[HN Gopher] 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
___________________________________________________________________
1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Author : paublyrne
Score : 164 points
Date : 2021-04-08 11:38 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (if50.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com)
| raintrees wrote:
| "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.
| tombert wrote:
| Starship Titanic was awesome, I love the random Monty Python
| cameos and the surrealist humor.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Starship Titanic is available (and inexpensive) on GoG, for
| those like me who don't want to try to mess with OS
| compatibility.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| >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.
|
| That is not what I got out of the radio series and book. In my
| opinion, it is rigidity, legalism, or by the letter vs spirit of
| the law what _The Hitchhiker 's Guide to the Galaxy_ warns
| against. This fits with the author's initial dislike of
| computers. The Vogon's are a perfect example.
| grawprog wrote:
| 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, that makes it
| so hard. You've got a hidden time limit, then the poetry section,
| then you're thrown back in the room with an active time limit and
| you're supposed to remember to do the other puzzle quickly that
| you hopefully noticed while figuring out the Babel fish stuff, or
| you get a delayed game over that'll leave you wandering aimlessly
| around the heart of gold scratching your head.
|
| On a related note, if you like Douglas Adams and quirky adventure
| games, I highly recommend his later game Starship Titanic. I
| played the hell out of that game when I was young, I don't know
| if I ever beat it. It's not the classic that hitchhiker's guide
| is, but if you enjoy Adams and frustrating obtuse adventure games
| with a strange sense of humour and somehow missed this game, I
| recommend checking it out.
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| w0mbat wrote:
| 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 Arthur Dent.
|
| Douglas was embarrassed to reply that he'd never read "Pilgrim's
| Progress", or heard of that puritan, and the Arthur Dent name was
| a complete coincidence.
|
| Things like that happened to him all the time.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| You might even call that... infinitely improbable.
| jraph wrote:
| 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| > "Imagine if everything ever written on a typewriter had been
| written by the guys who invented the typewriter,"
|
| I had not heard this quote before, and while I enjoyed the
| article, I would deem it worth reading just for this.
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The Z-Machine (which is the VM that powered the linked game) is
| also interesting in it's own right:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
| anthk wrote:
| OFC.
|
| Also, recommended modern games to play:
|
| - Anchorhead. Like Alone in the dark, but CLI.
|
| - Spider and Web. Spies-based game based on replaying the same
| scenes over and over, with gadgets and psychological twists.
|
| - Vicyous Cycles. Same, but in a different way.
|
| - Curses. Time traveling game, medium-hard.
|
| - Jigsaw. Simialr to curser, but much harder.
|
| - Slouch over Bedlam. Victorian setting + steampunk.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Choose your own adventure... I was sure that meant:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy
|
| but apparently it's another book series.
| stakkur wrote:
| I don't think the article explicitly mentions it, but Adams was a
| rabid Mac fan, and arguably the first in the UK to buy one in
| 1984. This page
| (https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/d/Dougla...
| has some nice detail about it:
|
| _" Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out
| in 1984 until his death in 2001. He was the second person to buy
| a Mac in the UK (the first being Stephen Fry - though some
| accounts differ on this, saying Adams bought the first two, and
| Fry bought the third). Adams was also an "Apple Master," one of
| several celebrities whom Apple made into spokespeople for its
| products (other Apple Masters included John Cleese and Gregory
| Hines). Adams's contributions included a rock video that he
| created using the first version of iMovie with footage featuring
| his daughter Polly. The video can still be seen on Adams's .Mac
| homepage. Adams even installed and started using the first
| release of Mac OS X in the weeks leading up to his death. His
| very last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the
| possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. Adams can also
| be seen in the Omnibus tribute included with the Region One/NTSC
| DVD release of the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide using
| Mac OS X (version 10.0.x) on his PowerBook G3."_
|
| For Mac heads, this too: https://lowendmac.com/2016/douglas-
| adams-author-and-mac-user...
