So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
multiverseemployeehandbook.com
So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
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Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
#2Ode to Douglas Adams: A Vogon Tribute
Oh blubbering nebulae of bureaucratic slime, Hearken to this most dolorous rhyme! For Douglas Adams, that scribe of renown, We vomit forth verses of gelatinous brown.
With squelching syntax and belching prose, We honor his mind where improbability flows. Hitchhiker’s Guide! A tome most absurd, Turning logic to gibbering, flailing bird.
Behold the beauty of bureaucrats vile, Whose forms in triplicate stretch mile by mile. For Adams, dear Adams, saw through the farce, And sculpted with words a galactic arse.
The number 42! Oh cosmic decree! A joke of the universe, but not for thee! With Marvin the Paranoid, sighing so deep, And whales who contemplate death in their sleep.
O Adams, grand spinner of nonsense profound, May your soul in hyperspace ever be found. Yet should you return, we promise you this: More poetry! More Vogon! More hideous bliss!
Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
#3Does anyone know was Tim Berners Lee a fan and was he influenced or did he have any inkling he was manifesting the infrastructure for the guide?
Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
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Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
#5Does anyone know was Tim Berners Lee a fan and was he influenced or did he have any inkling he was manifesting the infrastructure for the guide?
I think both Adams and Berners Lee were influenced/inspired by Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu.
Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
#6Ode to Douglas Adams: A Vogon Tribute Oh blubbering nebulae of bureaucratic slime, Hearken to this most dolorous rhyme! For Douglas Adams, that scribe of renown, We vomit forth verses of gelatinous brown. With squelching syntax and belching prose, We honor his mind where improbability flows. Hitchhiker’s Guide! A tome most absurd, Turning logic to gibbering, flailing bird. Behold the beauty of bureaucrats vile, Whose…
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Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
#7Multiverse Employee Handbook is like something from the Time Variance Authority, the Adjustment Bureau, or Everything Everywhere All at Once - with a few shades of Severance
I like these themes about the seeming absurdness and banal transcendence of capitalist systems and work today. Fight Club also echoes.
Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
#8Does anyone know was Tim Berners Lee a fan and was he influenced or did he have any inkling he was manifesting the infrastructure for the guide?
It's quite likely that he heard the original radio broadcasts in 1978. Entertainment choices were much more limited then and it was very popular, particularly among young people with technical interests.
Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
#9There's "The Salmon of Doubt", an excellent collection of misc essays and writings of Douglas Adams published after his death, and it contains his last unfinished Dirk Gently novel.
It's about one third finished, and it's really just wild: There's one narrative strand about Dirk Gently, a private detective, receiving mysterious anonymous payments and deciding to follow random strangers, one about a paragliding genius architect who's all by himself in a weird future architect's utopia, and one about an escaping rhinocerous that's mainly narrated in terms of what it smells.
It's fantastically creative and incredibly sad that we won't get to read AD's ending, although I doubt that he actually knew where he was going with it at the time he wrote the bits that are there. It's this grand setup that really leaves you wondering what it means and how it's supposed to come together.
I'd encourage anyone to read it and try to come up with an ending. It feels like a fiendishly hard puzzle, and really gets you in the authors head. And do let me know if you have a good one!
Re: So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
#10I always kind of wish HHGttG was as good as the geekdom's fondness of it suggests. I read it, I enjoyed it, but really, it is such a depressing series. And there is very little that's particularly funny or interesting after the first book and a half. So many dull and drawn out scenes of characters in miserable situations. And that whole tortured Krikkit gag trying to explain the origins of cricket. Sigh.