What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?
douglasadams.com
douglasadams.com
Somebody in the group gestured to one of the pieces and asked “does the transition of the floor from green to grey signify the subject’s disillusionment with current environmental policies and the increasing hopelessness of contemporary civilization?”
The artist’s reply was “I ran out of green.”
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/r...
It was specifically about writing, but the attempt to over complicate still applies imo.
“And then of course there are cases where writers don't want to make it easy to understand what they're saying—in corporate announcements of bad news, for example, or at the more bogus end of the humanities. But for nearly everyone else, spoken language is better.”
The colours used by an artist can hint at their financial position, it is certainly influenced by the science of pigments at the time, and even global trade patterns, extreme weather events in the past, war, etc.
I ran out of green can mean different things depending on circumstances. Some of those things are pretty interesting. Sometimes even a not that deep reason is actually pretty deep. :)
Also, I think I was stalling too well because people remember me being funny instead of what the presentation was about ...
Presumably they could've gone out and gotten more green. They could've transitioned to bright blue, or purple, or yellow. But they looked at the piece done in grey, and instead of going "Yikes, that's way more bleak than I thought it would be, I'm gonna buy some more green and redo this," they seem to be satisfied with the final piece.
And that means that interpretations that find meaning in the color choice aren't necessarily invalid just because the artist wasn't consciously thinking about what they were doing when they ran out of green at 3 am. Or, for that matter, that an interpretation of an art piece can't be valid just because it's counter to what the artist themselves had in mind.
I hope this comment is a gift of laughter to you in your day.
It was invented by rangers in the Serengeti for keeping track of Giraffes changing between areas. They made graphics illustrating those movements, and the format they used became knows as GIF. That's the secret history of the image format.
TL;DR H as modifier was introduced when translating Greek and they were lacking appropriate letters in Latin.
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29625/origin...
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-88... -- last answer by Anastasio de la Luna (and a few other answers there too)
> I'm a phoneticist and a general linguist and "PH" and "F" are, indeed, pronounced the same, and are both represented by /f/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Greek Phi was once pronounced as a hard "P" in Ancient Greek. So, Latin inscriptions wrote it as "PH" to show that it's a P sound, but with more air with H. As Greek changed, so did the Greek based English words. In Modern Greek, Phi is pronounced as "F", and no longer like "PH"/a hard P.
Oh what you don't know!
Robert Louis Stevensons 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', the pronunciation of Jekyll should be "Jyeec-ill" (rhymes with 'treacle') and not "Jek-ill".
Stevenson was of course Scottish, and this is how the Scots name is pronounced. However, the latter pronunciation for the books title has come into more common use for some reason.
Nobody ever ponders whether the artist's blood sugar was low or if their gut microbiome was misbehaving.
I think it speaks volumes for how the human brain works. How we interpret the world and look for the meaning in things.
It makes me see art criticism as largely an exercise in fiction writing.
EDIT: ah I see others have said essentially the same thing
"Everything you need to know is already hanging on the wall" is not considered an acceptable response.
The work needs to question, challenge, interrogate, and subvert, and artists definitely need to Be Interested in specific culturally niche things.
Lit crit, curation, the gallery scene, and visual and musical criticism are alternative industries - somewhere between symbiotic and parasitic on the creators who make the art.
You can make a very fine career for yourself by developing a reputation for making outrageous statements about other people's work. Popular music journalism isn't too bad at this, but by the time you get to academia it all gets very rarefied, meta, bullshitty, and (in reality) aggressively careerist.
The real answer is, Douglas Adams was a Macintosh fan. It’s that simple.
Well, at least until he got a hold of one of those Hitchhikers' Guides :) (which for all intents and purposes seem like a portable, possibly intermittently-networked Wikipedia computer)
Here’s Douglas Adams’ Mac SE in the UK computing museum: https://twitter.com/andytuk/status/731523049221181440?s=21
Yep, my parents paid for that upgrade, on my incessant prompting... and now I honestly can't remember if we went to 512k or 1MB... There were some things, I believe, that required at least 512, like I think VideoWorks (which eventually became what everyone now knows as Flash, and which was REALLY fun to play with at the time!)
