.

Originally, The Legend of Zelda was meant to be a game that spanned in-universe time periods, beginning in the canonical “past” and ending up in the “future,” with the Triforce acting as a mode of transport between them. The series hero’s unusual moniker was meant to symbolize his role as a link between the eras. But Nintendo’s current position is that he is a “link” between the player and the game.

24. SHIGERU MIYAMOTO WAS DISAPPOINTED BY ZELDA II.

When gaming site Kotaku asked Miyamoto if he’s ever made a bad game, the designer responded that Zelda II: The Adventure of Link didn’t live up to his expectations. “We could have done more with [Link],” he said. “It would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the [NES] hardware wasn’t capable of doing that.”

25. GHOSTS ‘N GOBLINS IS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE TOUGHEST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME.

Not only is Ghosts ‘n Goblins known as one of the hardest games of all time, you actually have to beat it twice to actually complete it (it turns out the first play-through is all just a dream for the player).

Rhetoric is often defined as “the art of language.” That might sound like a bit of a cliché (which it is), but it’s actually quite a nice way of saying that rhetorical devices and figures of speech can transform an ordinary piece of writing or an everyday conversation into something much more memorable, evocative, and enjoyable. Hundreds of different rhetorical techniques and turns of phrase have been identified and described over the centuries—of which the 21 listed here are only a fraction—but they’re all just as effective and just as useful when employed successfully.

1. ADYNATON

You’ll no doubt have heard of hyperbole, in which an over-exaggeration is used for rhetorical effect, like, “he’s as old as the hills,” “we died laughing,” or “hyperbole is the best thing ever.” But adynaton is a particular form of hyperbole in which an exaggeration is taken to a ridiculous and literally impossible extreme, like “when pigs fly!” or “when Hell freezes over!”

2. ANACOLUTHON

Often used in literature to create a stream-of-consciousness style in which a character’s thoughts flit from one idea to the next, anacoluthon describes a sudden and unexpected break in a sentence that leads to it being concluded in a different way than might have been expected. Although it can sometimes be due to nothing more than a speaker losing their train of thought, in practice anacoluthon can also be OH MY GOD I’VE LEFT THE GAS ON.

3. ANADIPLOSIS

Anadiplosis is an ingenious and memorable rhetorical device in which a repeated word or phrase is used both at the end of one sentence or clause and at the beginning of the next. As with practically all rhetorical devices, William Shakespeare liked using it (“She being none of your flesh and blood, your flesh and blood has not offended the king”), but you can thank George Lucas for what is now probably the best-known example: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

4. ANTHYPOPHORA

You know when you pose a question for dramatic effect and then immediately answer it yourself? That’s anthypophora.

5. ANTIMERIA

If you’ve ever friended or texted someone, emailed or DMed something, tabled a meeting or motorwayed your way across country, then you’ll be familiar with antimeria, a rhetorical device in which an existing word is used as if it were a different part of speech. More often than not this involves using a noun as if it were a verb, a semantic process better known as “verbing” (which is actually a perfect example of itself). Slang (and modern English in general, for that matter) loves antimeria, but it is Shakespeare who remains the undisputed master of it. Cake, drug, kitchen, squabble, ghost, blanket, graze, elbow, and crank were all only ever used as nouns before he got hold of them.

6. ANTIPROSOPOPOEIA

Prosopopoeia is just a more formal name for personification, in which inanimate objects are either described in human terms or given human characteristics. The opposite of that is antiprosopopoeia, a figure of speech in which a person is compared to an inanimate object. That might sound odd, but it’s actually a very effective form of metaphor able to confer a great deal of detail or information in a clever and often witty way—think about what it means to call someone a doormat, a tank, a firecracker, a mattress, or a garbage disposal and you’ll see precisely how effective it can be.

7. ANTONOMASIA

The Bard. The Iron Lady. The King. Ol’ Blue Eyes. When you substitute a proper name for an epithet or a nickname, that’s antonomasia.

8. APOSIOPESIS

In Act 2 of King Lear, the eponymous king rages against two of his daughters in a disjointed speech that ends with the famous lines, “I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall—I will do such things—what they are yet, I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!” The point at which Lear’s threat of revenge trails off, restarts, and trails off again is a perfect example of aposiopesis, a rhetorical ploy in which an idea is left unsaid or a sentence is left incomplete purely for emphatic effect. Why I oughta…

9. ASTERISMOS

Right. Okay. Here goes. Asterismos is the use of a seemingly unnecessary word or phrase to introduce what you’re about to say. Semantically it’s fairly pointless to say something like “listen!” before you start talking to someone, because they are (or at least should be) already listening. Rhetorically, however, asterismos is a seriously clever way of subconsciously drawing attention to what you’re about to say.

10. ASYNDETON

“We got there, the weather was bad, we didn’t stay long, we got back in the car, we came home, end of story.” When you deliberately miss out the conjunctions between successive clauses, you’re left with a choppy and abrupt series of phrases that energetically push things forward, an effect properly known as asyndeton. The opposite is called polysyndeton, when you add more conjunctions to a phrase or clause than are strictly necessary, often with the effect of intentionally dragging it out: “We ate and drank and talked and laughed and talked and laughed and ate some more.”

