Thank you. Next time I'm out that way I hope I remember to take a look at that view.
I would however point out that our world, indeed our universe is full of these wonders of size and perspective.
As you pointed out that's not much more space than needed to store the human race, actually I wonce saw man climb into a space 1' on a side on some tv show. And yet somehow that small dot of flesh is supposedly ruining the climate by creating fluctuation in temp the likes of which the earth hasn't seen since, err well just a few hundred years ago, and bigger by far a few centuries ago and...
That tiny span from crust bottom to atmosphere top is indeed tiny, but by the same token it completely wraps the surface of the earth. over 7 thousand miles in diameter.
I'm not saying we're having an effect, or that pollution is ok. What I am saying is we're still pretty much guessing what that effect is and to what extents it goes. Running around screaming we're gonna freeze, or is it melt this decade (dunno it changes every dozen years or so) the earth like chicken little is stupid and irresponsible.
Some kind of mismatch between your local afilliate and nbc themselves, most likely on your local afilliates end.
Some comercial breaks are for your local afilliate to fill, and some are network comercials. I suspect the black screen you see is supposed to be your local station's comercials but they screw up from time to time or something.
Yes I believe I have missed it. Well perhaps I'll find it sometime and try my fate. Despite missgivings I will do so with this movie as well.
Though Zaphod worries me a bit as well, I get the impression they did something really lame vis-a-vis his heads and extra arm.
heh, I could fill it easily if I still had it. sadly I sold it to buy what I needed to upgrade my pc as I was in college for cs at the time pc's were what I needed to do homework.
The current crop of emulators are pretty good now. The do run in windows and allow much simpler and more flexible setup of disk/tape images. As well as allowing other usefull things such as setting emulation rate, emulating all sorts of usefull hardware (snapshot cartridge, multiple floppy drives, etc.).
I'd give them another try. Plus if you already own the games and the rom images (from the c64 itself), you are on much better ethical grounds, and possibly leagle grounds depending on jurisdiction and such.
Depends on your definition of science fiction (and I suppose book).
Verne is generally considered science fiction. Shakespear wrote something about a balloon trip to the moon IIRC.
Leonardo had some ideas that were science fiction-esq for his time, though I don't recall that he ever wrote stories about them, just diagrams.
Not long in the scale of things I suppose, but still a few hundred years at any rate.
I seem to remember hearing that the Cronicles started out as a parody of religeon before he changed his mind became a christian.
Not shure of the timing on when he changed his beliefs,or how many times,it's just been to long.
True, HHG has a multigenre history that could make creating a movie very interesting. But by the same token I would expect that history to be very helpfull. They can read and hear how the various bits work in different medium and use that to guide them. Like binocular vision it should better enable them to hit the target by seeing where it lies better.
Ahh, I miss my C64. The color64 boards used the C64's odd graphics character set and built in character codes for it's 16 colors to create some pretty amazing graphics.
I'm shure if you look you'll find samples of this art somewhere on the net.
Also there are some good c64 emulators/simulators out there (computers have gotten so much faster in the last 20years that a modern pc can accurately simulate the C64 at the electrical level and still outrun one upwards of 1000 fold).
A good game to try is Earth Orbit Stations. Another is M.U.L.E. if you haven't tried them.
The other day me and a couple friends played mule for a couple hours, and didn't in the least miss having 3d bump mapped graphics and voice overs by Carl Ewes or Mark Hammil.
One of my first major computer projects was re-wireing a 256k (yes k!) ram expander that was used for a ramdisk (huge compared to 170k floppies) out to 2megs. wire wrapped up a few logic circuits and a LOT of 8pin dip sockets. Never did get enough $$ to fully populate it, but I did get another 128k in there.
There were some other classics. Phantasie I,II&III stand out. The original RPG game afaik, or if not the first it was damn close. Plus Mail Order Monsters, and so many others I forget.
Actually the idea isn't totataly without merrit. One concept that has been floated in some s.f. stories is of drilling long tunnels that are completely straight between various cities and evacuating them and running high speed vehicles down them. At the same speeds comercial air travel uses today you would find these tube much faster as they DON'T follow the curve of the earth, but rather go straight through.
By way of example imagine poking a big needle or simular through a cantelope, but at an angle so the entry and exit points are only an inch or two apart.
You don't actually go through the mantle, but at mid point you could be quite a bit underground.