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" 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 almost mandated that name for these cantankerous devices,
| especially networked ones).
| mckirk wrote:
| Given how heavily Adams struggled with procrastination, I
| wonder how he'd have fared in today's distractopia... he might
| not've gotten around to writing much. But what I wouldn't give
| to have him still around even just for the occasional quip.
| ctdonath wrote:
| "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as
| they go by." - D. Adams
| MattKimber wrote:
| I have a mental image of people setting great store in which
| platform Douglas Adams has moved to lately, given his
| tendency to hop between media and delight in the new and
| interesting.
|
| I can certainly see him both being delighted by Twitter and
| also becoming incredibly bored with Twitter, over not too
| long a time period...
| soylentcola wrote:
| Until my most recent workstation build, my two computers were
| Deepthought (the higher-end desktop) and Marvin (smaller and
| more finicky laptop).
|
| Never did think of an appropriate name for the new desktop
| though.
|
| edit: thanks for all of the suggestions!
| hilbert42 wrote:
| You're welcome. Just a reminder:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0yBf1JKTw8
| capableweb wrote:
| The successor of Deepthought is Gaia/Terra/Tellus, so maybe
| one of those :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Earth2.0
| capableweb wrote:
| You're doing a Microsoft and skipping one version? Why not
| just "Earth"? Deepthought wasn't Earth.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Earth was the computer before the Vogons destroyed it.
| Earth2.0 was what Slartibartfast was building for the
| mice. Just providing computer names from within the book.
| Deepthought can still exist even if the user replaces it
| with a new computer.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I wish TV stations would rerun the BBC serialization of
| _Hitchhiker 's_. I've actually read Adams' books but it'd
| be nice to see the TV version again. (I used to love
| Peter Jones as _The Book_ , his matter-of-fact tone made
| him just ideal for the job.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Adams himself changed every single version from radio,
| book, TV, film, etc. So you really need to absorb them in
| all of the formats to get it all
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Heart of Gold?
| RichardCA wrote:
| 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.
| sehugg wrote:
| The Digital Antiquarian has a two-part series on HHGG and the
| events leading up to the Infocom game:
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/the-computerized-hitchhikers/
| Vaslo wrote:
| I played this as a little kid and had never read the book and had
| absolutely no idea what was going on. I got a hint or cheat book
| to complete it.
| FredPret wrote:
| I read the book and still had no clue what was going on
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| 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 pleasantly surprised that it
| got a second series. Thoroughly recommend for anyone that
| considers themselves bored with television. Unique doesn't feel
| like a strong enough word.
| bityard wrote:
| I thought I was the only one who actually liked the Netflix
| version. It was delightfully surreal. At the time, all I found
| were intensely negative reviews complaining about the fact that
| the show had nothing at all to do with the books.
|
| Which is admittedly true. But it is still one of those shows
| where the characters are entertaining enough on their own that
| you don't even care about the plot, which isn't half bad.
|
| I would not have minded a third season.
| mdiesel wrote:
| The TV show was great because it really got me feeling that
| everything was random, then everything was connected in some
| ridiculously complex way, exactly how it should for a holistic
| story.
|
| I'd recommend the TV show for anyone that has gotten a bit too
| good at predicting endings a few episodes before the end. This
| one doesn't follow the traditional story arcs.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| Seconded. Both Dirk Gently series are good, both should have
| had additional seasons.
| anthk wrote:
| I tried the unnoficial Spanish translation and it's really bad.
|
| I may try the original English version, but I think it will be
| very difficult to grasp some words without WordNet.
| jandrese wrote:
| This article was fairly glowing, but the game is extremely
| difficult. Not only do the puzzles range from hard to "who
| would ever figure that out?!?" but the interpreter is the old
| Infocom one that only understands the one wording for any
| action.
|
| For example, there are 10 objects scattered in the game that
| you have to collect for a puzzle at the end. They are never
| mentioned when you look around the room. At the end of the game
| Marvin will ask you for one of those objects. You might be
| thinking "ok, so if I miss one I still have a 90% chance of
| completing the game right.", but the game checks and if you're
| missing one he will always ask for that one object. You have to
| collect them all.
|
| There's a bit in the article where the author talks about the
| clues for the Babel fish puzzle, but even he has to admit that
| the last part is basically just completely random based on what
| you happen to have in the inventory. Also, he doesn't mention
| that the puzzle is timed. If you don't complete it in a set
| number of moves you die. It is a game that is relentlessly
| unfair to the player.
|
| I know this is a lot of words about an old game, but the
| Hitchhikers Guide series was one of my favorite books growing
| up and I was so excited when my parents bought this for the
| Commodore 64. I played it many many times, had the Babel Fish
| puzzle and others down pat, but still only made it maybe 1/3 of
| the way through the game before getting completely stuck.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Original English version in my observation as a non-native
| speaker uses very simple and straightforward, relying on
| absurdity of situation and wordplay instead of beautiful
| language. You should be fine.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| There's a certain sense of loss I feel at playing a game that
| cannot be cheated. In the mid-80's playing interactive fiction
| there was no way to get help unless you could convince your
| parents to buy you invisiclues. You had to solve these games the
| hard way: on your own. Sure, there are games like that today but
| they require hand-eye coordination or grinding, not involved
| word-puzzle solving and thinking in many different ways.
