#the meaning of liff

[inbarfink]

#The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #The Restaurant at the End of the Universe #Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency #The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul #Mostly Harmless #The Meaning of Liff #Last Chance to See #The Deeper Meaning of Liff #The Salmon of Doubt #douglas adams #hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy #h2g2 #hitchhiker's guide #Restaurant at the End of the Universe #life the universe and everything #so long and thanks for all the fish #dirk gently #the long dark tea time of the soul #salmon of doubt

[kjond]

Publication Day!

42/42 The answer to the Great Question of 'Life, The Universe and Everything' was '42' - from where this book gets its title. The number had been percolating through Douglas' mind well before he used it in #Hitchhikers, so we dispel old myths and examine the written evidence.

#42 #42 the wildly improbable ideas of douglas adams #books & libraries #dirk gently #douglas adams #publishing #zz9 plural z alpha #the meaning of liff #doctor who #poetry

[captainclickycat]

“Deeping St. Nicholas (n.): What street-wise kids do at Christmas. They hide on the rooftops waiting for Santa Claus so that if he arrives and goes down the chimney, they can rip stuff off from his sleigh.”

- The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

#got to keep the old traditions going #the meaning of liff #douglas adams #christmas

[djpurple3]

yknow like none of my fics do the same numbers they used to when i wrote sanders sides fic and i shouldnt be upset about that,,,,, but sometimes im kind of upset about that

like commenting culture is so weird i know already but like augh... pspsps.... please.... tell me u like it....

the fandom that is the best at leaving comments (that arent too weird, too) in my experience Has been the ninja turtle people tho. idk whats in that fandom but they leave some good comments

#t/ss was also pretty good for nice comments but usually u also got kinda weird ones. which doesnt surprise me #can't forget that one person who called me british bc i used the world 'whilst' once in a 14k oneshot and demand i change it to #'make it more american' #like a) ur wrong abd b) no. it's been like 4 years and i still resent you #writing mcy/t fic is rough sometimes because i fucking love to write it but people hardly comment #the worst fandom was overwatch. like NO ONE commented. that could have just been bc no one was reading my works tho #dj rambles #vent #i guess #somewhere in my brain i was a 'semi big tss writer' but like. only one fic was vaguely popular. #tho i mean a lot of people read the effects of shame. i wish i could ifnish that sometimes but aughgdkjgdffg. yknow? #i also dont want. people to think im into sides anymore #tho i am living a little double liffe i do still write tss stuff i just write smut on another completely unrelated blog. it amuses me #sorry im just rambling fr. i just think about this too much #i wish i could churn stuff out like i used to #even like a year ago i was writing like fucking crazy #im just. iASOHSDG!!!

[justherebecause15]

people are so cute when they're passionate.

I loveeee when people talk about their passions. Like, I've got a friend who loves drawings of pretty ladies. One of my friends just loves mushrooms and ramune soda bottles. It's just so adorable, because you KNOW they've been waiting for someone to ask. Favorite book? Explain the plot. Scary knowledge of military history? Tell me more. eerily judgmental love of keeping freshwater fish? Let's judge the people who keep fish in bowls together.

#then you get to EXPLORE your common passions with people #you like mythology? #so do i #what's your favorite type? #and yes #i do have a love of keeping freshwater fish #IN TANKS THAT ALLOW FOR PROPER AND HEALTHY MENTAL STIMULATION ALONG WITH GROWTH #you too would survive in a room eating bread the rest of your liffe #but that doesn't mean it would be a GOOD life #and that's why I'm broke

[coraniaid]

Finished Children of Memory yesterday. Really liked it, unsurprisingly. I think this is one of my favorite science fiction series in a while. 

I don’t really know whether it makes sense to rank the books individually, but for what it’s worth I enjoyed this one a little more than the second and a little less than the first.

(Spoilers below the cut for the whole trilogy.)

Big fan of the (I think only ever implicit) pun suggested by the Corvids dyadic nature. One half is a creative problem solver that explores new things and one half keeps track of the state of the world around them and the history of how it came to be this way.  They are thought and memory. Huginn and Muninn. Odin would approve. (The book also features a protagonist being hanged from a tree, though she already had knowledge of other worlds at the time.)

And while I'd never describe the series as “hopepunk” (because, as I said, I liked it…),  it is also – despite its far future setting being incredibly grim in many ways, starting as it does with a civilization ending war followed by the slow extinction of life on Earth – almost aggressively hopeful.  Particularly when it comes to the question of sentience and the possibility of peaceful cooperation between very different types of intelligence.

