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I preferred the audio play adaptation.
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May 19, 2023 07:44
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In the beginning this thread was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
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May 19, 2023 08:58
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Presto posted:The first two books were fun then they got increasingly worse. This is because Adams grew to hate Hitchhiker's but people kept sending him very large checks to write more, and hey, booze ain't gonna pay for itself. Smuglous Adams
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May 19, 2023 16:37
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:Hoopy is a noun, not an adjective. Means "really together guy." Ok I'm going to walk back my "hoopy" argument. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, chapter 23 after Arthur and Ford find themselves teleported to the Golgafrincham Ark ship, Ford says "This one's a dead hairdresser. Hoopy!" So that reads as an adjective. Douglas Adams went kinda nuts with the goofy scifi language in this book. Every thing he describes has a string of sciencey word salad attached. "Hyperbinoptic glasses." "Professor of Neomathematics." "Electron ram." "Xanthic restructron destabilized zenon emitter.
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May 23, 2023 05:28
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He'd probably been watching more Star Trek. Honestly, he had a way with words, those are fun to say. That's probably the way he came up with them.
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May 23, 2023 07:39
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the first Dirk Gently show was more British-clever but the second was more fun also Stephen Fry clearly ate Adams' brain, and used the knowledge to smugly host gameshows
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May 23, 2023 10:21
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Every year I spend a week at the beach and read a book while I'm there. A few years ago, I read the entire Hitchhiker's Guide. I never read it when I was young, so I missed out on all the 42 jokes etc at the time. Everything was completely new to me. The excerpts from the Guide read like many Wikipedia articles to me, mostly a collection of facts that don't really teach or guide anyone. Arthur reminded me of Karl Pilkington and an incel. Zaphod is a charismatic idiot failson who only wins and any loss can't stick to him. He succeeds through dumb charisma. Marvin is programmed to feel the only emotion that is familiar to everyone. There were a lot of funny gags and throw away jokes throughout. In conclusion, thank you for reading my book report on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I thought it was as applicable today as it ever was. It was entertaining. Next I will read Snow Crash.
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May 29, 2023 14:18
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Salami Surgeon posted:The excerpts from the Guide read like many Wikipedia articles to me, mostly a collection of facts that don't really teach or guide anyone. That's pretty much the idea, yeah. The Guide is just another half-assed defective product made by a company that doesn't give a poo poo because it's not like their competition is any better, just like everything else in the galaxy.
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May 29, 2023 14:27
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Lampsacus posted:What's the American equivalent of HHs? I'm not familiar with american comic novels tbh, and am curious to read something funny but american. American comic novels probably Confederacy of Dunces and Infinite Jest. I've read a couple Pynchon and they're actually zany paranoia poo poo with the worst loving corny jokes. American comedy sci Fi is Harry Harrison, mainly Bill the Galactic Hero and I remember liking those a lot (right away he loses an arm and ends up with two right arms and is delighted to find he can shake his own hands).
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May 29, 2023 19:07
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Bill the Galactic Hero is fuckin great. It's like if Mad Magazine produced serial space novels. After I finally saw Starship Troopers at 30 years old I assumed parts of it were based on Bill. I don't know if Verhoeven took some direction from that but the lampooning of the fashy space military rings so similar.
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May 30, 2023 04:07
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IIRC Bill the Galactic Hero is a straight-up Heinlein pisstake on Harry Harrison's part. It's also hilarious as hell and thanks for reminding me I should go read it again.
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May 30, 2023 06:39
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And now I'm wondering where Yahtzee's Will Save The Galaxy For Food books fall here, in origin mostly. A British author who's lived in Australia and now the USA.HenryJLittlefinger posted:Bill the Galactic Hero is fuckin great. It's like if Mad Magazine produced serial space novels. After I finally saw Starship Troopers at 30 years old I assumed parts of it were based on Bill. I don't know if Verhoeven took some direction from that but the lampooning of the fashy space military rings so similar. Probably more that the source material lends itself to particular kinds of jokes.
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May 30, 2023 06:48
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Lampsacus posted:What's the American equivalent of HHs? I'm not familiar with american comic novels tbh, and am curious to read something funny but american.
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May 30, 2023 07:59
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Also I still say Futurama. Zapp Brannigan even sounds like Zaphod Beeblebrox.
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May 30, 2023 10:13
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Prescott posted:Catch-22 That's interesting. I was thinking perhaps Vonnegut, since he's more explicitly sci-fi. There's a lot of humour to some new wave sci-fi, but its often a darker humour: There's that great story in one of the Dangerous Visions collections about journalists going to a hotel to cover first-contact with aliens and near the end, one of them asks one of the black porters who have been bustling around in the margins for the whole story why he doesn't seem excited and he says something like "because now there's someone else for you to compare us to". The story is short, and almost reads more like a bleak joke. Hitchhikers Guide feels a bit like that strain of sci-fi filtered through The Goodies, Monty Python and Radio 4 sensibilities.
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May 30, 2023 10:49
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Also I still say Futurama. Zapp Brannigan even sounds like Zaphod Beeblebrox. Zaphod has a huge ego and does some dumb impulsive things, but he's not a colossal idiot like Zapp Brannigan. Definitely some parallels and surely Groening et al took some influences from HH but I can't find Brannigan even remotely likeable.
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May 30, 2023 18:58
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Zap is one Zaphod head, Kip is another
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May 30, 2023 20:48
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:Zaphod has a huge ego and does some dumb impulsive things, but he's not a colossal idiot like Zapp Brannigan. Definitely some parallels and surely Groening et al took some influences from HH but I can't find Brannigan even remotely likeable. That's absolutely on purpose, of course, just that they have similar sounding names (albeit Zapp Brannigan is absolutely meant to sound like a pulp sci-f hero) and play relatively similar roles as egotistical irresponsible authority figures. Funny thing is that Zapp might actually be a genuine sociopath going by his behaviour and traits. Not an actively malicious one, relatively, but he has just about all the symptoms.
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May 31, 2023 06:01
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Jun 1, 2023 00:36
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