Think of the Chunnel as warm up to something crossing a couple thousand kilometers/miles. LA to Chicago for one leg, Chicago to DC for the other?
Thank you. Next time I'm out that way I hope I remember to take a look at that view.
I would however point out that our world, indeed our universe is full of these wonders of size and perspective.
As you pointed out that's not much more space than needed to store the human race, actually I wonce saw man climb into a space 1' on a side on some tv show. And yet somehow that small dot of flesh is supposedly ruining the climate by creating fluctuation in temp the likes of which the earth hasn't seen since, err well just a few hundred years ago, and bigger by far a few centuries ago and...
That tiny span from crust bottom to atmosphere top is indeed tiny, but by the same token it completely wraps the surface of the earth. over 7 thousand miles in diameter.
I'm not saying we're having an effect, or that pollution is ok. What I am saying is we're still pretty much guessing what that effect is and to what extents it goes. Running around screaming we're gonna freeze, or is it melt this decade (dunno it changes every dozen years or so) the earth like chicken little is stupid and irresponsible.
Unless your specifically keeping seperate 'mirror' or 'alternate history' type universes seperate from all 'alternate' universes, or I've forgotten something said on the show (been a few years) I would think the handfull of episode that occured in e-space would count to some degree. He even picked up Adric and left Romanadvoratrelundar(Romana) there with K-9 mkI
Actually BBS's are pre-internet (well public internet that is)
Each 'site' was a different phone number and could usually only have ONE remote connection untill near the end when Major BBS (and a few others IIRC) started supporting multi line setups.
You didn't get much for graphics outside ascii graphics except on the Color64 boards, and that was basically 8color graphics using the built in symbol character set the C64 had that was very versitile for that sort of thing.
Basically you had several 'discussion' areas to post to and read from and on some boards even a file area where you could spend ten to thirty minutes to download a gif or bmp or program (we're talking upwards of 100k! file sizes).
And yet quite often it was better discussion than many of these online forum type places are today. Guess it was in part because you had to have at least half a clue to get involved and because most of the time your fellow members of a board lived somehwere in your local dialing area (usually under 50Miles/100KM)and shared some common background to make communication w/o missunderstanding easier.
At first your reply didn't seem completely congruent with my post. Till I spotted my mistake.
I should have said : Needless to say that robot looked as much like my mental image of Marvin as a bowling ball resembles snow, that is NOT AT ALL.
It just occured to me, you never experienced the BBS scene of the 80's.
This kind of communication was pretty standard back then as everyone took turns calling into the board, reading the current messages on the public sections, then replying then getting off and calling back eigther a few hours later or sometime the next day.
Though towards the end a number of bbs's got upgraded to handle multiple incomming phone lines. A few even had as many as 10! connections at once, not counting the sysop who's computer it ran on.
The conversation here is FAST by the standards I grew up with. And this was all at 300-2400 baud (.3k to 2.4k by todays standards) with the cheapest modem being about $150-$200 in todays money. Uphill both ways in the snow of course:)
I haven't really bothered with IM's much since your choices were ICQ, ICQ and that other one ICQ IIRC.
LOL, high school age is what I was thinking when you said 'kids' figuring whith you being in the hospital w/ suspected heart attack and having heard the radio program first you were likely older than me (I'm 34, 35 rsn). But turns out you didn't even exist when I first found THHG.
One of the redeeming features is you can't easily mis-judge someone because of thier dress habbits or race or other irrelevancies. Just on thier words and deeds.
Most likely we will have such an influx, but if we're lucky the Guides equivalant to Peter Jackson will be in that group. And at any rate some of them will be o.k. people. I ran into the books in early highschool myself at somewhere around 13 or 14.
That's interesting. I didn't know a re-make of 'The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe' was being done.
I always hope they'll get it right (An expectation the LOTR trillogy exceeded) and am willing to settle for 'ok' but often find another such as the so called 'Starship Troopers' which was to the original book as 'Super Troopers' is to real law enforcement. IE a total spoof. Except Super troopers was deliberate and advertised as such.
I've notice that in many cases how we first encounter something often colors our view of how it's 'best'.
Usually a book is better than even a good movie. but there have been a few cases where the I've felt the movie was better, almost always when the book came second though.
But I've always enjoyed the broadcast Dr. Who over the books, even the ones that weren't adaptations of actual episodes, and I'm a book person who has been known to read more than one book a day when given the time.