I mean, this is a trilogy that introduces, in order:

The corrupted and imperfect digital copy of the mind of a misanthropic scientist who died tens of thousands of years before the story begins

The species of cannibalistic spiders that worship her as a god and built a computer out of ants for her to live in

Spacefaring octopuses with distributed, ever-changing personalities whose main desire in life is to avoid the company of other octopuses 

A mind-controlling parasite that loves making friends and going on adventures and is directly responsible for the deaths of billions

Neuorodivergent talking mutant crows who, if pressed, will patiently explain to you that of course they're not really sentient, they're just animals mindlessly operating on instinct so as to effectively mimic the illusion of sentience (just like you, right?)

The ghost of a teenage girl who never actually existed who is on a quest to save her long-dead grandfather from a witch

The alien computer that's been patiently simulating the entire history of the colony said girl might have grown up in if only its founders hadn’t all died before landing on its planet

And then goes on to argue that yes, actually, these all count as people. Even the brain-eating parasite. Especially her. (She feels very guilty about the multiple zombie apocalypses she started once it is explained to her that taking over people's bodies without their consent is generally frowned upon in polite society.)  

Because the universe is mostly cold and empty and utterly inhospitable to life, so why not be as generous as you can be in your definitions of who counts as sentient?  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the closest thing the series has to outright villains (Liff’s Uncle Molder in this book, These-Of-We in the second book, Captain Guyen and the religious fanatic Portia in the first book) are people who refuse to accept the personhood of others (whether that’s starving people from the neighboring farms, potential new friends who vocally object to you taking over their brains and using their bodies to go out and explore the universe, the aforementioned cannibal spiders who are already living on the planet you've decided to move to or the smaller, weaker male spiders who object to being eaten.)  

#books #children of time

[walamacada]

I just finished reading The Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky and I desperately need to vent my thoughts about it but I’m putting it all under the read more cause holy shit

Spoilers under the cut, if you wanna read the books (which I highly recommend) then maybe don’t read this lol

I’m continuously amazed by just, everything in his books? It’s all so interconnected and all so beautifully human and alien and comforting and strange all at the same time, and I was seriously thrown for a loop in children of memory and it took me awhile to appreciate it all

At first I was like none of this makes any sense and each section is filled with things contradicting even stuff in its own section, like with Miranda telling people she was from the out farms and then later her arriving on the shuttle with Holt, and for a while there I kinda got lost in the inconsistencies, but I could tell that it was all building up to something and it all felt important so I stuck with it

And the reveal with the simulation was just sgdbdgacdfavsv I can’t even begin to say how much I loved that because I mean, how beautiful is that? Something that’s so completely alien to us that we can’t even begin to understand took the time to understand holt and his crew even as they were dying. And then it took the time to plot out how their civilization might have gone and it remembered and it cherished and it feels like, in that remembering, it *loved*

And the replaying of Landfall is absolutely wild to me, cause it’s kind of horrific that it’s playing out the end of this community over and over again, especially with Liff starving and being alone in the end, but at the same time it’s like, it feels a lot like grief, if that makes sense? You love something so much even though it’s only in your life for a short time, and you love it to the point where you keep going back to it and replaying everything you know about it, and in the replaying you replay the loss but you also replay what made it all so beautiful

And the machine didn’t have anything but the brief hopes and dreams of the key crew before they crashed and it fucking *ran* with that and helped it blossom into something, however brief that was

And Miranda’s whole relationship to the town and to the people there, even before she landed (or tried to anyway) was so beautiful and caring too, and her whole conflict was absolutely amazing to read and I just !!!!!!!!

And can I just say that the whole trilogy was so interconnected and so complex within each book and I can’t even begin to comprehend the planning that must have gone into this?? Everything was important, nothing got left behind, everything was loved and there were so many connecting threads

I’m still reeling so everything is all a bit jumbled but I’m just gonna end by saying that I love Avrana Kern my beloved fucked up blorbo

#children of memory #adrian tchaikovsky #holy shit #if anyone has any book recommendations based on my love of this trilogy I’m absolutely open to suggestions #I’m gonna have to reread this trilogy someday

[ur-battdoll911]

alright, time to talk everyone.