|
| I still play interactive fiction every November when the IFComp
| publishes its games[1].
|
| [1] https://ifcomp.org/
| capableweb wrote:
| There are plenty of games today (probably more than in the 80s)
| that are all "thinking" based with puzzles, that doesn't
| require a lot of coordination nor grinding. Myst, The Witness,
| Obduction and The Talos Principle comes to mind, but I'm sure
| there are more.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Of course.
|
| Gadget was fun, and Riven was spectacular. Let's not talk
| about Myst 3, though. :)
|
| Same with Grim Fandango (getting glottis to puke was epic)
| and Monkey Island.
|
| But they appeared in the time of the internet & yahoo search.
| Sure Myst was ~1995, but the rise of having answers a click
| away existed with these games.
| soylentcola wrote:
| All of my Infocom games were on bootleg floppies that came with
| the second-hand Commodore 128 my dad bought for the family when
| I was a kid. Thankfully at least Zork included some photocopied
| maps and manuals buried in the pile of papers and user guides
| that also accompanied the computer.
|
| Still a bit sad that "Hitchhiker's" wasn't in the box of
| questionable disks we got, but "Planetfall" seemed to be
| inspired by the story (at least the beginning when you're on
| the ship, ducking Ensign Blather and trying to avoid death in a
| safety webbing).
| crocsarecool wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| It's the "interactive fiction" genre.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| "Interactive fiction" is another term for text adventures;
| they have no art and they do have puzzles. Were you
| thinking of "visual novels"?
| jerf wrote:
| I think you're looking for the "visual novel" genre.
|
| By accidents of history, visual novel as a genre is strongly
| correlated with anime aesthetics and tends to focus on
| certain story genres that may or may not interest you.
| However, there's no _fundamental_ reason for this, any more
| than there 's a fundamental reason why "cartoons" in the US
| became strongly associated with "for children".
|
| Quality is definitely also mixed, as the bar for entry of
| this style of thing is low. But that also means there's the
| sort of vibrancy and experimentation you get when there's
| virtually no "commercial market" functioning as a taste-maker
| by overwhelming all the smaller groups with big piles of
| money and raising the consumer's expectation of quality
| beyond what they can compete with.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| 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)
| and Fullbright (Tacoma, Gone Home). There is tons of quirkier
| experimental stuff on Steam and Itch too. Note that some
| walking sims are more about exploring the environment and
| there isn't much dialog, while other ones feature more
| conversations. Dontnod tend to be more on the conversation-y
| end if that's what you're after.
|
| You could also check out point-and-click adventures, which
| are a direct descendent of IF. They require a bit more
| puzzle-solving, but the pacing is often very good in modern
| (post-2005) games and it's a nice way to experience dialog-
| heavy stories. A good place to start might be older releases
| from Daedalic Entertainment or Wadjet Eye Games, perhaps.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| 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.
| OnACoffeeBreak wrote:
| 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 and the asterisk.
|
| 0 - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/03/douglas-
| adams-...
| ghgdynb1 wrote:
| I remember exactly where I was, about a year ago today, when I
| realized Deep Thought was an existentialist. B2 Data Structures
| lab in a building called Fitz. I knew I couldn't have been the
| first to realize this, but I couldn't bear to look it up and
| see whether or not I'd been preempted.
|
| And it was totally what he meant. The ASCII wildcard-
| existentialism theory is too consistent with the themes Adams
| explores through the series to have been an accident.
|
| I fully agree with Musk when he said he regards the
| Hitchhiker's Guide as a great work of philosophy, whether or
| not he was joking. It totally worked for me as I was trying to
| progress beyond nihilism.
| kekebo wrote:
| Contrived, but I always liked the idea that a rearrangement of
| the syllables could be voiced as "tea for two".
| hathawsh wrote:
| That's a good one. My favorite is this one:
|
| - F is the 6th letter of the alphabet.
|
| - I is the 9th letter of the alphabet.
|
| - S is the 19th letter of the alphabet.
|
| - H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.