I do fear a bad translation though. I still have a fealing of being cheated out of more than just a tickets price over the movie 'Starship Troopers'. What's sad is if they'd billed it as a parady or spoof of the book I would have aplauded and laughed and enjoyed it, for in that context it works, but as an adaptation it's not even craptacular and the people involved should be shot.
My first encouter with THHG was DA's books, and I find I view every other version by that standard.
I rather figured you knew. But I felt the chance you didn't was worth the miniscule effort.
IIRC some of the books come in 'original' or 'unabridged' versions wich contian more of what DA originally wrote than what the editors finally published, but sometimes triming things down is actually for the better.
From the discription it sounds like you go the 'more than complete' version in one book.
Well if your lucky you made the rather reasonable mistake of thinking a Trillogy means three books, which normaly you would be right. However normal doesn't necessarily apply to Adams and if you did indeed make that mistake you will likely be pleased to learn you have two more books yet to read.
Sadly even if the screenwriter got it, that doesn't mean everyone else who gets to muck with the script and how it winds up onscreen did.
I saw a tv interview a while back with a screenwriter about the process that goes from initial story to what the actors actually say. sometimes the screenwriter is just some guy who does a lot of the actual typing work for ver 0.9beta when it's version 3.7 that hits the screen.
Please don't tar all of america with hollywoods issues. Many hollwyood writers, having no real exposure to the reading of actual novels, completely miss everything that makes a good novel good. It's not about the subtle (or not so in some cases) differences between British and American humour.
I can see why that scene is funny, and I live less than 100 miles from dead center of the lower 48. Now admittedly it's only mild chuckle funny and not rotflmao funny to me, but I still 'get' it.
Damn hollywood is making us all look bad.
I just saw a trailer for this movie that had Marvin in it. Needless to say that robot looked as much like my mental image of robot as a bowling ball resembles snow, that is NOT AT ALL.
This worries me just a tad, the review doesn't help eigther.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. Next time I'm out that way I hope I remember to take a look at that view.
I would however point out that our world, indeed our universe is full of these wonders of size and perspective.
As you pointed out that's not much more space than needed to store the human race, actually I wonce saw man climb into a space 1' on a side on some tv show. And yet somehow that small dot of flesh is supposedly ruining the climate by creating fluctuation in temp the likes of which the earth hasn't seen since, err well just a few hundred years ago, and bigger by far a few centuries ago and...
That tiny span from crust bottom to atmosphere top is indeed tiny, but by the same token it completely wraps the surface of the earth. over 7 thousand miles in diameter.
I'm not saying we're having an effect, or that pollution is ok. What I am saying is we're still pretty much guessing what that effect is and to what extents it goes. Running around screaming we're gonna freeze, or is it melt this decade (dunno it changes every dozen years or so) the earth like chicken little is stupid and irresponsible.
Mycroft
Some kind of mismatch between your local afilliate and nbc themselves, most likely on your local afilliates end.
Some comercial breaks are for your local afilliate to fill, and some are network comercials. I suspect the black screen you see is supposed to be your local station's comercials but they screw up from time to time or something.
Mycroft
Yes I believe I have missed it. Well perhaps I'll find it sometime and try my fate. Despite missgivings I will do so with this movie as well.
Though Zaphod worries me a bit as well, I get the impression they did something really lame vis-a-vis his heads and extra arm.
Mycroft
heh, I could fill it easily if I still had it. sadly I sold it to buy what I needed to upgrade my pc as I was in college for cs at the time pc's were what I needed to do homework.
The current crop of emulators are pretty good now. The do run in windows and allow much simpler and more flexible setup of disk/tape images. As well as allowing other usefull things such as setting emulation rate, emulating all sorts of usefull hardware (snapshot cartridge, multiple floppy drives, etc.).
I'd give them another try. Plus if you already own the games and the rom images (from the c64 itself), you are on much better ethical grounds, and possibly leagle grounds depending on jurisdiction and such.
Mycroft
Depends on your definition of science fiction (and I suppose book).
Verne is generally considered science fiction.
Shakespear wrote something about a balloon trip to the moon IIRC.
Leonardo had some ideas that were science fiction-esq for his time, though I don't recall that he ever wrote stories about them, just diagrams.
Not long in the scale of things I suppose, but still a few hundred years at any rate.
Mycroft
I seem to remember hearing that the Cronicles started out as a parody of religeon before he changed his mind became a christian.
