1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy • Hacker News Board

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#71

Post by fit2rule » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

dcminter wrote: post #48

OnACoffeeBreak wrote: post #14

This is off-topic, but I've always wanted to bring this up with fellow geeks... Integer code of the asterisk ('*') ASCII character is 42, which, is the answer to life, the universe and everything. The asterisk character is used as a wildcard character to indicate anything and everything. Adams never revealed the origin of 42. [0] So, just because we really don't know, I'd like to think it originates with ASCII table…

He posted (on his own usenet fan group) the following: "The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story." But of course nobody is an entirely reliable narrator, and cer…

Deep Thought said it was Gods phone number.

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#72

Post by SpaceInvader » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

shoto_io wrote: post #63

dcminter wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He posted (on his own usenet fan group) the following: "The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story." But of course nobody is an entirely reliable narrator, and cer…

Of course, no one wants to believe this. Me neither. I recently turned 42. And, I finally had the guts to start my own business... it's gotta mean something!

Way to go! :)

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#73

Post by jraph » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

w0mbat wrote: post #70

I used to hang with Douglas back in the day and we worked together a bit. Douglas once told me he got sent a very detailed PhD thesis that described how The Hitchhikers Guide was an elaborate parody of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" (1678). The main evidence was that "Pilgrim's Progress" is known to be partly inspired by a pamphlet called, "The Plain Man's Path to Heaven", written by, get this, a puritan named Ar…

Wow, this is painful. None of the student or the advisors thought about getting in touch with the author during the whole PhD? How come?

I went through a PhD. Should I have worked on an hypothesis that could be tested just by sending a mail, this would have been about the first thing I would have tried to do I think. You know, just to be sure. And I would not have missed the occasion to communicate with Douglas Adams, of course, at least to make this PhD more worth it!

edit: at least, a multi year effort to produce hundreds of pages filled with absurdity was not completely unfamiliar to Douglas, I guess.

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#74

Post by JeremyReimer » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:06 PM UTC

alisonatwork wrote: post #66

crocsarecool wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I love the story with video games - it’s the main draw for me, especially as I get older. It often feels like the plot is held up by having to go do six mundane tasks. I’d be happy having a game where you just walk around and talk to people. Have it almost be like a book, but with the added extras of art and music. Maybe there’s a genre for this, and I just don’t know how to look for it properly.

Outside of VNs (visual novels) and IF (interactive fiction) which has already been mentioned, these sorts of games may also be described as walking sims or narrative adventures nowadays. Some mainstream studios you might want to check out are Dontnod Entertainment (Life is Strange, Tell Me Why), Red Thread Games (Draugen, Dreamfall Chapters), The Chinese Room (Everybody's Gone to the Rapture), Campo Santo (Firewatch)…

These are all great examples. I would add "Adios", which came out recently, is short and bittersweet, and has some of the best writing I've ever seen in a video game.

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#75

Post by tombert » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

raintrees wrote: post #69

"It was the ultimate procrastination device, of course, but also a tinkerer’s dream." Reminds me of one of my favorites of Douglas' quotes: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." I was also able to get Starship Titanic working a couple years ago... Had an old Compaq computer with Windows 95 as the starting basis. Much fun to revisit.

Starship Titanic was awesome, I love the random Monty Python cameos and the surrealist humor.

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#76

Post by mbg721 » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

raintrees wrote: post #69

"It was the ultimate procrastination device, of course, but also a tinkerer’s dream." Reminds me of one of my favorites of Douglas' quotes: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." I was also able to get Starship Titanic working a couple years ago... Had an old Compaq computer with Windows 95 as the starting basis. Much fun to revisit.

Starship Titanic is available (and inexpensive) on GoG, for those like me who don't want to try to mess with OS compatibility.

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#77

Post by setpatchaddress » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:30 PM UTC

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #42

Also off-topic: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I read both the books and they were good. There was a short lived British TV series starting Stephen Mangan that was great and seemed at least partially based on some events and descriptions in the books, and two seasons of a US TV series on Netflix that was off-the-fucking-wall crazy in a not-quite-Douglas-Adams way, and unique to the point that I was pleasant…

Seconded. Both Dirk Gently series are good, both should have had additional seasons.

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#78

Post by II2II » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

OnACoffeeBreak wrote: post #14

This is off-topic, but I've always wanted to bring this up with fellow geeks... Integer code of the asterisk ('*') ASCII character is 42, which, is the answer to life, the universe and everything. The asterisk character is used as a wildcard character to indicate anything and everything. Adams never revealed the origin of 42. [0] So, just because we really don't know, I'd like to think it originates with ASCII table…

It would be amusing if this was the case, but would he have been familiar with ASCII and wildcards when he wrote it?

It is rather easy to assume that ASCII and wildcards would be common knowledge since they predate the series while being common knowledge today (at least among those who use computers), but was this true when the series was written? ASCII is by no means the only character encoding scheme and asterisks are by no means the only wildcard character.

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#79

Post by RichardCA » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #5

"Hitchhiker’s is hard to summarize, but one of its overarching themes is that technology, in the hands of big business and bloated bureaucracies, does not make life better: in fact it makes it far, far worse." Seems Adams was ahead of his time, I wonder what he would have thought if he were alive today given the antics of Google, Facebook et al. Incidentally, my printer is called Marvin for obvious reasons (Adams alm…

He would no doubt comment on the absurdity of companies like Google, the unprecedented level of human talent and inventiveness dedicated to tasks such as allowing us to view pictures of cats, or get into petty squabbles with strangers.

There's also the matter of Google users who inexplicably lose access to their account, and the response is so utterly obtuse it would cause a Vogon to blush.

I would never wish for any Google or Facebook employee to be "First against the wall" but I do admire Adams' unerring prescience in this matter.

Re: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

#80

Post by II2II » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #62

Not long ago I got this urge to go back and replay the Hitchhiker's Guide game. >Then there were the puzzles, and it’s impossible to talk about Hitchhiker’s without talking about the Babel Fish puzzle. Going through that part again and trying to remember it and figure it all out was a bit of a challenge. But I don't think the puzzle itself is really all that hard, it's the whole beginning on the vogon ship, all of it…

Such difficulty was almost forgivable in the Hitchhiker's Guide since you usually ended up meeting a humorous fate, yet it still led to frustration. I recall thinking that you pretty much had to read the book at the time to simply understand the significance of what was coming up on the screen.

Many games had wonderful worlds to explore, but I am firmly in the camp who believes that obtuse puzzles took the adventure out of adventure games (may they be text or graphical) which led to their premature demise. Thankfully modern IF writers seem to live by a different set of rules.