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

Right, exactly. Nice post on the "Why Do People Hate Americans" thread, by the way. Sort of cut through all the crap. (Not that it will prevent me from continuing to ramble there, but I like your view of it all. Not only is the US a joke, but history is a joke. Human life is a cosmic joke, and the US only a very small one by comparison. )

Not sure if I'm colonial. I think some of my great great grandparents might have been colonials. Some of my grandparents might live in colonials. I neither feel very colonial, nor live in a colonial -- at least, I don't think an apartment building can accurately reflect a colonial design. And if it can, it shouldn't.

Yes, turkey, our forgotten national symbol, pride of Ben Franklin. Operation Noble Turkey. Operation Enduring Colony. Gramma must have injected something awesome into the white meat this year, because it was especially sweet and juicy and delicious, and apparently causes all who ate it to write embarassing posts in which they repeat themselves. Or maybe it was the cheesecake.

I've spammed a few other researchers this morning (5:34 A.M. EST local time, Ann Arbor, Michigan) with the idea for forming a group to publicize unedited guide entries. Shall we brainstorm some more ideas for the name of a group? I'll mark down "Last Chicken in the Shop" as first suggestion. Maybe something related to AGGH if we somehow use this page as headquarters... "AGGHies" or "AGGHers" or "Publicists of AGGH?" Raiders of the Lost Guide? Spelunkers in the Unedited Basement (S.U.B.)? Or pick a painfully witty acronym and work backwards to fit words to it?

Actually, living in Texas, I have a natural antipathy to belonging to any group that sounds vaguely like 'Aggies'. A&M is a pox on the landscape. A college that trains one to win the Darwin Award. That's the place where the bonfire collapsed a couple of years ago, foreshadowing the WTC event in their drunken clumsiness.

I have another suggestion for a name for a department of silliness:+
'The Corrupt Universe Bookstore and Trivial Emporium'.
I used to work in the University Co-op Bookstore in Austin. One day as I was shoving books onto the shelves during a particularly hectic rush week, the idiot on the PA burped the end of the shopping day notice. I was listening out of the side of my ear because they were playing an early Kate Bush album up at the desk and I thought I heard the woman's voice say,"pssst-Erk. Your attention please...the..Universe..corrupt.....is now closed. pssst-Erk."

How about BYOB=Bring your own brain, KOST=Knights Of the Stained Table, FJORD= ?, ....aw, piffle, I'm trying....

As for turkey day, the wife and the infantis went to the mother-in-laws and I sat at the interactive idiot box and chatted with people in a country that has no Thanksgiving...possibly because their ancestors stayed home....

Here's a suggestion from Lucinda et al: "I was thinking of the h2g2 post myself, actually. It could be a simple enough idea - trawl the AWW for entries - take them up, 'subedit' them (*very* lightly), and have one entry a week displayed in the post. Once an entry is in the post, move the thread out of the AWW. Once there's a "drain" in here, it'll be much less of a graveyard, I reckon..."

[I told Lucinda where we were hiding, maybe he'll be along shortly, eventually...]

RE: Aggies. Right, cross that one off. I know what you mean. And I know how most Texans tell jokes featuring Aggies, mostly recycled jokes that the rest of the country tells about Poles. That whole bonfire fiasco was sad. I hated how people afterwards kept claiming, "The students who died would have wanted this tradition to carry on," acting like it would be dishonorable to stop the tradition. Or that any number of years worth of "tradition" is enough to justify a giant fire hazard blazing with school spirit.

I think we need to stay as far away from AWW as we can. Just visiting there leaves a smell on your clothes. I went there last night.
Some of the stuff there should have been deleted or sent back to the author's journal.
Ooops! thats the kind of comment that got me in trouble in PR.

Look, I believe that if the kind of stuff that Swift, Twain, Poe and H. Allen Smith did can't be done here, then DNA is doing the macarena in his grave!

Its pretty absurd to have people cranking out entries about the Goons and Flanders and Swann if you can't indulge in that kind of stuff here!

Well, the AWW does have a lot of junk, but it is still the obvious place to go for entries which are completely unsuited for the Edited Guide. And there's a lot of backlog there now, which is always helpful when you're starting out on this kinda thing...

