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Hitchhiker's Guide Quandary Phase Starts May 3rd
MilenCent writes "Time to grab your towels once again! BBC Radio 4 is set to begin the Quandary Phase (that is, the fourth) of the radio version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on May 3, covering the events of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. Once again you'll be able to listen to it on the web from Radio 4's site. There's a production diary on BBC Radio 4's website that discusses the Quandary and Quintessential Phases, which will each be four episodes and will deviate further from the books than the Tertiary Phase did (it may not end the same way it did in Mostly Harmless), as well as tie up loose ends from the first two phases. In other news, their illustrated version of the Hitchhiker's text game won a BAFTA! They also have an interview with the game's co-creator, Steve Meretzky, who also created Planetfall."
This is worth my licence fee alone. fortuntely I also get 5 TV channels, 2 news channels, and more radio channels than I can count. Anyone who says commercial radio is better is just plain wrong.
Steve Meretzky is one hoopy frood.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Paramount has announced they will do a radio version of the HHGTTG that is available only in mono (not stereo) and in which all of the jokes have been made unfunny.
...
The series will be cancelled six weeks into its 13-week series due to Lack of Interest by listeners.
.
.
Well, I wouldn't put it past them
Will in Seattle
In case anyone's wondering, BAFTA is the The British Academy of Film and Television Arts. They give awards sort of like the Oscar, only without quite as poor a sense of judgement.
I'm not sure why an 'academy of film and television arts' thinks they're particularly qualified to judge interactive media though...
I'm a herring you insensitive clod!!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
What do people like so much about Hitchhiker's Guide, what is it about? How does he compare to other great writers?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
. . . to declare adding illustrations to a classic Infocom game blasphemy.
Your IP address is . . . oh, that's right, I don't know how to do that.
I'm a herring you insensitive cod!
Sorry, did I say something wrong? Pardon me for breathing which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, Oh God I'm so depressed.
Is that -1 Troll a preemtive mod to yourself, or a mod to Hitchhiker series?
Your brilliant failure to use a question mark, inability to punctuate the colloquialism "I mean" appropriately, and decision to misspell "repetitive" belie a deeper appreciation for the English language than the average Hitchhiker's Guide fan possesses. Maybe that's why you didn't like the sequels.
From The New Zork Times, Spring 1984:
4. Why don't your games have graphics?
We have nothing against graphics per se. However, given the quality of graphics currently available on home computers, we would rather use that disk space for additional puzzles and richer descriptions. After all, as our famous "brain ad" says, the world's best graphics generator is your own imagination.
It's a dupe! http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146789&c id=12296354
WhyTF would you dupe that?
except I missed the first three phases... anyone wanna hook me up?
I like the trailer!
You have been warned.
enter disk
cat
What should I tell them about the Babel Fish puzzle?" He said, "What should you tell them? Tell them to f*** off!" So the puzzle stayed... and its very difficulty became a cult thing.
Damn, that was a fun game that sucked up weeks of my life.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I know I can listen to them legally live (Being a UK licence payer with t'internet and Digital radio), but I have a nasty habit of missing these things. Anyone know of a site that torrents all these?
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
I have just had the strongest sense of deja-vu when reading that comment...
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
My thanks to the British people for paying for the wonderful thing that is the BBC. I think i'll take BBC radio 4 with me to a deserted island.
Maybe they should put a paypal donate link on their homepage. I'll do anything to keep enjoying this forever.
This is quite cool! Part of the US movie site. If you like collecting and trading stuff you will probably find this fun. UK users can also register, I just did. http://disney.tokenzone.com/dtz2/set/hitchhikers/H ome
There are several other collectible sets at www.tokenzone.com
I liked the Tertiary Phase, but it was pretty much identical to Life, the Universe, and Everything and didn't really provide much new entertainment. I especially think that changing the ending to Mostly Harmless is a good idea. I was never comfortable with that (no spoilers here). And tying up loose ends are good as well....what did ever happen to Lintilla?
Maybe I'm missing some sublety of the Queen's English, but I thought the fourth in a series is the QUATERNARY and the fifth is the QUINARY.
Please enlighten me if I'm missing the joke or something. They do identify the previous phase as the TERTIARY.
At the beginning of the original second series, someone mentions that she was carried away by Galactic Shriners.
I didn't even know they did a third series. I LOVED the cliffhanger at the end of the second series, and didn't care much for how the books carried the story along.
Stefan
1) Grab RA WAV Recorder
2) Open this location with it, at the appropriate time: BBC4 radio feed. Last September, it played Tuesdays at 10:30AM on the west coast (US).
3) Convert WAV, if you want to (or put right to CD for the car).
4) Profit (no, not really)
Just tried it again, to make sure the address hadn't changed, and it still seems to work great!
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
I like Adams, but I like Lem more. I guess it maybe because I read Lem earlier - it clicked better.
If you like THGTTG you should read Stanislaw Lem's
The Star Diaries - with the main character Ion Tihiy (Ion Quiet,) you will not regret it.
You can't handle the truth.
I have to say that I think the last radio series was very disappointing. It demonstrated Adam's genius in knowing how to craft an excellent radio series and how to craft an excellent book and knowing the difference between the two media.
