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

is up with pretty pictures and a review of Eurovision Song Contest by Mags, whereelse on the Internet could you get this content?

'In theory, if we didn't use alarms clocks or other noise (neighbours, bin lorries, phone calls, etc) we's sleep until we were naturally rested'
- Sadly that doesn't stop the kids from jumping on us at 5am.

off to

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They class as "other noise"

I have no idea how long I'll be here. I'm certainly nowhere near as active as I used to be, and to be honest I don't really miss it as I fund social networking to be far more fulfilling on places like Facebook or specialist fora.

Which leads me to one of my ongoing - from way back when I did still care enough to visit every day - gripes about Hootoo and its community is the obstinate insistance on living in the past.

If you're going to have a community you need to move with the times and what we appear to have instead is people who, as far as I can tell, don't really use any other forums or networking and therefore are no fit judges of them insisting on partying like its 1999.

I use a few specialist forua for err, certain types of topics and discussions, twitter for 'stuff', and avoid facebook like the plague, cept to check in every now and then, but even the specialist forums tend to ... lack a certain depth or width of discussion one can sometimes find on h2g2, and never really come across any site, with fora which quite establishes the community sense, that hootoo has although the social/coommunity side of places like fetlife can have its advantage soemtimes and occsioanlly you'll find relatively bright people talking in sensible ways about the topics without too much mundane rubbish thrown in and derailment of threads etc I think really, my main dislike of FB thesedays is the same as commercial TV or radio; Too many adverts, an dthe actual* content jut gets harder and harder to find, navigate and look at, amongst all the shiney flashing lights of advertisings

I thought Facebook was only used to post identical photographs of very drunk people, every week posting essentially the same photo of them in the same pub with the same people, drinking the same drinks and posing the same pose, alternated with the score of how they are doing in some silly Facebook game.
Last night, distant relative earned 10,000 points in ThumbTwiddle, but need to trade a Yawn!

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I keep getting utterly baffling messages from FB, on my phone... something about jelly... or something... e everytime I forget, and actually go look at FB, it all looks very purile and school-ground-esk... and, kinda pointless... asides re-making a friend or two from school, over the last ocuple years, and going to two amazing school drinkathons, err, I mean reunions, which were both very good, most of FB is just... dunno... childish really

*Icy took part in the quiz 'What piece of street furniture are you?' and got 'Bollards'.*

Like

I think you get out of things like FB and Facebook what you put into it. You need to make an effort to not just get pictures of drunks and game scores. If you put no effort into Hootoo you'd get nothing out of it and therefore would think it boring. QED.

"Which leads me to one of my ongoing - from way back when I did still care enough to visit every day - gripes about Hootoo and its community is the obstinate insistance on living in the past" [Mr. Dreadful]

When one reaches the point where there's far more past than future to be expected in one's life, it's natural to lean more toward the former.* But that gets back to demographics. Early on, Hootoo's demographics seemed skewed toward teenagers and people in their early 20s. That's the same demographic that was attracted to Douglas Adams's books, some of which were to be found on high school summer reading lists.

Then things changed. Many of the young people who once dominated the place [people like EvilClaw and Dragonfly] moved on with their lives, as well they might. I think it's fantastic that their live are going forward, and they're growing and changing and trying new things, including new websites.

However, I don't see this as a reason to be unhappy with older researchers who have their own life journeys to make. If they are finding their way forward by focusing on h2G2, that's a good thing, too. Nobody took over or tried to skew this site's mission. Things just happened, and people made the best of things.

Just my opinion.


*Life can and should become richer no matter what age you are. Grandma Moses ran a farm, raised a dozen kids, and began painting in her late 70s. She still had a major career, one that no one could have foreseen. There may be seeds of unexpected accomplishments in any of us, at any age.

"occsioanlly you'll find relatively bright people talking in sensible ways about the topics without too much mundane rubbish thrown in and derailment of threads etc"

Welcome to h2g2 - whatever you want to talk about, we'll find a way of bringing it back around to Nighthoover.