Anyway, Subcomm's posted my idea: once a week, an entry in the post as a regular column: "The UnderGuide - [name of entry]". Collect the list of such entries so far in an UnderGuide page, and once there is enough of them, start putting in categories and such. Leave pure jokes to So Long and... - because that works well for them, but grip the rest of the stuff. If any one section becomes really popular, it can always be spun off...

In fact, see the history of So Long - http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A490141 - that's the kind of beginning I'm thinking of...

Most important thing is to just do something, and get a start - the details can happen later...

Okay. So, where be da page?
And can I write stuff for the Underguide without hitting AWW first or am I already running into anti-silly rigidity?

And what about stuff that the eds just hoped would disappear? Like 'top ten boring library games', which I've just recently offered to help ressurrect.
I was hoping to concentrate on humor.

I figure direct submission to some UnderGuide page, and the AWW as well, but not people randomly trawling the unedited guide. Just me.

How about this? We hold a quick vote as to what should be the first entry for the UnderGuide - once we've decided on the first entry, we can create a page to list the entry, try and sell it to the Post, and figure out whether subbing is too much like the sort of thing an official Guide would do.

For myself, I'd like to vote for the top ten boring library games - it's a winner!

by 'pure jokes' I meant "knock knock" jokes - not banning entries with a humourous bent...

oh, and "27th letter" - if it hasn't already gone through the post before, that is...

OH, I get the idea.
Resurrect the AWW by getting people interested in it by actually moving stuff up from it to the Post, then you won't have to go to the effort of pushing an entirely new idea, the page and the mechanism will already be in place. Once the AWW is cooler than it's ever been, then you can get new stuff or solicit stuff from people who've already shown potential. So the Post entry of the week becomes not the end-all but the ad for the AWW, so that people would think it was cool just to be in AWW, so that the stuff that didn't make it to the Post would still be in the Guide search list and if you went to that entry then yo would find a bunch of other stuff just like So Long and Thanks for all the Laughs.

And yes, I would like to vote for 'Top Ten Boring Library Games' as a first entry in the programme. But it does need it's tie straightened before it's ready.
One has to have standards. Every monkey with a keyboard can't write Hamlet or the 'scottish play'.

hi all,

Well, Deidzob mentioned your idea to me recently, so I thought I would stick my arm up and register my willingness to get involved.

As far as I can see, the 'unofficial subediting' process you have mentioned can be a collaborative affair in AWW, and I guess I am just proposing my input to that kind of thing.

I haven't read the Library Games thing yet, so I guess I know what to do next!

Spiff

Da more, da merrier. I think this one needs a designated referee.
PR is fine in it's place, but many of the entries we might look at have already been drug over the coals by the Elite.

yeh - if something's been through PR and been moved to AWW then I reckon the pleasant thing is to not nitpick - so either accept as is, or do the spellchecking et al for the writer.

OTOH, entries submitted directly to the AWW, or with little feedback, might benefit from the collaborative approach. Ask the author, I guess

Da more, da merrier. I think this one needs a designated referee.
PR is fine in it's place, but many of the entries we might look at have already been drug over the coals by the Elite.

tonsil revenge,

For some reason, I've been writing your nickname as "tonsil's revenge." Sorry. I still blame it on turkey, cheesecake, etc.

Re: Swift, Twain, Poe, DNA. If you're an envelope-pushing satirist or writer, then h2g2 under the thumb of BBC is unfortunately not the place to exhibit your work. For now, we'll have to work within the limitations of the House Rules. Meanwhile, there should still be some quietly biting humor and zaniness that slips past the Killjoys every now and then. That's the kind of thing we're aiming for.

Re: the Goons and Flanders and Swann. What are the Goons and Flanders and Swann? Goons was a UK tv show?

"I think we need to stay as far away from AWW as we can. Just visiting there leaves a smell on your clothes. I went there last night.
Some of the stuff there should have been deleted or sent back to the author's journal.
Ooops! thats the kind of comment that got me in trouble in PR."

*off to PR to take photos of the accident scene*

Be careful how you look at Writing Workshops. 90% of everything is crap, but the 10% is still worth going after. Once you get past the idea that there's a lot of poorly written stuff out there (in PR as well as AWW, or any writing workshop anywhere), you can't just dismiss the whole workshop. You have to keep in mind that it's proper to dismiss or ignore some entries, if they're not very good, or not as funny as they think they are, whatever.