The only pity is that J.R.R. Tolkien never finished it, so some things like where Hobbits came from or where the Blue Wizards went remain (mostly) unaddressed.
The extended LOTR film depiction of them being made from a mud-like mixture is nonsense.
He talks about it in one of his Letters - and says that’s why he ended up having to reduce the amount of “orc talk” because it was making them sympathetic and he didn’t really know how to handle it - for the story he wanted generic disposable “baddies”.
That explanation does not work in Tolkien's universe though. Can orcs be redeemed? Do they still have a soul? What happens to it when they die? Do they go to the halls of Mandos? Can they be reincarnated like elves?
Tolkien was never satisfied with any explanation because he could not fit them inside his world's theology, which is inspired by Christianity but does not match it one to one.
"Dear famous Science Fiction editor,
While I know that this is the way many people write, it is not the way I do it. "
Her description of her process was that she made it up as she went along but because of her characters or locations there was always only one reasonable choice. So for example when Vivian is biting on Reginald's ankle he says "I do not think this is at all pertinent to the matter at hand", because, being Reginald what else could he possibly say? (anecdote about Reginald and Vivian from the article although no doubt mangled by the years between reading and now.
That is a very "local" view of causality and story logic, which could lead to an inconsistent world (like a location being both a rainforest and a desert), which might not matter for the small lart of the world history that is the story, or one that leans heavily on defaults inported from the aurhor's experience (which might or might not be same as the readers')
He also wasn’t afraid to co-opt his universe and shoehorn in a story from a different source, if needed. I believe that the third book started life as a Doctor Who script.
I wonder how much remaining approachable for listeners who only jump in on nth episode was a driver of the creative process. "Story first" must have meant something very different from what we might effect today.
My first contact was hearing it on the radio some night, a German language radio version likely created long after the books became the defining version. Makes me wonder which original version it was closer to. Could have been a close translation of the original radio version, could have been a radio reboot based on the books.
The level of importance of world building really depends on what the goal is. I don't think h2g2 would have been majorly improved by a lot of world building, but I can appreciate the world building that's been done for Pratchett's Discworld, though that's as much a reflection on the length of that series than Pratchett's priorities
JK Rowling exercised similar authority in the world she created for Harry Potter, as the Muggle Prime Minister was never named and naming the Prime Minister Sir John Major or Tony Blair would have done a similar disservice to that world.
You are right about technology references being jarring. I nearly died laughing while reading the Wrath of Khan about a decade after its release. The size of a game mentioned in the book was dwarfed by games at the time I was reading it by over an order of magnitude.
I get it. I've done extensive worldbuilding for a couple of stories, and it can be a lot of fun! You find yourself researching everything from the geological and climatological history of Earth to the detailed mechanics of gravitational slingshots. And then most of that ends up not really mattering all that much to the story, because for the most part what matters in a story is the characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding mainly goes to determining what situations and circumstances can feasibly arise. And then you probably end up throwing out or reworking a bunch of it anyway, when you have a compelling scene that the research says can't happen, and the scene does more for the story than all the worldbuilding in the world.
Worldbuilding is best done with caution and in moderation - it's useful to an extent, but it can also easily become a rabbit hole at the cost of the story it's meant to support. You'll rarely err by spending less time in research and more with the characters whose stories you are after all trying to tell.
(Granted, given Adams' prior experience as a Doctor Who scriptwriter that gave rise to his most famous series, and also his legendary work-shyness, I don't really credit him with having thought the whole thing far enough through to identify the general case. But who cares? His most famous series is famous for a reason, and I've never really felt the lack of a concordance describing the complete history of the Vogon bureaucracy or a Wikipedia page about Milliways.)
For those authors who do a lot of world-building, the reader never sees 90-99% of the world that is built. The purpose of doing that world building is to have a scaffold on which the story can be hung, and which will help keep the story self-consistent.