11. CHIASMUS

Apart from the fact that it’s part of a great speech, one of the reasons why John F. Kennedy’s famous “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” line is so striking is that is a fine example of chiasmus, a clever rhetorical formation in which the order of a pair of words or phrases in one clause (your country, you) is inverted in the next (you, your country). This gives a rhythmic and instantly memorable criss-cross pattern, AB-BA, which appropriately enough takes its name from the X-shaped Greek letter chi.

12. CONGERY

Congery is a form of tautology, the rhetorical use of repetition. It refers to a writer or speaker using a number of different and successive words or phrases that all effectively mean the same thing, purely to emphasise the point. That’s it. That’s all. Done. Finished. Finito.

13. DIALOGISMUS

In a dialogismus, a speaker either imagines what someone or something else might be thinking (“I bet that guy’s thinking, ‘what am I doing here?’”), or else paraphrases someone’s earlier words (“‘Don’t worry!’ she told me. ‘Everything will be fine!’”). In either case, the speaker ends up talking not as themselves just for rhetorical effect.

14. DYSPHEMISM

If a euphemism is a nicer turn of phrase used in place of a more offensive or embarrassing one (like “call of nature” or “bought the farm”), then a dysphemism is an offensive or detrimental phrase deliberately used in place of a nicer one. This applies to everything from using an insult instead of someone’s name, to phrases like frankenfood and junk food that try to influence what we should think of genetically modified crops and take-out restaurants with just a few choice words.

15. EUTREPISMUS

First, we need to explain what this is. Second, we need to show how it works. And third, we need to explain what it achieves. Eutrepismus is the numbering or ordering of a series of phrases that are all under consideration, and it’s used to structure arguments and speeches more clearly, making them easier for an audience to take in and follow your train of thought.

16. EXPEDITIO

An expeditio is that instantly recognisable figure of speech in which you list a number of alternatives, and then proceed to eliminate all but one of them. “We can go for Italian, Mexican, or Chinese. But I had Chinese last night and you hate garlic, so it’s going to have to be Mexican.”

17. HYPOCATASTASIS

When you say that something is like something else (“as busy as a bee”), that’s a simile. When you say that something actually is something else (“a heart of stone”) that’s a metaphor. But when you just go all out and label something as something that it actually isn’t (“You chicken!”), that’s a hypocatastasis.

18. PLEONASM

When you use more words than are in actual fact absolutely really strictly necessary in order to communicate and make your point effectively and efficiently, that’s a pleonasm. It needn’t be as clumsy and as long-winded as that, of course, and more often than not the term pleonasm is used to apply to what is otherwise called “semantic redundancy,” in which extra qualifying words are used to force a point home—like “empty space,” “boiling hot,” or “totally unique.”

19. SYNECDOCHE

A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part or component of something is used to represent that whole—like calling a car your “wheels,” the staff of a company the “hands,” or the film industry as a whole “Hollywood.”

20. TMESIS

Tmesis is the proper name for that fan-bloody-tastic technique of splitting a word in half by inserting another word inside it. More often than not, the word being inserted in the other is a swearword (you can provide your own examples for that), but it needn’t always be—tmesis can be used any-old-how you like.

21. ZEUGMA

There are several different forms and definitions of precisely what a zeugma is, but in basic terms it describes a figure of speech in which one word (usually, but not always, a verb) governs or is directly related to two or more other words in the same sentence. So you can run out of time, and out of the room. You can have a go, and a laugh. And, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, you can go home in floods of tears and a sedan-chair.

Gravediggers aren’t normally acknowledged for their skill, but eastern Europe’s funeral industry wants to pay homage to the funeral industry’s unsung heroes. Yesterday, the Associated Press reports, laborers competed in an international grave digging tournament in Trencin, Slovakia, sponsored by the third International Exhibition of Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services.

Apparently a gravedigging competition is an actual thing in Hungary https://t.co/lmRdwaqCWq pic.twitter.com/JRK4zi8pvq

— dwnews (@dwnews) June 3, 2016

Ten two-member teams from Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary competed to dig the fastest and neatest coffin-sized pit, using only shovels and picks. No modern tools were allowed, and each grave had to measure exactly 5 feet deep, 6.5 feet long, and 3 feet wide.

“This whole exhibition is about getting groups of funeral companies together,” said event spokesman Christian Striz, as quoted by the AP. “It’s all about showing people how hard” the gravedigging profession is (and since Striz was reportedly dressed like the Grim Reaper, how funny it can be, too).

In Slovakia, gravediggers are a necessity. “Most Slovak graveyards are so crowded and spaces between graves so narrow that we need human diggers instead of machines,” Ladislav Striz, the contest’s founder, told Reuters. “They work hard, come rain, come snow.”

Two brothers from Slovakia—Ladislav Skladan, 43, and Csaba Skladan, 41—took home the grand prize. According to The Guardian, the siblings dug their grave in only 54 minutes, and a five-member jury declared their work to be the neatest.

“I am happy we won,” Csaba Skladan said. “It’s a satisfaction after 15 years in this job.”

[h/t Associated Press]