I wonder if ppl who are upvoting this submission actually read the whole, verbose piece before upvoting or whether they're just upvoting on seeing Douglas' name in the submission title ?
And I disagree about the badly written bit, that seems a little much.
We're more than 20 years past Douglas' untimely death. People writing new pieces on him now need to be writing much more appealingly or, if they're only going to deliver information without any flair, boil it down to just that, the newer or lesser known information they are presenting without all the detail that most even moderate fans of Adams are already familiar with.
In Hamlet, Polonious declaims that :
“Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief…”
and then goes on and on at pompous length. Adams truly understood that brevity was the soul of wit and showed it in his writing. The author of this blog piece doesn't.
Hadn't really twigged that aspect but I think you're correct.
So he combined deep ideas with humour and brevity. He also had to carry his torch post-Hitchhikers, a show which had had creative input from other talented people in addition to his own.
Small wonder he found writing hard. It must have been really really hard.
After a while I stopped reading, it was very wordy, and it felt like they were trying too hard. Long form is fine if you have good reason. I didn't think this was it.
This piece about Adams is part of that timeline. Over the past 13 years he’s covered 1971 to 1998:
https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
It’s not unfair to say that his pieces could use some editing. But he writes them every week, like clockwork, for decades now. As a long-time reader, I find the Digital Antiquarian’s long-winded digressions to be cozy and essential to why I keep coming back. It’s a bit like sitting down with a friend regularly.