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

I'll add my Najopomo stuff here.

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The month is off to a bit of a disappointing start as I'm a little under the weather. Symptoms are headache, inability to breathe through my nose, loss of sense of smell, dizziness and muffled hearing. I also have coughing fits if I talk too much – so as I was supposed to be on the student helpdesk, I took the day off work instead. I don't think students really want to be served by someone who can't hear them and has a coughing fit whenever he tries to answer them.

My wife's unwell too and has been signed off all week. Inexplicably, she didn't want to watch the 'Terminator 2: Judgement Day' commentary and instead was watching daytime telly

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Back at work, typical sort of day but very picturesque autumn and it hasn't rained yet, so the leaves haven't all turned slippery. At lunchtime I browsed the charity and second-hand shops and got Raymond Briggs' 'Ethel & Ernest', which I was pleased with, as well as a boxset of 21 Laurel & Hardy films. Since I caught this cold a couple of weeks ago, my hearing has gone from being hyper-sensitive and creating headaches when I've heard loud noises to the extreme now of being very muffled, so I've decided that the best thing to do is to stock up on silent films.

I normally pay 50p-£5 for a secondhand DVD, but disappointingly Studio Ghibli films don't diminish in value even on the secondhand market, where they stay around £10 each.

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getting rid of that cold!

Here, have a handkerchief.

Sorry to hear the cold is still lingering... Good luck getting rid of it indeed...

Last night I discovered that the Isle of Wight appears (in map form) in the Laurel & Hardy film 'A Chump at Oxford' and was surprised to see it starred a young Peter Cushing.

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Has Peter Capaldi ever been to the Isle of Wight?

Just wondering

Because I spend all my time rushing back and forth between Yarmouth, Cowes, East Cowes, Fishbourne, Ryde Pier Head and Ryde Esplanade to scrutinise and list every single person getting off the ferry/hovercraft…

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We wouldn't put it past you to study the CCTV footage...

I’ve tried to work out how many people could potentially travel to the Isle of Wight today – which is of course on a Tuesday during the reduced Winter timetable.

Ignoring cars and purely focussing on foot passenger numbers, I’ve looked at how many trips to the Island are taking place today (trips to the mainland are ignored), what the passenger capacity is of the vessels travelling that route and multiplied the two together to get a total figure of the maximum winter daily foot passenger total.

TerminalTripsCapacityTotal
Yarmouth173606,120
Cowes162754,400
East Cowes1589513,425
Fishbourne2787823,706
Ryde Pier Head312608,060
Ryde Esplanade311013,131
Total:58,842

So you're saying you expect me to look at CCTV footage of 60,000 people arriving on the Isle of Wight per day* on the off chance that Peter Capaldi is among them?

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* Some people travel to the Island by private boat and/or aircraft, but how many I've no idea.

If it was Paul McCartney, you would...

I know he stayed in Newport's Premier Inn last time, but I think he probably travelled either by helicopter or hired a hovercraft.

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Sometimes I worry whether I've been a bad influence on Peer Review.

When I write entries, most of them are, to be frank, probably a bit too long. I enjoy writing long entries and so continue to do so. In the past that wasn't a problem; the number of too-long entries I'd written were outnumbered by the shorter entries everyone else wrote, so overall it all evened out and balanced.

However, without particularly intending to, I seem to have inadvertently become h2g2's most prolific writer and churn out more rubbish than anyone else. This has got distorted in recent months so that the current situation is that there is far more stuff in Peer Review written by me than everyone else put together. I worry that this means that anyone reading entries in Peer Review gets a distorted view, and perhaps concluding that entries for Peer Review should be quite long, is put off writing something. The truth is that my entries are too long, and we need more short entries in there to restore the balance.

In the past I've tried to introduce new people to Peer Review by compiling collaborative entries. A topic is chosen, everyone is credited and their contribution to that topic is used in the entry and the idea is to show that anyone can contribute something to the Guide, whether it be an idea, a paragraph or a sentence. My plan was that if people saw that they could get a sentence into the Edited Guide, maybe they'd be inspired to try and get a paragraph, and if they could get a paragraph, maybe they could get a whole entry.
But that doesn't seem to have worked as planned. In many ways it has been a bit of a backwards step, as the resulting collaborative entries I've created, by using everyone's contributions, have again been lengthy. Perhaps even when I'm trying to encourage others to have a go, I have still perpetuating the incorrect idea that entries need to be long to be put into Peer Review and been putting people off.

So how do we restore the balance of Peer Review? Now, I'm taking a break from writing entries at the moment, but me giving up something I enjoy doing is not really a long-term solution. We desperately need short and sweet entries to outnumber all my waffling.

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We DO need 'short and sweet' entries. And I've been snowed under with the Post, NaJo, and soon, I'll have a work project coming up. So I'll write when I can.

But as I keep telling everybody else out there...WRITE!

We want recipes for this month's AltChallenge!

It is a sad state of affairs, but if it's your fault, then it's my fault too...

I like a short Entry, as I often don't have a lot to say, but in general people tend towards longer writing than shorter, in my experience (eg word limits for essays, etc), so I don't think your Entries are offputting. In fact I find them inspiring...

No indeed it isn't a solution for you to give up doing what you enjoy...

I enjoy writing as much as I can, too, as I find the Peer Review process fun, but we seem to have lost most of the people who enjoy writing and Peer Review, and few new people are taking the plunge...

Plus most of the remaining people who enjoy it seem to be the ones who are driving the process, which then leaves less time for them to participate in the process... Peer Review itself might be putting people off, but these days it is all very friendly and relatively quiet, so it should be less daunting than it might have been in the past...

I think you do a good job with finding promising fragments of Entries for the Flea Market, but it is a shame that those authors have elvised and don't return to finish their work... Perhaps non-elvised Researchers with Entry fragments might finish them with some encouragement, I don't know... The number of non-elvised Researchers is smaller than it used to be, too, which is a related issue...

I love the Flea Market as there are entries on things I'd never have thought of writing about, although a lot are entries on places I've never been to and so know nothing about. There's usually a couple I'm thinking about doing more with. Which reminds me – anyone can put an entry into the Flea Market if it meets the following criterion:

1.) It was previously submitted to one of h2g2's review fora (Peer Review, Writing Workshop, Flea Market or University) but did not become an Edited Entry.

2.) The author has not ticked 'Not For Review', but has definitely ed.

3.) It does not break h2g2's rules in any way.

There must be many, many, many entries out around h2g2 that qualify and I can't find them all myself! When I'm browsing the guide looking for entries to link my own entries to, I always look at the related non-edited entries too to see if I can find any hidden gems with potential.

Another one of my entries has been in Peer Review exactly a year today.

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I've had four entries leave Peer Review today

Babylon 5 Characters - G'Kar – A Flea Market Rescue co-written by TowelMaster, who was one of the first Researchers I actually met.
'Dad's Army' - the 1971 Film – the entry that has been in Peer Review exactly a year
'Dark City' - the Film – one of the first films my wife and I saw together at the cinema
'Flaming Pie' – the Album – An entry I'm hoping will be illustrated by Douglas Adams.

This means that 24 of the 32 entries in Peer Review are written by me or my rescue attempts.

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Part of me is tempted to start another thread or two that may possibly lead to Peer Review or entries. As some of my entries have left Peer Review, should I bung in an entry I finished a little while ago? I'm not actually achieving anything by not putting a finished but long entry into Peer Review.

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