Not shure of the timing on when he changed his beliefs,or how many times,it's just been to long.
Mycroft
True, HHG has a multigenre history that could make creating a movie very interesting. But by the same token I would expect that history to be very helpfull. They can read and hear how the various bits work in different medium and use that to guide them. Like binocular vision it should better enable them to hit the target by seeing where it lies better.
Mycroft
Ahh, I miss my C64.
The color64 boards used the C64's odd graphics character set and built in character codes for it's 16 colors to create some pretty amazing graphics.
I'm shure if you look you'll find samples of this art somewhere on the net.
Also there are some good c64 emulators/simulators out there (computers have gotten so much faster in the last 20years that a modern pc can accurately simulate the C64 at the electrical level and still outrun one upwards of 1000 fold).
A good game to try is Earth Orbit Stations. Another is M.U.L.E. if you haven't tried them.
The other day me and a couple friends played mule for a couple hours, and didn't in the least miss having 3d bump mapped graphics and voice overs by Carl Ewes or Mark Hammil.
One of my first major computer projects was re-wireing a 256k (yes k!) ram expander that was used for a ramdisk (huge compared to 170k floppies) out to 2megs. wire wrapped up a few logic circuits and a LOT of 8pin dip sockets. Never did get enough $$ to fully populate it, but I did get another 128k in there.
There were some other classics. Phantasie I,II&III stand out. The original RPG game afaik, or if not the first it was damn close. Plus Mail Order Monsters, and so many others I forget.
Mycroft
Actually the idea isn't totataly without merrit. One concept that has been floated in some s.f. stories is of drilling long tunnels that are completely straight between various cities and evacuating them and running high speed vehicles down them. At the same speeds comercial air travel uses today you would find these tube much faster as they DON'T follow the curve of the earth, but rather go straight through.
By way of example imagine poking a big needle or simular through a cantelope, but at an angle so the entry and exit points are only an inch or two apart.
You don't actually go through the mantle, but at mid point you could be quite a bit underground.
Think of the Chunnel as warm up to something crossing a couple thousand kilometers/miles. LA to Chicago for one leg, Chicago to DC for the other?
Mycroft
Thank you. Next time I'm out that way I hope I remember to take a look at that view.
I would however point out that our world, indeed our universe is full of these wonders of size and perspective.
As you pointed out that's not much more space than needed to store the human race, actually I wonce saw man climb into a space 1' on a side on some tv show. And yet somehow that small dot of flesh is supposedly ruining the climate by creating fluctuation in temp the likes of which the earth hasn't seen since, err well just a few hundred years ago, and bigger by far a few centuries ago and...
That tiny span from crust bottom to atmosphere top is indeed tiny, but by the same token it completely wraps the surface of the earth. over 7 thousand miles in diameter.
I'm not saying we're having an effect, or that pollution is ok. What I am saying is we're still pretty much guessing what that effect is and to what extents it goes. Running around screaming we're gonna freeze, or is it melt this decade (dunno it changes every dozen years or so) the earth like chicken little is stupid and irresponsible.
Mycroft
I think you'd hit terminal velocity long before you hit midpoint. Likely you'd miss the other top by a LOT.
Mycroft
Unless your specifically keeping seperate 'mirror' or 'alternate history' type universes seperate from all 'alternate' universes, or I've forgotten something said on the show (been a few years) I would think the handfull of episode that occured in e-space would count to some degree. He even picked up Adric and left Romanadvoratrelundar(Romana) there with K-9 mkI
Mycroft
Actually BBS's are pre-internet (well public internet that is)
Each 'site' was a different phone number and could usually only have ONE remote connection untill near the end when Major BBS (and a few others IIRC) started supporting multi line setups.
You didn't get much for graphics outside ascii graphics except on the Color64 boards, and that was basically 8color graphics using the built in symbol character set the C64 had that was very versitile for that sort of thing.
Basically you had several 'discussion' areas to post to and read from and on some boards even a file area where you could spend ten to thirty minutes to download a gif or bmp or program (we're talking upwards of 100k! file sizes).
And yet quite often it was better discussion than many of these online forum type places are today. Guess it was in part because you had to have at least half a clue to get involved and because most of the time your fellow members of a board lived somehwere in your local dialing area (usually under 50Miles/100KM)and shared some common background to make communication w/o missunderstanding easier.
Mycroft
At first your reply didn't seem completely congruent with my post. Till I spotted my mistake.
