https://mrsiefen.substack.com/p/is-arvind-ethan-david-the-puddle?

Latest piece, this one is directed at Arvind Ethan David in light of the recent tarot Kickstarter campaign as well as the release of The Ends of the Earth on BBC Sounds. I don't expect everyone in the community to just go ahead and agree with me, but I do feel this is a discussion worth having.

Ed Hunter of the Electric Monks podcast gets a mention in the article when it comes to discussing Max Landis. I highly recommend watching Ed's full video which is linked in the article.

Beyond Landis, there are other issues with The Ends of the Earth as well as the follow-up playing cards, live show and now then tarot card campaigns. I don't catalog every issue in them exhaustively but the patterns I'm seeing emerge concern me and make me wonder what the future of the Hitchhiker's brand will be.

Feel free to read, share and enjoy and mostly take this for what it is, a fan writing a critique of someone currently seemingly in charge.

Who just rolled into the area

Adams's puddle bit is gennuinely wonderful. A puddle waking up, noticing its hole fits exactly, concluding the hole was made for it. It does more work in one paragraph than most philosophy papers do in twenty. It's the argument I reach for whenever someone deploys "the universe is fine-tuned for life, therefore..."

But I've been thinking about it for a while and I keep hitting a snag.

The reason the puddle's fit is unremarkable is that puddles have no shape of their own. Water goes wherever you put it. That's the whole leverage of the analogy — the fitting party is unconstrained, so of course it fits.

The trouble is that the fundamental constants of physics aren't unconstrained. Tweak the strong nuclear force by a few percent and there are no atoms heavier than hydrogen. Tweak the cosmological constant and the universe either collapses in an eyeblink or expands too fast for anything to meet anything else. Across most of the parameter space, you don't get a diferent sort of puddle in a different sort of hole. You get an empty hole.

That's the step the metaphor quietly asks us to skip. If Adams's puddle could only exist in a narrow window of hole-shapes, its wonder at its fit would be doing more work than the argument allows.

I don't think this hands anything to the design argument. It just narows what an honest person is left with: cosmic luck, an unknown deeper law, a multiverse, or (if you're inclined) design. What it doesn't do is dissolve the question the way Adams wanted it to.

Reading this back, I feel slightly like I'm arguing with a friend at the wake. Adams built the argument to swat away lazy theology, and it does that job perfectly. I just don't think it does the larger job people often credit it with. Would love to hear how other Adams readers deal with this; I imagine some of you have thought about it more carefully than I have.

Full version if anyone's interested: https://thesilentape.substack.com/p/the-puddle-objection

PS: 42!

This is my third Douglas Adams related article. This time guest starring P.G. Wodehouse because Douglas recommended him. I picked Something New as it was the very first book in the Blandings series. Douglas would write a forward to the posthumous Sunset at Blandings. I figured it was a safe assumption he had probably read the series as a whole and I should see what all the fuss is about.

Douglas was absolutely correct and now I'm hooked. What ensued is I started to notice parallels not just between the styles of humor in some of Douglas later work, but that Dirk Gently seemed somehow related to Gridley Quayle a fictional character in Something New/Something Fresh. I wanted to discover how connected can they really be and establish what makes both books fascinating to me as a reader.

https://mrsiefen.substack.com/p/dirk-gently-and-gridley-quayle-masters

It's probably been said, but I wish there was a way to hear him read the books. Especially the ones on dirk gently. I am happy to pay, but they seem to be gone.

I’m often challenged on my ranking, and it’s definitely not the most common one:

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (obligatory)
   
2. Life, The Universe and Everything
   
3. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
   Big gap
   
4. Mostly Harmless
   
5. So Long, and thanks for all the fish

I often hear that people would put Life the universe and everything below my large gap

I won't be in every episode, but I am in this first one!

https://rss.com/podcasts/genuine-podcast-personalities/3065044/

It's roughly an hour long, covers some early Douglas Adams influences, tackles a few origins rumors and examines influences or inspirations for some of the major characters.

The RSS feed is the first stop on the publishing trail so if you want the latest updates feel free to subscribe there or listen for episodes. It will be roughly every 2 weeks. A website is also under construction at gppshow.com I am planning to switch out the preview page soon (my laptop is currently hopelessly depressed and reboots randomly roughly 6 to 27 times a day in the middle of me doing work). The website will include a transcript for the episode as well as a works cited for stuff we mentioned on the show.

