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

I'll animate that line, for sure. .

And thanks all, for info about the technical situation right now, regarding links. I think these wonderful technical wizards who set up this site do an amazing job already, so it's OK with me. At least it's not my laptop. Lucky I didn't throw it out of the window. heheh.

Hypertext hyperlinks. So if I am working on paper, and I can't make the words go blue, then I have to create a hypertext wormhole another way .... how will I do this, I wonder. Uh oh....

And where will my wormholes take me? Uh oh again .... .... goodbye world....

What I want to know is this. If the wormholes link different places in time and space, what are the worms like?

Good question,MVP.

What??? The worms??? I never thought about the worms.

Oh no! Now I will have to change my plans. Plans? Yes, I had plans. There were plans. Plans concerning hypertext and wormholes, and various poetic dimensions written backwards on the other side of the paper.

And I was going to go travelling, but now I've changed my mind.

Because of the worms.

They made up the worms. You can have wormholes without worms.

Besides, see my journal, I've sent you a ticket and an itinerary.

A ticket and an itinerary? Nice. It's not every day someone offers me a ticket and an itinerary, (although I wonder where I'm going? uh oh) and also tells me that the worms vacated the wormholes, in fact they might never have been there in the first place, the worms that is, not the person who sent me the ticket.

That would be a good opening paragraph to my life story. Readers might flock around me, demanding my autograph and more of my deep insights into life. There again, they might not.

I'm sure they would. Interdimensional travel writers are a rare breed, you know.

. In my daydreams, I am an interdimensional travel writer, who always carries peppermints and a slim book about the cultivation of dahlias.

I am double stupid today. .

I've started out my journey, though. I have my ticket and my itinerary. I've only been travelling for minus five minutes, and I've already met a wormlike cyber entity, who asked me why I had no internet device for him to move into and raise his wormkids.

I told him I could access h2g2 by clicking the dot of a tiny holographic question mark which I keep in a secret place in the attic my brain, out of the way of wormkids, outlaws, and interdimensional travel writers.

.

OK serious now, the strange thing is that something weird is actually happening to me.

I have had too much sugar today already. .

This will teach me to accept interdimensional travel tickets from the Ed. .

I might have to write a Guide Entry, and edit it for the next twenty years.

.

So I started out on my interdimensional travel, but every time I attempted to travel through or beyond, or left or right, or up or down, or into or out of, or into the what was, what is or what will be, I found that the laws were different, and that none of these routes seemed to be relevant.

In fact they didn't exist.

Which made me feel a bit pale and faint.

it was a bit like a game I had as a kid, where you had to try to get a blob of mercury to go through a maze, and it never did because mercury and mazes were incompatible.

Except there was no maze, and no quicksilver mercury. It fact it wasn't like that at all.

I won't edit that paragraph though, because it was quite good to remember that game, and I like typing the words Mercury and Maze.

So what's this ticket all about then, Ed? A journey without motion?

This could be good, if I could figure out how to write it. . Perhaps I'll ask myself for my own autograph.

You know what? I've just realised something, which is incredibly interesting to no-one .. but myself. .

This could affect my career as in interdimensional writer.

It began with my Five To Midnight Bus story. And now it is happening again.

Namely, there is one side of me that is incredibly stupid. No really? You hadn't noticed?

And there's one side of me that is all deep and questing and philosophical.

And any piece of writing that I do from now on, has to unite both sides.

I think I just discovered my hypertext heaven. .hmm OK now I must work! See you in 4,304 yrs.

What an amazing discovery. Yes! I woke up this morning thinking about the serious versus the playful, and that's just hit the nail on the head.

"Every time I attempted to travel through or beyond, or left or right, or up or down, or into or out of, or into the what was, what is or what will be, I found that the laws were different, and that none of these routes seemed to be relevant."

This is mind-boggling and I'll have to away and think about it.

Except that I'm still writing Halloween stories, and none of them are working out. I'm having trouble with my

I blame Dmitri.

Am I in the running for some sort of 2legs award?

whooargh hahah (wicked cackle)

Trouble with your ghost, eh?? . I love that.

And of course, there's the next project after the Hallowe'en project. I take it you've begun on this one, mvp? The one that the Ed mentions in his journal, the interdimensional travel writer challenge? Where we ride the merkabah of the soul, and he will meet us in the coffee shoppe on the next level.

I was being quite stupid about it, but now I've had this weird experience of transit-no-transit, I've gone all spiritual and serious, and I don't know where I am.

Ah yes, he's keeping us working, this Mister Ed. It's good. I am enjoying the challenges, even though they are taking me into strange spaces.

Not like me to enjoy a challenge. I am very worried. .