Let's not forget the readers. These are the people who use h2g2 as reading matter. They look at the entries, but never register, log in or comment. There are thousands of them, far more than the active Researchers.

Unfortunately, we don't know much about them other than what they are interested in - crafts, recipes and things like that seem to be the most popular.

We are all readers Hopefully Not everything comes back to nighthoover.... well, not quite... but those which don't, inevitably come back to food

I'm younger now than when I registered... really... I've decided this is definately the way time seems to be working...

I like that h2g2 doesn't have an edit function, that you can't post pictures, etc etc, it's part of what got me to come back after 2 (?) years.

I use reddit a lot, and it's f*cking awful. I've had to block around 70 subreddits to get anything close to a decent experience. Most of that is softcore porn for horny 12 year olds that haven't discovered xtube. The rest is people trying to feel smug about themselves by belittling others. The rest of reddit is driven by trying to accumulate as much "karma" as possible, or trying to pretend that you don't care about it at all. Short "witty" replies or stupid memes are the order of the day, whether that's comments or posts.

Twitter I like a lot more but it's far from perfect, it serves some of what I want though and it's great for talking with people (despite the low character count). It's obviously limited by it's character limit though.

Tumblr is sort of similar, but then it suffers from similar problems to reddit. Only replace karma with "notes". That said, there's some cool people on there that I do like talking to. I've only started using tumblr recently though.

h2g2 differs from all of them and that's why I like it.

End rant.

Edit: Apparently I can't swear on here. That's a bit annoying.

The relative inactivity here in the late winter months
drove me to investigate FB and I found two or three groups
that have interested me - Philosophy, LeCoq's House of Nonsense
and A Pun My Word.

Yeah they all have the usual problems but seem to be administered
by open-minded intelligent folks who occasionally purge the trolls
and put down the juvenilia.

My point - I knew I started out with one - is that I have met there
a chap from Wales whose credits as a linguist, translator, diplomat
and high ranking academic seemed more suited to the old h2g2 crowd.

When I asked if we had possibly met before he admitted he had
never heard of h2g2. I found this astounding since he seemed
the very type who made this site so interesting.

So perhaps some of the blame lies in a lack of proper publicity
and ongoing promotion.


~jwf~

PS: n2g2 has also migrated to FB when after ten years on Yahoo
we were left drifting amid format changes that ruined our homepage
and made threads difficult to follow.

h2g2 forfilled a purpose, and function, and did so in a way, nothing did in the way back when, and, to an extent it still does.... Yeh, that can make it look olde in some respects, but in part, that is at least part of the reason why it works, as it doesn't suffer the same level of over-simplification, combined with overly flashy for the sake of being flashy nonsense, or gimiky stuff... Itsa bout words... and writing... Whether that's in the conversation fora, or the writing and reading of guide entrys... I do rahter like twitter though... but, that's just a differnt type of thing... and, of course, one can always go to a spicific audio tech website set of fora when one whats to look at specialist stuff, like that, or whatever the subject area may be... etc... but they never seem to quite have the sense of community, one gets on here... sort of too specific I guess in some ways
Anyhow, none of those otter sites have nighthoover, or JWF, or, indeed, for that matter, a dancing chinchilla at the top of every page....

dancing chinchilla?

my page top has 69 inaring (Safari)

Oh, I think I only get it on the pages I look at... its an imaginary transexual chinchilla, called Greg afterall... He's wearing a spiked collar... and, I think, yes, a pair of pink silk ballet shoes... I just kinda assumed everyone saw him, otterwise... well... if it was only me seeing her... then... *thinks* that's not good is it?

Well I am currently "mid-flounce" this is my first post on hootoo for ages.

But my strop came against a backdrop of coming here less and less frequently.

Hootoo will have a special place in my heart always, but I'm not sure it is ever going to be a place I ever hang around much again.

FB