I should have said : Needless to say that robot looked as much like my mental image of Marvin as a bowling ball resembles snow, that is NOT AT ALL.
OOOPS sorry
Mycroft
It just occured to me, you never experienced the BBS scene of the 80's. :)
This kind of communication was pretty standard back then as everyone took turns calling into the board, reading the current messages on the public sections, then replying then getting off and calling back eigther a few hours later or sometime the next day.
Though towards the end a number of bbs's got upgraded to handle multiple incomming phone lines. A few even had as many as 10! connections at once, not counting the sysop who's computer it ran on.
The conversation here is FAST by the standards I grew up with. And this was all at 300-2400 baud (.3k to 2.4k by todays standards) with the cheapest modem being about $150-$200 in todays money. Uphill both ways in the snow of course
Mycroft.
I haven't really bothered with IM's much since your choices were ICQ, ICQ and that other one ICQ IIRC.
LOL, high school age is what I was thinking when you said 'kids' figuring whith you being in the hospital w/ suspected heart attack and having heard the radio program first you were likely older than me (I'm 34, 35 rsn). But turns out you didn't even exist when I first found THHG.
One of the redeeming features is you can't easily mis-judge someone because of thier dress habbits or race or other irrelevancies. Just on thier words and deeds.
Mycroft
Most likely we will have such an influx, but if we're lucky the Guides equivalant to Peter Jackson will be in that group. And at any rate some of them will be o.k. people. I ran into the books in early highschool myself at somewhere around 13 or 14.
Mycroft
That's interesting. I didn't know a re-make of 'The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe' was being done.
I always hope they'll get it right (An expectation the LOTR trillogy exceeded) and am willing to settle for 'ok' but often find another such as the so called 'Starship Troopers' which was to the original book as 'Super Troopers' is to real law enforcement. IE a total spoof. Except Super troopers was deliberate and advertised as such.
Mycroft
I've notice that in many cases how we first encounter something often colors our view of how it's 'best'.
Usually a book is better than even a good movie. but there have been a few cases where the I've felt the movie was better, almost always when the book came second though.
But I've always enjoyed the broadcast Dr. Who over the books, even the ones that weren't adaptations of actual episodes, and I'm a book person who has been known to read more than one book a day when given the time.
I do fear a bad translation though. I still have a fealing of being cheated out of more than just a tickets price over the movie 'Starship Troopers'. What's sad is if they'd billed it as a parady or spoof of the book I would have aplauded and laughed and enjoyed it, for in that context it works, but as an adaptation it's not even craptacular and the people involved should be shot.
My first encouter with THHG was DA's books, and I find I view every other version by that standard.
Mycroft
I rather figured you knew. But I felt the chance you didn't was worth the miniscule effort.
IIRC some of the books come in 'original' or 'unabridged' versions wich contian more of what DA originally wrote than what the editors finally published, but sometimes triming things down is actually for the better.
From the discription it sounds like you go the 'more than complete' version in one book.
Mycroft
Well if your lucky you made the rather reasonable mistake of thinking a Trillogy means three books, which normaly you would be right. However normal doesn't necessarily apply to Adams and if you did indeed make that mistake you will likely be pleased to learn you have two more books yet to read.
Mycroft
Sadly even if the screenwriter got it, that doesn't mean everyone else who gets to muck with the script and how it winds up onscreen did.
I saw a tv interview a while back with a screenwriter about the process that goes from initial story to what the actors actually say. sometimes the screenwriter is just some guy who does a lot of the actual typing work for ver 0.9beta when it's version 3.7 that hits the screen.
Mycroft
Please don't tar all of america with hollywoods issues. Many hollwyood writers, having no real exposure to the reading of actual novels, completely miss everything that makes a good novel good. It's not about the subtle (or not so in some cases) differences between British and American humour.
I can see why that scene is funny, and I live less than 100 miles from dead center of the lower 48. Now admittedly it's only mild chuckle funny and not rotflmao funny to me, but I still 'get' it.
Damn hollywood is making us all look bad.
I guess you missed the part in the trailer where they showed 'Marvin' looking like a stupid plastic bobble head doll.
Mycroft
I just saw a trailer for this movie that had Marvin in it. Needless to say that robot looked as much like my mental image of robot as a bowling ball resembles snow, that is NOT AT ALL.
This worries me just a tad, the review doesn't help eigther.
Mycroft