In the Paper Age, before the web, we had to rely on book and magazine editors to read through slushpiles of bad writing and pick out the gems. Advantage is that we don't have to go through the trouble of weeding out all the crap. Disadvantage is that we often disagree with those editors about what constitutes crap. There are some gems that were getting missed in the slushpile.

Some people complain about the web and the revolution of every idiot posting their poetry, cat photos, history papers and journal entries where the whole world can see them. The web is a giant slushpile, and a lot of it is admittedly crap. But the benefit is that some of us who are willing to work at it can mine gems on our own, no need for editors anymore.

So don't write off the AWW just because a lot of it's crap. It just means we have to read or skim 10 or 20 entries for every really good one we hope to find.

NEXT PROBLEM:
Reading through that page about "So Long and Thanks for Laughing" plus the guidelines for "Writing for the Post" at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A569711, I'm a little worried about whether we're treading territory that's already been covered. "So Long" seems to restrict itself to cataloging jokes, so we wouldn't be stepping on any toes if we tried to be the publicists of satire and humor. I just stepped into the empty, echoing chamber of the Comedy Workshop, and it looks like there are few toes still visiting there for us to step on. And the h2g2 Fiction Central at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A294833 is still actively covering that subset.

However, the writing guidelines for the Post seem to ask for the same things that I was thinking of... "Many experiences in everyday life are not always appropriate for inclusion in the Guide..." If we propose this idea to the Post, I wonder if they'll reply, "DUH, that's what we're already doing!"

Still, our angle could be that we are looking for guide entries that are specifically excluded from the Edited Guide based on style: fiction, poetry, satire, humor, non-fiction formats including interviews and first-person accounts, OPINION pieces, gonzo journalism mixing fiction with real life, etc.

THE NAME GAME:
I kind of like the idea of hanging on to AGGH, since jwf seems to have poked into this festering boil of an idea quite a while back, and I'd feel wrong to steal it out from under him and re-name it. On the other hand, nothing against jwf, may god bless him and cthulhu refrain from eating his brain, he hasn't expressed much interest here lately. (Come on, John, prove me wrong! The more the merrier!)

DECENTRALIZATION, ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN:
Lastly, when I started bugging jwf about the AGGH several months ago, thinking that the Alt Writing Workshop would draw lots of people to AGGH, I got to thinking about the way editors and elites generally select stories or guide entries, and wouldn't it be nice if we could cut them out as a middle man? And that's the same thing we would be doing, replacing the h2g2 Editors and subeds and scouts with our own little group of elites. The antidote to elites selecting everything is to encourage people to dig through the slush pile for themselves. So in addition to using this group/column/webpage to publicize selected entries every week or however often, I suggest we always show a few links to the best places where people can browse for interesting unedited stuff on their own, like RANDOM NORMAL LINK, PR, Alt Writing Workshop, any of the workshops, etc.

Further, I'm totally open for debate on the issue, but my anti-authoritarian instincts tell me that we don't need to do any sub-editing on this stuff. It's just like the junk you find on the web, or anywhere you come across it on h2g2 already. Some of it's raw, misspelled (god damn double-consonants trip me every time), poor grammar, but if it's good, the core of it shines through. I think we can point out good articles whether or not they have minor flaws, and no one will complain too much that we're failing our duty. (Especially if we point out that we won't make it our duty.) Meanwhile, if we find an article that sounds good but has some bigger flaws, we can point them out to the author before using it in AGGH/UnderGuide/Corrupt Universe Bkstore (whatever). And ideally, if the author is a stubborn b*****d who refuses to make corrections or clarifications we suggest, then more power to them. No need to browbeat them. If it's generally good enough to tell people about it, then we use it. Otherwise, skip it.

(Now I have to go back and read your backlog, the last few posts. Please don't shoot me if y'all have already worked this stuff out.)

Thhhhpppppppttttt!

I'm here if you want a chat guys... and no, you wouldn't be stepping on our toes! How do you think we find most of our articles anyway eh?

shazz

rats!



shazz