The Tertiary phase simply didn't work as good radio for me, compared to the original series. The narrative didn't carry me along, the writing lacked the great 'radio moments' that the original had.
Sad.
Actually I kind of agree with you - the first two books were great (I read them when they first came out). The third book was, if anything, a better singular novel than either of the other two.
The fourth book was okay at best, and really the less said about the fifth book the better.
Adams gets a free pass for his extreme cleverness in the first three books, but apart from that he was never a great writer.
Starting out by retconning the entire Secondary Phase as a hallucination by Zaphod wasn't a good start, but I still preordered the Quandary Phase on CD at amazon.co.uk over a month ago for £11.06 ($20.93).
Hmm, good thing I took another look now. My order seems to be for ISBN 0563529644 which is out of stock and not being produced, whearas they are taking preorders for it under ISBN 056350496X for £12.99 ($24.58). I'm doubting I'll get my lower price now. And Amazon.co.uk has been a little bait-and-switchy on their prices, too.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
...get yourself to your local public library and request to borrow the audio recording produced by the BBC back in the 70s. They will likely be cassettes (yes, dammit, cassettes) but if you're really lucky, it might be a copy of the original broadcast which, to nutters such as myself, would rank you way up there. While the books are funny-ish (for literary teehees you must admit), the radio play not only pre-dates them, but as a working, successful form of comedy, out performs them. About 27 minutes, per episode, its an easy format to enjoy on-demand. Wear headphones. Thumbs up. Win awards!
I can't begin to tell you how tempted I am to spit out the Z-score for $300USD ... ;-)
"Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" is an unsung treasure. I think part of the problem with Adam's later work is that he was always full of ideas, and he started to try to shoehorn those ideas into Hitchhiker's books so they'd sell.
Given the freedom to create whatever he liked without that legacy, Holistic Detective Agency became a truly amazing book which has less kooky humor and far more dry conceptual wit. It's brilliant.
The sequel, "The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul" makes the mistake of letting Dirk be the main character and the storyline is a little too epic for Adams to handle, but it's decent. Certainly far better than Mostly Harmless.
Main point: Holistic Detective Agency isn't just Extremely Clever like the first three Hitchhiker's books. It's a fine novel that establishes Adams' ability as a pure writer. It makes me wish he'd tried more that wasn't Hitchhiker's before he got old and worried about endangered parrots.
... okay, I give in:
:)
300-195/16.6 = 6.33; statistically, "way the fuck out there".
That was just me (attempting to) overclock my CPU.
I probably shouldn't be doing this, but, one cannot be a "hoopy frood," unless the one doing the describing has had one too many pan-galactic gargle blasters.
Hoopy is not an adjective. It's a noun. It's like saying, "You're a relly-together-guy amazingly-together-guy." Which sort of implies that whoever is saying such a thing hasn't quite got a handle on the whole "together" thing.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
I doubt thats the correct figure, if you really wanted to get the Zscore you'd need the mean value of the US dollar per pound anually since it came into existance. THEN we'd see how way the fuck out there 1.67 dollars do the pound is.
I think it's this out there ... just a guess, though.
Taken from The Secular Web
My review of this book is irrelevent. I could sooner review Newton's Principia Mathematica or the Book of the Subgenius. My point being, this is a book that should be read by everyone, if not for enjoyment then for cultural reference; moreover, anything I have to say about it would neither add to or detract from the book, and would only make me look like an ass (the braying kind). --Hoopy Frood (06/06/2001)
Technoli
Tertiary Phase is definitely out on CD. About $20 from Amazon, £10 from Play.com
R Tape loading error, 0:1
It is meant to be a pun -- they're quite popular in British humour ;-)
I didn't say it was a good pun ;-) but it is in the spirit of Douglas Adams.
Hmmm, someone needs to understand the difference between an opinion that they disagree with and a Troll. Did you really think that the Tertiary Phase was as good radio as Series 1 and 2?
If so, Belgium man, Belgium!
I submit that the only way that we could elect a 'slashpope' would be that we all burn our computers and see if white smoke rises.
hmmmmmm...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Given how geeky everyone around here is, I suspect that there are more people than just me who read assorted fan fiction. Slash has a very specific meaning there. Associating that meaning with pope is more than a little disconcerting, and I'm not even Catholic.
:)
Maybe SlashdotPope, instead? Or something else, please.
I speak the dialect of English in use in the U.S. In my vocabulary "quandary" is almost identical to the concept of predicament or dilemma. Quick consultation with Google points up no association between "quandary" and the concept of 'fourth'.
The word "quintessential" does invoke the concept of fifth, specifically the fifth essence (but not the fifth distillation nonsense).
The word that I know of that starts with the letter Q and denotes the fourth in a series is quaternary.
I am interested in your opinion, especially if you are a native UK English speaker.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
Sorry, but I am in the US. I just find myself buying things more often from Amazon UK. I've had no luck finding the radio show on CD in the US, and I've bought several DVD titles that weren't available in the US. (It annoys me that they won't ship toys to the US.)
But I think DNA was having some fun with the words. Possibly it was also a nod to the 5 books of the series still being called a trilogy, so the fourth and fifth phases of the radio series break with the traditional terms.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?