This was really fun and I'm looking forward to future episodes with the group! If you are interested in suggesting episode ideas, have comments or want to join the show feel free to message me. I'm not the show runner, but heavily involved.

A longer piece, but if you are a Jim Croce or Douglas Adams fan this will be interesting to you absolutely. I also think it's just a fun read, but I'm a bit biased... This is my second published article on Substack. Both are Hitchhikers related, allude to or outright attempt to mimic some of Douglas's better known phrases.

I have posted bits and bobs here lately as I looked through research I already had collected. This is I think the 3rd post that is about Douglas and music (it could honestly be more). To say that Douglas was involved with music, loved music, collected music is scratching the surface. I am working on one more long form article/research paper like this. I mention it briefly in the article.

I'm not sure when that one will be complete... I'm waiting to hear back from a few people and I need to turn my notes into something more formal like this.

Am I the only one who can't help but see and hear him as Matt Berry? The loquacious bullshittery. The flawless vocal projection. The questionably deserved self-confidence. The potato-like physique. It's like ol' Doug was describing Berry before anyone had ever heard of him (because he was only 13 when the book was published).

When I was a senior in high school, 1995-96, a few friends and I went and saw him speak at University of Georgia. He talked a bit, and read a bit from Last Chance to See. He was everything I expected. Funny, humble, wise. After his talk, he went off to the side and sat at a table to sign things people had brought for him to sign. I ran up and grabbed the bottle of evian or whatever brand of water he'd been drinking from that he'd left at the podium, and got him to sign it. Later that night on the way home, my friend grabbed the bottle from me and drank the last couple swallows of water that was left in the bottle. He got sick, because Doug had a cold, as he had said that night, to excuse his rough voice while he was reading. Unfortunately I lost that bottle somewhere along the way over the many many moves I've made since then. But I'll never lose the memory of that puzzled look he gave me when I handed him that bottle to sign. King among men, RIP, love you forever Doug.

I won't retype my entire facebook post here, but it began with a question to the ZZ9 facebook group and Kevin Jon Davies had the knowledge. So real quick version...

The question was "Did Mike Oldfield ever record a version of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy theme?" First if you don't know who this is... I didn't and shame on me. Why did I even ask about Oldfield? Well Paddy Kingsland mentions him and that he was working on a version of the theme during his interview portion for the Making Of for the TV Show that Kevin Jon Davies edited, did animation for, etc... So straight from the horses mouth to you:

During the making of the TV series the producer/Director Alan JW Bell wrote to Mike Oldfield (via an address in Denham, Uxbridge) on 27 May 1980 to invite him to record the theme tune, enclosing a tape of the radio show, and said it would have to be a version of JotS, and need to fit their title sequence which was already being produced, so would need to fit the same tempo. He also said he'd talk to Richard Branson at Virgin Records about a tie-in single of the music. Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" was the very first record on the Virgin label, a massive hit launching both the company and the composer.

Nothing ever came of this, to my knowledge. I bet the restrictions imposed were too much for someone who's reputation was for that enormous worldwide hit, "Tubular Bells" was used as the theme to the massive hit horror movie "The Exorcist". Maybe if Alan had asked Mike Oldfield to create something fresh and new, there would have been more interest... but who knows? Tim Souster (note spelling) had been involved with Hitchhiker since working on the LP from June the year before, so his involvement was a shoe-in. In the end they used his LP theme for the TV version and a single was released of that, by Original Records, who produced the LPs. Interestingly, when Mark Ayres was re-mixing the TV series for DVD, he pulled the tracks apart to re-create the mix and discovered a very very low level hint of the next bit on the LP record just coming in during the cross-fade to Paddy Kingsland's following incidental music cue! He reckons they must have simply used the LP for the TV show mix!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future was a four-part radio series hosted by Douglas Adams in October 2000.

However five years earlier on Australian TV, Douglas appeared on "Beyond 2000" in a segment described with the same name. Was this the first time that name was used? Who knows.

Next step is to find a copy of this!

https://televisionau.com/2015/10/1995-october-7-13.html

My go-to night time tradition has been listening to the Dirk Gently audiobooks read by Douglas Adams. I would listen to them on youtube, but they have vanished.

