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

There is a coffee flavoured milk drink in Sweden called "Pucko" - 'nuff said really. (Though I have commented else where that my favourite Swedish product is "Fukt Creme"). /foreign brandnames>

Good heavens hou did I miss that reference? Mind on a different track, long day, late night, rubbish excuses, I'm going to bed.

Thanks for explaining though... I wouldn't have call it pedantry, rather politeness, although I can think of someone who would probably call it a politity

H

7literate7 wrote:

"Gulliver's Travels, Part 4: "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms" The Houyhnhnms (horses) were plagued by a race of savage brutes - the Yahoos (humans)."

For anyone who has flinched at the spelling "Houyhnhnm", and may wish to drag it into a conversation, try pronouncing it as "Whinnim"; an onomatopoeiac horse type sound.

(Does my head look big in this patronising hat?)

One of my favorite parts of that book is when Gulliver puts out the fire at the palace of the Lilliputs...

Let would be flamers take the lesson to heart.

Hee hee!

Putting out the fire *is* the part they always leave out of the cartoons, isn't it... Along, of course, with all the naked bits... the Brobdingnagian naked bits.

For those of you interested, I highly recommend Asimov's annotated edition (1980). Excellent. And far be it from me to have implied that any yahoos were hanging around here.

(Further vaguely-related aside: anyone familiar with Hayao Miyazaki's 'Tenko no shiro Rapyuta' (1986)? Its only similarity to Swift's 'Laputa' is the name, but it is a very fine example of Miyazaki's animated filmwork.)

(Is this the 'joking around' bit of the thread? Wheee!)

-77

And thanks for the pronunciation explanation, plaguesville - I should have done it myself. It was certainly less patronising on your part than my attempting to explain Swift in the first place. Usually I refer to that aspect of myself as, "Does this big word make my mouth look fat?"

Hi, this the last time I'll be using the name 'playboy reporter' on the guide. (this is to safeguard my personal details So I'm taking this opportunity to tell the jerks at h2g2 exactly what I think of them. They know who they are.

What irks me is this:

LekZ comes to h2g2. She fires off extremely abusive, threatening and defamatory postings about me and other people over the course of several weeks. She is rightly banned. Not once did any of the people on the above list bother to ascertain the facts or bother to enquire about my well-being. All I have ever heard from them is 'poor LekZ, what an injustice'! LekZ has fired off far more hate speech about me than I ever did about her. Hoovooloo and you should have gotton her facts straight before you started lecturing to me!

Hate speech is hate speech whatever the source. If you are disputing the facts Hoovooloo I suggest you take a look at a certain other website where LekZ continues to make abusive and threatening remarks - for instance see her post 'stupid bloody git' where she threatens to kill me. That is hate speech my friends - It's also illegal.

In short, no one is to blame for the banning of LekZ than LekZ.

I have been on the receiving end of some of the most vicious and abusive hate speech I have ever seen and no one bothers to enquire about my well-being or even speak up about it! How dare LekZ talk about me like that! How dare you talk to me like that Hoovooloo!

Frankly, I've had a gustful of it! I put in one last post to try to make a peace offering to them but they didn't take it so now I'm considering legal action!

The same people have also been harassing the italics! The italics are the very people that have done the most work on h2g2 - h2g2 'belongs' to them and h2g2 could not survive without them. The italics therefore get to decide how the website is run.

Having an account at h2g2 is a privilege not a right! If you agree to use h2g2 you agree to play by the rules or piss off and find another website. HOW DARE these people now start harassing the italics and bombarding them with schemes telling them how to run their own website!

It looks to me that far from making h2g2 a better place, the schemes Colonel Sellers and Rob are proposing are simply a way for some members of the community to start pushing other people around. The goal of Barton and co is in my opinion to turn h2g2 into an elite 'high IQ' society where anyone who 'doesn't measure up' is treated like trash. How is that in keeping with Douglas Adams dream?

It's not my place to suggest what Mark and Peta do, but I will tell you what I would do if I was one of the italics.

If I was one of italics and the people carried on the way they've been going on my website I would boot them right out of here on their backsides in a heartbeat! Terminate all their accounts! End of problem.

Further more if any of these idiots dared to bother this website again or make ANY offensive remarks on ANY other website I would report them to the BBC Legal team and ask the police to deal with them.

I'll back under another name when the idiots are deal with. Until then I've got better things to do than waste my time trying to reason with morons!

Anyone care to bet who posted the above, which has (at the time of writing) been hidden pending moderation?

H.

Tho only problem with that is that you never know if he actully sai somthin valid or just tried to insult people

I gess its PR btw way

Whoo now Bob, you don't know that for sure. Ostracision with restraint, is what my mother always shouted from the side of the footy field.

Can we please stop with the kicking of Playboy Reporter now? Much as we have our differences, this moderation (if it's really he) is making it hard for him to respond, and if he's unsubscribed which is possible, I'd prefer to not be flaming him behind his back.

Incidentally, Gulliver's Travels also is the source of computer systems being known as Big Endian or Little Endian due to the way they arrange their integers as bytes (a bit too complicated and tangential for this thread). This leads to some confusion when you transfer data from one system to another, requiring byte translation routines on systems. I've been meaning to write a Guide entry on this one, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

I personally feel that official accounts for the Editors are great not because they encourage professionalism (I'm not going to argue the Italics have not been professional), but because they eliminate some ambiguity. When you see a message from the Editors account, you know it's really official. When you see a message from Mark, you're not sure if it's as official or not.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/U110017
Playboy is still subscribed, and yes it was his message that was moderated. h2g2 space has gone too.

Hmm - that workaround to the hiding of the username associated with a hidden posting is possibly something of a loophole - I wonder whether the eds should try to close it somehow? Probably too minor for them to bother about - and in any case they've been extolling the virtues of "think before you post" recently...

Lucinda - "just say NO to public stonings"

If that meant what I thought that meant Lucinda, the user name is hidden as well as the posting to stop people doing it deliberately for the fame of it. As well as the shame of it. I think it was Peta that said that, a long time ago.

I wasn't sure from what you said if you thought it was hidden accidently.

Mina:

What Lucinda meant was that although you can't tell by looking above here, you can go to PR's personal space and *see* that he's still subscribed and that he posted here 12 hours ago. Since nobody else posted exactly 12 hours ago, the moderated post was from him. QED. A loophole, and he gets the fame/shame.

Top marks, Playboy, you're now officially more moderated than me! (I've had two taken down, although they were identical, so it doesn't really count, and that's your third! Good going )

H. (catching the stones and juggling them)

I wonder if he will win the star prize of a weeks holiday?

Ah, thanks Hoovooloo, I got the wrong end of the stick. Still, someone must have a good idea of who is posting to be able to check the page, not hard in some threads. I hadn't thought of doing that.

Excuse me for my opinion that he's doing it on purpose.

Given what he's got away with before, I think the star prize is out of his reach. I *think* this is one of those cases where "Employees of H2G2 and their relatives are disqualifed from entering the competition". Simply can't think of a reason why he hasn't won it already, unless it's that.

H.
Catching the stones and building a fetching cairn.

His posts are being hidden, which is a start.
And funny how they started after the italics unsubscribed. Although they must be aware of them, because the post I saw was referred, not just hidden.