Talking of weird spaces, I just entered another one. What's going on around here? I am starting to wonder if Other Interdimensional Travel Writers are reading this journal. . Or maybe I am attracting coincidences. .

Check the front page. Nice piccie. Check those lights. Anarchy online. Testing 12121212 Hullo Earth. .But I guess that's not really a coincidence, just h2g2. .

However ...... check the articles under review, in Peer Review. Brave New World! A flea market rescue by Bluebottle. Well, that's weird. Last week there was the Mary Poppins coincidence, this week we were just talking about BNW and there it is.



I think I need to lie down. (lies down) (gets up again)

But I can't! This strange site of coincidences is keeping me awake. . I have to go edit my story some more, oh no! And then there's .....

I would like to be rescued from a flea market. That fills me with inspiration. When I first joined hootoo I always wanted to put writings into the flea market, but I think my work might have been too weird, even for that. .

.... (closes eyes) .... So I am wandering in the Monastiraki, Athens, Greece. And then I am rescued. By whom? By mvp's rogue ghost. .

Thank you for your post. It's cheered me up after a dark night of the soul, or, to be more precise, a thoroughly wet and windy morning of the body and soul. Where's the smiley when you need it?

How does one get to be an inter-dimensional travel writer? I would quite like to go back to ancient India and follow the Buddha, but would I need to know Sanskrit? I would need a babel . Failing that, I would go back to 16th century London and meet Shakespeare and see how he wrote all those plays.

But, to some extent, aren't a lot of writers into time travel? Read Rose Tremain's 'Restoration' and know what it would be like to be at the court of Charles II. I suppose a good writer could write a novel set at the court of Kubla Khan, if he or she was prepared to do the research.

As for inter-galactic time travel, you need a and . See you in the coffee shop at the next level.

heheh. The dark and stormy night of the soul, leading to morning misty memories, but with sunlit clear thoughts later, after a coffee. .

Yes, good point. I always assume that if I could travel though the dimensions into another period of time, I would automatically understand the language around me, whatever it is, be it Chaucerian English, or strange purple bleeps and jasmine fragrant fizzing sounds.

I guess maybe it's best to select the 'Subtitles On' option, just in case. . What would be my own native tongue though?



I still can't get over the Brave New World coincidence, like how we were talking about it, then it appears in Peer Review. On reading the entry, I realise that this book still spooks me as much as it did in the 70s. . It's good to read about it, and remember everything. .

I think I might go on retreat for a while, maybe pitch a small tent on the slopes of Peer Review, eating only waterbiscuits and grapes, washed down with slow gin. I will take with me one of those cameras that has an infra red night vision lens, like they have for paranormal ghost photography, and lie in wait for a Coincidence sighting. Yes! A Coincidence! They exist! I have it on film!



That was a really stupid paragraph. Now I must balance it out with the serious.




Talking of paranormal ghost photography, and with all this Hallowe'en talk, I've been thinking about ghosts.

My mother saw presences. They didn't scare her. She would break off in mid conversation to greet one. It seems I grew up in a very haunted house, except I never saw or sensed anything. I always thought these particular ghosts were a psychological situation.

Except I think the dog saw them. . hmm.

I worry sometimes about ghosts. Are they trapped in some kind of atmospheric limbo? When I hear about them I feel I want to help them find their freedom.



As for the interdimensional travel writer project. Well, I'm going nowhere fast, and haven't yet set pen to paper. Still grappling with this paradox that I felt the other day, after too much sugar , this feeling of peculiar stillness, even though we are currently hurtling through space, and everything is moving around all the time, in an interdimensional sort of way.

Hah! I just realised what I said. Going nowhere fast! How interesting is that??



byeeeeee

PS I'm trying to do one final edit on the Five to Midnight Bus.

heheh. I always do my editing on the bus. .

No, wait, help me please,

Is it grammatically correct to say

'I felt beside me a presence'

or is it just plain pretentious?

I feel I want to leave it like this, even though I know it should technically read 'I felt a presence beside me'.

If you say it's best to change it, I will change it, because I like you all very much.

I think that sentence sounds fine. Not pretentious at all.

Cc, if you're interested in ghosts, have you read Dmitri's comments on my story 'The Ghost of Bellevue Park'? The thread is F74130?thread="smiley - ghost" title="ghost" class="smiley" src="http://www.h2g2.com/h2g2/skins/Alabaster/images/Smilies/f_ghost.gif"/>.

I suppose you could have your own personal ghost who followed you around . I know there's the story of Orestes, who's pursued by the Furies after he kills his mother, Clytemnestra. But are the Furies ghosts, or is this the first known account of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

That sounds like me trying to be learned which I'm not.

I don't know what happened to that post! Perhaps a ghost got in the works!

Does the internet have ghosts?