|
| 6 + 9 + 19 + 8 = 42. IOW, the dolphins probably manipulated the
| experiment so that humans would give them more fish.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Adams never revealed the origin of 42_
|
| I could swear blind I'd heard/read him saying that it was
| simply a number that could sound amusing, be pronounced rather
| incredulously, was big enough for the multiplication at the end
| not working to work, without being too long to repeat in the
| actors lines or having an existing "meaning" that he was aware
| of (so 69 was way out because of reasons, as were things like
| 88 too for having commonly known (in the UK at the time) bingo
| calls, etc.).
|
| Then again, my ancestors may have previously sworn blind about
| the giant mutant star goat thing so you might not want to trust
| the ponderings of anyone of my lineage...
| shimfish wrote:
| Why 42: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.douglas-
| adams/c/595nPukE...
| tomweingarten wrote:
| When I was in middle school I was sure I had cracked the
| meaning behind 42. I sent Douglas Adams a letter telling him
| how much I appreciated the books and laying out in detail how
| the alphanumeric values of each major character's name related
| to 42.
|
| He wrote back an exceedingly kind hand-written postcard
| informing me that he appreciated my curiosity but that there
| was, in fact, no deeper meaning to 42 other than it was a nice-
| sounding number.
| [deleted]
| zxter wrote:
| > Adams never revealed the origin of 42.
|
| Actually Stephen Fry claims that Douglas Adams told him. But it
| seems he is taking it to the grave to honor his vow.[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%2
| 7...?
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| I've heard fry say this before but don't believe him
| [deleted]
| omerhj wrote:
| Also off-topic, TIFF files use 42 as a magic number in bytes 2
| and 3 of the file header:
|
| "The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical
| significance."
| capableweb wrote:
| Unlikely to be the source as TIFF was first released 1986 and
| HHGTTG initial "release" was 1978. Although I'm not sure "the
| answer" was mentioned in the original radio show.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Just another case of causal inversion.
|
| "Not again!"
| omerhj wrote:
| Right, the TIFF creators were obviously inspired by the
| Hitchhikers Guide.
| capableweb wrote:
| Hah, obviously, I misunderstood the intent of your
| comment, makes much more sense the other way around :)
| [deleted]
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I always assumed it was British random dry humor, much like the
| show "Look Around You" [1] and more specifically their episodes
| around "maths" _the full episode of which I can not find_.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9MRYJz9-4
| foreverathome wrote:
| it's the number of harrod's earl grey tea.
|
| https://www.harrods.com/en-us/shopping/harrods-no-42-earl-gr...
| b3kart wrote:
| Nice. Seriously, humans are the greatest pattern matchers.
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| dcminter wrote:
| 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
| certainly not the author of The Guide so... Maybe?
|
| (Edit: I see a peer respondent already linked it, but I'll
| leave this anyway)
| shoto_io wrote:
| 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!
| SpaceInvader wrote:
| Way to go! :)
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| This is what's so great about art IMO. You can craft a piece
| with deep personal meaning, or a totally frivolous piece, and
| it can be perceived in infinitely many ways by others
| according to their own worldview and life experience. I wish
| I could know what it feels like to learn a new interpretation
| of your own work on a regular basis. Beauty, eye, beholder.
|
| It sounds somewhat equally exciting to, and less frustrating
| than, releasing software and seeing all the ways people break
| it.
| fit2rule wrote:
| Deep Thought said it was Gods phone number.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| There's also this little bit from an interview:
|
| Q: About three-quarters the way through the Illustrated
| Hitchhikers Guide there is a strange illustration of 42
| multi-coloured balls lined up in columns 6x7. I can only
| assume this is the famed "42 Puzzle". My question is, how do
| you play? What's the puzzle?
|
| DNA: The point of the puzzle was this: Everybody was looking
| for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I
| had written (like 'is it significant that 6 * 9 is 42 in base
| 13?'. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would
| actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved.
| Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's
| terribly significant.
| acheron wrote:
| You are carrying: no tea
| Stitch4223 wrote:
| give croissant
| radiowave wrote:
| take all
|
| put all in thing
| cik wrote:
| A grue ate your face.
| alexandargyurov wrote:
| Great article. I would definitely recommend checking out _42: the
| wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams_ [0] edited by Kevin Jon
| Davies if want more Douglas Adams in your life
|
| [0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unbounders/42-the-
| wildl...
| fullshark wrote:
| You can play the game here:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN...
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(page generated 2021-04-08 23:01 UTC)