As a reader, you don’t need to know why a character had a particular relationship with their parents in a certain way, or what the nature of that relationship was. However, the nature of that relationship might drive a number of critical choices that the character would make, and therefore drive the story in a particular direction.
I know that for my own characters I’ve created for role-playing games, I can get quite creative in their backstory, and write many pages on the subject. Most of that will never, ever show up in any game that I play, but I can also guarantee that all of it will inform choices that the character makes as we go through the campaign.
IMO, the Silmarillion made for good worldbuilding. But not so good as an actual story.
> Someone told me that Harry Potter is supposed to take place between 1991 and 1998 which is ridiculous because not once in seven books does a single character say, "Man the Chicago Bulls are having a hell of a run huh?".
In hard sf, scientific plausibility is a major desideratum - Andy Weir's The Martian is a widely known recent example, with the entire story built on a foundation of entirely plausible near-future space engineering. (It's also a somewhat rare example in which this focus on feasibility does not come at the cost of characterization.)
In the related but distinct high-concept sf, the story is designed around a given concept such as "what if humans became telepathic?" or "what if FTL communication was possible but FTL travel was not?", and serves to explore the consequences of this idea in great detail. Unlike hard sf, the concept doesn't have to be plausible, but like it, one often encounters stories where the concept outweighs the characters. I think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is a good example here, outdoing the reputation of its field by using its concept to tell a compelling and beautiful story that also happens to be about giant sapient jumping spiders.
Wheel of Time in particular.
Steven Erickson, Ian C. Esslemont and their friends spent a decade world building while playing table top games. First Erickson then Esselmont started pouring over that world into the Malazan series.
It is, without question, the largest, most complicated, most inspiring entertaining engaging and satisfying collection of plots, sub plots, sub sub plots, sub sub sub plots, super plots, super super plots and possibly super super super plots. I'm only 2 re-reads in - people who are into their 4th or 5th re-read tell me they are still discovering layers.
The downside is that the first book in the series - Gardens of the Moon - is ridiculously difficult to get started with. There's a read-along blog that Tor did that helped me get through it - but it's still a challenge. I had to downgrade from an audiobook to an ebook and then to a paperback because I kept flipping back to remind myself who someone/something was.
The general point is that inevitably works of fiction drag truths from the real world into the fictional one. Many things (and perhaps which Apple computer Dent had in particular) are neither true nor false in the relevant fictions, but that doesn't mean that inquiring whether they are is nonsensical or misguided.
> `cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1546,2`
EG, small changes over time, is often less work than a rewrite.
It's not illegal, or insane to use cgi and perl.
On every request, you're spawning a new process from disk, reading the entire script's source code (including everything it imports), compiling it, and running it, just to throw all that away.
I do appreciate how simple it is, and how much it inherently frees its own resources, but it seems super wasteful. I'm actually quite shocked how common it was in the early days of the internet.
This would make it hard to have a continuity of legacy technology devs and make it more likely that it just gets archived by a future team as that's easier than finding the appropriate expertise.
Of course CGI has scaling issues, that is not deniable, but it is still a quite strong technology. I would argue that the main reason to avoid CGI is not for performance reasons, few sites will encounter those usage levels, but rather because CGI coding patterns ultimately end up breaking MVC best practices.
I mean, his entire writing career was dedicated to inventing details about people who don't actually exist. That's writing.
Why would anyone care what kind of computer Arthur Dent had?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777599
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777599
I never finished the book, I wasn’t really into Clancy.
No, he just doesn't want to answer it. Which is fine.
But there are like, hundreds of other writers who would expound in great detail on the type of computer and its relationship to the story-- until their handler scoots them off to sign autographs or pay bills or whatever.
Hell, even Linus understood this-- see the "s is sad" commit[1] from a four-year-old and Linus' relevant rant[2].
It's delightful to me that the world's crankiest operating system maintainer is more willing to entertain trifles than a fiction writer!
1: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
2: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255
Edit: clarification
* Douglas Adams has a website which is still operational.
* He died in 2001(I was left with the impression that he died in the first half of the 90's for some reason).