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-...
"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)
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.
It sounds somewhat equally exciting to, and less frustrating than, releasing software and seeing all the ways people break it.
[1] https://www.buttercookie.de/The%20Burkiss%20Way/Transcripts/...
- 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.
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.
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...
"The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance."
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%27...?
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.
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.
https://www.harrods.com/en-us/shopping/harrods-no-42-earl-gr...
It's not a binary joke, either.
However, if you add together the numbers on all the faces of a pair of normal 6-sided dice...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
10min story bites - cruisy, drama, comedy, horror. Little bit of everything except the usual.
>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.
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.
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).
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.
I can certainly see him both being delighted by Twitter and also becoming incredibly bored with Twitter, over not too long a time period...
Never did think of an appropriate name for the new desktop though.
edit: thanks for all of the suggestions!
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.
"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...
I still play interactive fiction every November when the IFComp publishes its games[1].
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/the-computerized-hitchhikers/
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.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unbounders/42-the-wildl...
I may try the original English version, but I think it will be very difficult to grasp some words without WordNet.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy
but apparently it's another book series.