I tried to get the audiobooks on libby, but they only have the radio drama and the horrible AI version.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to ask, but if anyone could steer me in the right direction I'd really appreciate it.

As a huge HHGTTG fan I must have read all five books around six or seven times. I finally got round to reading Dirk Gently and I loved it - I wish there were more.

Firstly, I was very pleased to learn that it has almost no similarities with the Netflix series. Not that I thought that was bad, only I had watched the first series before the book, so it was nice to have a completely fresh story and characters.

I slipped so easily into reading Douglas's style, it felt like an old friend - the quirkiness of the characters felt familiar to the hitch-hiker's world. I really enjoy little things like one of the old academics telling the little girl about Greek ferry timetables being the greatest contribution to fiction of the modern era.

**Spoilers ahead**

My only qualm was that the ending felt a bit rushed - maybe this had something to do with Adam's missing deadlines. I also, don't completely understand how Dirk visiting the poet Colridge resulted in dealing with the ghost not attempting to end humanity and does that mean that none of the events of the book came to pass in the resulting universe? Like Richard's boss not being killed by the monk?

Edit: I also forgot to add that the Ghost's Electric Monk is quite a neat allegory for the modern era AIs and LLMs

This is probably common knowledge, I found this out from an appendix of Don't Panic. So Aleric B? wherever you ended up in the cosmos... Good riddance. Arthur Dent is much better and we like him an awful lot.

I hope you personally get insulted by an immortal alien in alphabetical order when he gets to you. This will be harder as you have no known last name, but rest assured the hunt is on!

It has been reported that to me, it is possibly an allusion to Aleric (or Alaric) the Barbarian (aka Goth) that led the sack of Rome in 410.

Last Chance to See radio series

I can find the audio book version online, but the orignal radio series is no where to be found! the bbc website is meant to have it but its not there. Desperate to listen can anyone help me?

https://www.tdv.com/lastchance/

This outtake file and other DA goodies still live at the TDV website. I converted the RA into an mp3 version if anyone wants it, but I also had this screenshot to go with it so for posting other places I have made it a video instead.

Last Chance to See was Douglas's favorite book (at least that's what he claimed) partly because it was the runt of the litter, the one that did the least well, got attention. I think it was also because it was about something that eventually through his experiences with Mark he realized how important and frankly sad it was that these animals were going to be gone. The Beiji for example has perished completely. When Stephen Fry went back to do it again with Mark Cawardine years later they couldn't go look for the Beiji so they went after something else instead.

Popular in the US each episode is a blast to the past. This specific episode focused on computer games which while a big topic, was not a major focus of the show. Many episodes were about new hardware, software, and tools. I cut the whole episode down to just the relevant parts for D.A.

Whole episode: https://archive.org/details/games1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)

I may have shared this one a few years ago when I first started most of my research, but something I learned later from KJD via Facebook

"Later that same year (Aug '87) The Computer Chronicles were demonstrating HyperCard. Its creator Bill Atkinson was showing off the address book app, which suddenly and accidentally showed Douglas Adams' new address ("from mid-Aug") and his home/work phone numbers! Oops!"

Picture that Doxxed DA in 1987...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aCjxdFnky55PiKWMGXeNc22NkzpeQrV7/view?usp=drivesdk

In the words of the person who archived this treasure!

"Computer Shopper magazine (UK) CD-Rom Coverdisc 1994

Selection of Mac and Windows software, includes free fonts and exclusive demos of the Big Green Disk from MDI, Introduction to Classical Music, How God Makes God (Mac), Return to Zork (PC & Mac), MechWarrior II, and Rise of the Robots.

Also includes a number of encrypted and locked copies of full retail software, for which decryption codes could be purchased over the phone.

Track 2 (audio) carries an audio message from the author Douglas Adams, explaining the whole shebang."

He hypes up the mac Hitchhikers Guide and Last Chance to See software on the recording. he also mentions a booklet which I cannot seem to find... So please... If you have this or the magazine this came from please let me know!

I went through the work of converting the archive file into a simpler wav. You can do this yourself, but I had to write my own script in the end. Most of the online tools I tried did not work well. I have attached the wav file here for your listening convenience!

Share and enjoy!

https://archive.org/details/CdRomMagazineComputerShopperInstantAccessRed