h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

[the following is actually the words of Douglas Adams, from the first book, which can be purchased from Amazon.com in its entirety. Although if you're HERE and you haven't BOUGHT a copy of everything DNA has ever written, what good are you? I felt it somehow appropriate to quote it here, even tho this is the "Earth version" of The Guide. It still belongs here.]

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol.
It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by
the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect
on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It
says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle
Blaster.

It says that the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like
having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round
a large gold brick.

The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic
Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one
and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate
afterwards.

The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself.

Take the juice from one bottle of that Ol' Janx Spirit, it says.
Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V
- Oh that Santraginean sea water, it says. Oh those Santraginean
fish!!!

Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture
(it must be properly iced or the benzine is lost).

Allow four litres of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it, in
memory of all those happy Hikers who have died of pleasure in the
Marshes of Fallia.

Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin
Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark
Qualactin Zones, subtle sweet and mystic.

Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve,
spreading the fires of the Algolian Suns deep into the heart of
the drink.

Sprinkle Zamphuor.

Add an olive.

Drink ... but ... very carefully ...

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than
the Encyclopedia Galactica.

damn. I hate the formatting in this thing!

i know what you mean. hopefully they'll get it fixed up a bit. but you have to admit this is the best 'earth guide' out there.

Actually, Project Galactic Guide still beats it in some ways. I've compared it before to the movie You've Got Mail. PGG is like Meg Ryan's little children's book store and h2g2 is like Tom Hanks' big corporate "we sell everything at a discount and we've also got cappuchino" megabookseller.

PGG [ http://www.megadodo.com ]has a personable group of volunteers who really believe in what they're doing and are having fun at it, while h2g2 has money backing it, and fancy cgi and stuff.

H2g2 has immediate satisfaction in that your guide entries are immediately accessible in the system, but it takes forever for a journal entry to be accepted, rejected, or even looked at by the staff. It's also very easy to be lost in h2g2. I mean, the chance of someone noticing your work is very slim. In PGG, everything is centralized through their newsgroup alt.galactic.guide, so more interested parties will more probably see your work and comment on it.

Both have their pros and cons, but I think it's too early to just say h2g2 is the best out there, in fact it could learn a lot from observing the success of PGG.

thanks for the info. i only had a quick look at megadodo.com before. guess i'll have to have another look.

Can you get them (PGG) to do something about the background image? it's not wide enough for a 1280x1024 screen and the colours look a little naff making reading of the thing a little more difficult than reading text on just a plain background.
Just my view on the initial layout, that's all.

You can ask them that yourself if you'd like. http://www.h2g2.com/A41121 is Paul Clegg's h2g2 page about PGG. He's a founder of PGG, and his email address is [email protected]. I'm sure he'd welcome any and all input about the project, both good and bad. You can also go to the newsgroup alt.galactic.guide and mention your thoughts about the website's background there. I do agree that websites should now accomodate higher resolutions as best as possible, since so many screens now are 21 inches or more.

However, your opinion and the opinion of as many others as you could get to email him would probably carry more weight than mine alone. =)

"PGG [ http://www.megadodo.com ]has a personable group of volunteers who really believe in what they're doing and are having fun at it, while h2g2 has money backing it, and fancy cgi and stuff."

Oh Zach, if you only knew. And naturally, no-one here is having any fun at all, and we're contractually obliged not to believe in anything.

That doesn't sound very good. You guys should have some fun and think about renegotiating your contracts.

Okay okay okay, PGG has a personable group of volunteers who really believe in what they're doing and are having fun at it but are fighting financial nonexistence and perpetually feel uncertainty due to the lack of a warm smile or confident assurance by DNA that he won't sue them for being sincere fans, while h2g2 has some money backing it, a personable group of employees who better at least be making minimum wage if Douglas Adams knows what's good for him, an occasional warm smile by DNA and even the occasional submitted article writ by his hand, and of course fancy cgi and stuff.

And you're contractually obliged not to directly say anything postively hoopy about PGG until some time after Douglas Adams ceases being tall.

Is there any reason why the actual references to the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy IN the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books are not all incorporated into this web version of the work? It would seem only logical. If you're going to create an actual terran replica of the guide, it seems rather silly not to actually include alleged quotes from the allegedly actual, actually fictional work in question.

I've always dreamed of a place in which all said entries from the five books were cross-referenced by subject and readily available via search functions. PGG could never do that. H2G2 COULD, but has so far chosen not to, except for the reference to flying and perhaps a couple others.

Check out http://www.vogon.com/guide/ it's pretty good. I like it at least. =)

Uhm, thanks Pink. I mean a version of the Guide that isn't so juiced up and seething with fancy stupid-web-tricks by a handful of show-offs who just make me green with envy. I can't get the vogon.com guide to work, and I'm using msie4.0.

Not my fault. They MAKE me use msie at work. I may try it with netscape at home, but there I'll have bandwidth problems. Ideally, just putting the original guide entries from the books HERE would make more sense.

We are looking at how best to present the entries from the books. You can see that we've added one or two entries on Douglas' home page. This will probably continue unless there are copyright issues.

Yes I saw the flying entry. That's good. That's great doing the rest of them like that. As for copyright issues, just bribe a couple judges and don't worry about it. They're DNA's words. If they're being put in his name there shouldn't be a problem.

You'd think it wouldn't be a problem, but copyright is a minefield, and just because a writer wrote the words doesn't mean he retains all rights to their use in any medium. We just have to be careful because (for obvious reasons) intellectual property rights are rather important to us.

Like I said elsewhere I believe, the whole fear of copyright infringement and stuff does in the end curtail creative expression. I for one am beginning to get frustrated by it. Especially since except in cases where a lot of money involved, it doesn't seem to protect those it claims to, and is simply a waste of everyone's time.

This project is ideal for the transfer and sharing of information, but if people are worried about who owns what information.. well it just puts a big rain cloud over the party.

Do subscribe to alt.galactic-guide too. There aren't many articles posted so you can read it all...

tourist stop round and round we go,A1904519 ,or U28024