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

Hi

You're a kindred spirit, yeah? Feels like it anyway.

I don't know what to do with that Batavia piece, I really don't.
I'm too proud of it. They'll only spoil it.

I posted here because the last word in the PR forum, before I pulled the thing, came across arrogant. Too late to change it now.

Yeah, I guess I am a bit arrogant. But not mutinous, not really. There has to be a better way of celebrating DNA's legacy, that's all. This site must be about learning to write. Right? What else could it be for?

Just a note so that you know where I'm coming from, Waz.

Where am I going to? I haven't worked that part out yet.

Pin

Hi! Can there be any good reason why new messages don't show up in conversation lists? I keep missing messages that get left here. I hadn't seen this one when I replied to your Batavia PR one.

I know where you're coming from - I didn't read the PR post as arrogance, just that you care about h2. Which I knew already. Not sure I'd have gone as far as referring to the editors as dead heads though .


If the EG stays as it is, on its own it will eventually fail I think. With the exception of some very rare individuals, people who write quality stuff care about it, they've a right to care - good writing is hard work, and they have a natural a sense of ownership of it. How can they not have. It's their creation. The current EG editing system and the planned updating systems don't recognise that. The EG is neither fish nor foul. It falls between two stools. (How many more cliched metaphors can I think of.) Encyclopaedic entries can be updated by future researchers, quality creative articles can't. Imagine in ten years time someone finds a few new facts about the Batavia and decides to update the entry you've written. Are they going to match your style? It's doubtful. I dread to think to think what might happen to Frogbit's wonderful fossil entries.

The EG needs to come out of its closet and say 'Hi, I'm EG, I'm an encyclopaedia', step to one side of the stage and say 'here's my long lost twin brother...(UG?), a glorious compendium of quality articles'.

If writing is going to have any importance on this site I think it inevitable that that will happen or that the EG will change. It's more of a question to me whether the BBC does see writing as an important part of the site. They are more likely to if there is high quality writing going on here.


To get back to the point, if I were in your shoes I would only sail the Batavia into the PR docks if I could think of it as a replica given to the eds to use as they saw fit, while the real Batavia continued to sail the h2 seas in full rig. But then I've already chosen to opt for EG + UG rather than change the EG. I'd rather see the EG change but I can't reconcile artistic quality with updatability.

So it's the author's choice, and I don't envy you it . Your own fault for writing good stuff.

Looking forward to reading the new version, whatever port it lands at,

Waz
PS nice to be thought of as a kindred spirit.

Kindred Spirit all right.
Thanks
Pin (now gone for a week)

Hi Pinniped, I saw you'd been barking. I feel guilty about not posting on the VG thread but a) it felt like the usual 'EG needs to change'rs v the 'EG is fine as it is'rs again and b) I didn't have what it took last week. I'm not posting there now because it seems clear you want to drop the subject. For what it's worth your first post seems to have been fairly widely misinterpreted. Hope you're ok out there on that limb, your barking reminds some of the rest of us not to slide too far back down towards the trunk. And it's a reminder what the UG is about. It's easy to get lost in other issues down the mines.

Hope the Batavia's doing ok in the dry docks.

Oh, and you can call 'Gravel' banal if you want to but I love it. It gave me the giggles first time round, months ago, and now. My village is built on a pile of gravel dumped by a passing glacier. Just a passing fact.
Waz

Hi Waz
I quite like it out on this limb, atch.
You get a great view of the Body Corporate from this extremity.
Lots of big words over there, lots of noise, relatively little thought.
Our own regular Tower of Babel...
Pin
(...and I'm afraid if you laugh at 'Gravel', you'll probably laugh at anything)
*wonders if it's a picturesque village. Probably not, by the sounds of it? *

I wonder what we look like from up there. The towers I mean, not your limb, I'd like know what mental image the staff have of the typical researcher.

As for the village - not particularly picturesque but it has its good points. Later glaciers put a fertile layer of clay over the top of the gravel pile. In my garden this clay is all too obvious - I could make plates with the stuff. More info. on the village than anyone could possibly want can, of course, be found in the earthbound Hitchhikers Guide. Pages 659865, 619454, 636022, 643006, 609608...I got carried away - my bit of the blizzard. I saw Jodan quoting you somewhere on not editing, I wish I could get my hands on those pages again and edit them.

Waz
(who does not 'laugh at anything' and is a most serious person. , <- see?
But there's this vague sense of the ludicrous in Gravel which builds gradually and bursts out, (in what in a less refined and serious person would be a guffaw), when the green and pink funerary variety is reached)

I just went to look at A659865, for starters. Sounds idyllic. Not a part of the country I know at all, I have to confess.

'Typical researcher' needs adding to the oxymoron thread, yeah? It would probably take an italic to believe in the existence of such a thing.

I re-read 'Gravel' too, just to make sure I didn't miss something. Nope. It's still cr*p.

But ludicrous rather than actually funny is right...unfortunately. I hadn't realised till now, but The Post is obviously picking out the approximately-humorous stuff. (Hi, Shazz! That's the bottom of a barrel you're scratching at, dear...)

Funny is hard, particularly in Entry style rather than one-liner repartee or a different structure altogether. I try to do all the genres, but get stuck in the rut of rhetorical/portentous. Presumably you've noticed...

Pin
*off to sift some more of the blizzard*

Just went to look at A659865, for starters. Sounds idyllic. Not a part of the country I know at all, I have to confess.

'Typical researcher' needs adding to the oxymoron thread, yeah? It would probably take an italic to believe in the existence of such a thing.

I re-read 'Gravel' too, just to make sure I didn't miss something. Nope. It's still cr*p.

But ludicrous rather than actually funny is right...unfortunately. I hadn't realised till now, but The Post is obviously picking out the approximately-humorous stuff. (Hi, Shazz! That's the bottom of a barrel you're scratching at, dear...)

Funny is hard, particularly in Entry style rather than one-liner repartee or a different structure altogether. I try to do all the genres, but get stuck in the rut of rhetorical/portentous. Presumably you've noticed...

Pin
*off to sift some more of the blizzard*

Looks like the h2 connections are playing up for you as well.

'Presumably you've noticed...' How am I supposed to answer that ? It's not how I would put it. As I've said somewhere before I think, what I see is that you care. It's easy to be lighthanded and laid back when you don't care. Not when you do. Anyway, I just like reading your stuff, not that I've read all of it by any means. (There's so much here, h2 is such a time eater.) Every so often I stop by and pick an entry off your page at random. Some of it takes a deal of understanding (for me) but it's all interesting. Some of it's much more than that - like the piece in Japan, that I commented on when I read it.

Ludicrous is funny. The very idea of writing with apparent seriousness about the identification of gravel appeals to me. Shazz too by the looks of it. I did assume you'd written it with tongue firmly in cheek. (Which isn't to say I didn't realise how serious you were about the point you made at the end about the EG. It occurs to me that possibly Shazz chose it to illustrate that point?) Funny is hard in the EG. The tongue has to be so well hidden in cheek that the reader's liable to miss it altogether. Especially after editing.

Don't go reading all those pages, I left the 'A's off deliberately. The quantity of them of them appeals to my sense of humour - ludicrous again. That's why I listed them. As Bossell said at the time there's now more in the guide on this v. small village than tthere is on Washington DC. I like that. <- that much.

The only entry I've written that I'm happy was one on Ruddy Ducks, (appart from what should be a footnote being put into the main text), yet again there's a certain ridiculousness in that that appeals. But I had fun writing all of them.

I'm particularly curious to know the age of the 'Typical researcher' .
Well, I'm off now, I was much too late last night,
Waz

Night, Waz.

(Batavia's back from sub-ed - apparently with no alterations except for links added. So far, so good!)

Hi there Pin,
Re your comment in the 'Seven Years On' thread, the first four entries accepted for the UG are;

A992892 - Uncle Bob's War Story
A273061 - Three Popes - or the Great Schism
A1047098 - Game Play

I think we've done pretty well, hope you do too. Most miners, in their enthusiasm, and with some confusion, used their quotas to put entries into the hat leaving only four votes available for seconding. That's why only four entries selected so far, and it's no reflection on the quality of entries not yet selected.

I don't know if we'll have another selection round before the UG 'opens'. I suggested a while back that we have more than one entry on the first day to give a better flavour. No single entry we chose would be representative. We haven't heard a yay or neigh on that from Ashley yet.

We're building a stockpile of entries, partly to convince the eds that's there's sufficient quality writing to sustain the UG, and partly to cover dips in the flow of entries into AWW. There's no decision yet on what order they'll appear on the front page.

I'm posting here because although this isn't confidential e-group stuff (you could find put by patrolling the AWW threads) it's best not spread around. And I'm sure this is all much more than you wanted to know.
Tough! I'm not rewriting all that now
Waz

*butts in*

I don't mind telling you Pin that your entry was actually the first to be selected

Waz- we'll have another round. Also, GTB and I have actually thought about the first entry to hit the front page. There are a few that I'd love to have first, but haven't been selected yet. And the eds are definitely impressed with the quality

*butts out*

Jodan-

Jodan!

you put your right butts in, you put your right butts out, you do the hokey-cokey and you...

enough of that


Sudden thought - do you have the 'hokey-cokey' dance across the pond? If not you won't have a clue what I'm on about.

Any news on more than one entry on the first front page? I'm sure we'll get a big enough stockpile to allow for it.

We have the hokey pokey

I hadn't considered more than one entry, but I'll run it by GTB next time I talk to him. He's busy lately. Got a job

Thanks, guys.
It's quite an honour to be chosen among these.
There really is some special stuff here, isn't there?
Pin

Yeah. Yours was an easy pick Pin

I'm a big fan of yours, and I think it's your best work. GTB loved it too

Welcome Home, Waz!

Thankyou! Well it's good to back in my own home, and good to be back here. But when it came to it, I didn't want to leave Aberdeen . Keep telling myself it's all sentimental rubbish, everywhere's the same once you know it, but I keep not listening.

Had a very eerie walk in sea fog on the beach at Balmedie. Kids were everywhere, making sandcastles, playing in the sea...but you couldn't see them, only hear them. Visibility was about 50 yards, now and then a ghostly swimsuited tot would would appear, and disappear. Even eerier knowing there are six shipwrecks buried in the sand along there. Had this image of one of the big ships we saw at the harbour towering up out of the mist and beaching itself.

It was a good break, now I'm trying to catch up here.
Waz

Sounds atmospheric. I remember a walk on a beach when it was snowing once. That's weird too.

You can keep Aberdeen, though. Ought to be twinned with somewhere in Albania IMHO.

Been pretty quiet with you and several others away. And we'd all have thought you'd have got this UG-thing fired up by now . Poor old Jodan's resorted to talking to me in your absence...

Pin

Early September Pin. And I'm talking to plenty of people offsite.