Okay, this is probably be long, but i need to tell and spread awareness. a little tthing can go a long way. my friend Izzy haas servere depression and anxiety, so shes not in a good place in liffe at this time since shes also suicidal. theres this girl named Makayla (the white blonde one, not the black one, @itzmariellecade knows who) and shes what we call a, "friend". see, Izzy loves her like always, she loves all her friends, but the thing is, Makayla has made her cry 3 times, all for bad reasons. Makayla also hated by most girls in the 6th grade, and since everyone loves and knows Izzy, ord gets spread quickly. and i'vve spoken to what we'll call the victims of Makayla and they all seem to have one thing in common. they all have a mental disorder that makes life harder. Makayla claims she has had it bad, and me and Cade are starting to question if shes lying or not. she claims to be adopted and that her mom is a drug addict, which i could see, but 8 siblings? and she procceeds to add to the story, and shes lied so much that im starting to question if this is all real. so, shes bullied a ton of people, a lot of girls have grown to hate her for how she treats people, so that means that most girls i have met seem to actually hold a grunge. and so, on wendsay, Makayla said that we were leaving her out, which we werent and you know what happened? Izzy started sobbing. i dont care if its just a few words, a little something can go far. i have attachment issues, but the one person i havents found myself defending is her. i'll probably say more soon, but you all, be careful for what you say and do, a little goes far

#suicidal awareness #awareness

[sugarsblurbs]

Ok has anyone seen Metal Family on YouTube it is my favorite thing in the world…….. in which I have many Eddie x reader ideasss….please tell me either here’s or at @sugarsfics if I should write a fic on these concepts

Like I could easily make and Eddie x Reader out of Glam and Victoria. Eddie the unstable metal head who all has eyes for the reader. He is normally happy and goes with the flow but the moment someone tries to mess with his family he goes off. The reader is this badass chick who has a resting bitch face who only knows how to handle problems with their fists but only has a soft spot for her man, Eddie. The moment someone talks bad about Eddie reader sees red. The reader is a little slow at times and gets mad very easily but Eddie is patient, sometimes reader is trying to do something but it is just not going their way so Eddies secretly steps in to helps reader thinks they fix the problem on their own and Eddie will praise them as if they did but would never tell the reader the truth.

Orrrrrr

Reader and Eddie meet like Glam and Ches/Chive did. Reader has been working all their life to get into the music school trying to follow the path her family wants her to have. Then they meet Eddie, the trailer park trash (I am sorry I don’t mean it :( ) then get mad when he get a better score them them. Queue academic rivals/enemies to lovers.

Orrrrrrr

Something similar to Dee and Liff. Eddie who has this bad boy vibe to him very sarcastic and quick witted, so basically himself, but with his crush, the reader, and his brain turns into mush. So then if finally tried to ask out or talk to reader and Dustin or Steve ruin the moment much like Heavy did to Dee.

I have so many ideas…..

#metal family concept #metal family #sugarsblurbs #sugarsthots #sugar needs help #sugars ideas #eddie munson #stranger things #eddie munson headcanon #eddie x reader #eddie fluff #boyfriend eddie munson #eddie munson blurb #eddie x you #eddie munson headcanons #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson oneshot #eddie x harrington!reader #eddie x y/n #eddie hc #eddie munson boyfriend #eddie munson x shy!reader #husband eddie munson #eddie headcanons #eddie munson hcs #eddie munson imagine

[edwardslovelyelizabeth]

I want to know if Elizabeth Woodwell should have some jewelry or something like that? Why didn't she have any inheritance before she died?

She was given gifts by Edward in form of jelwelry most notably for the birth of their eldest daughter Elizabeth of York  (What would be around 125 pounds now was spend by the King on a jeweled ornament presented to the Queen “against the time of the birth of our most dear daughter Elizabeth”) and no doubt she had other jewels as befitting the Queen though we sadly have no surviving accounts of those. Also according to Edward IV's will from 1475 he specifically let her have several of the items of his houshold including tapestries, plates, jewelry as well as his precious books (below excerpt from the said will):

"Item as to all oure goods, that is to say beddyng’ arrases tapestries verdours stufF of oure houshold ornaments of oure Chapell with boks apperteignyng to the same, plate and jouelx excepte, excepte also such part of the same ornaments and boks as we shall herafter dispose to goo to oure said Collage of Wyndesore, we wol that oure said wifF the Quene have the isposicion therof without let or interruption of the other oure Executours, to thentent that she raay take of the sarae such as she shall thinke to bee moost necessarie and convenient for her, and have the use and occupation therof during her liff, and after her deceasse oure said son the Prince hooly to have and enjoye that part."

As to why she didn't have anything before she died - she didn't have any inheritance before she married Edward (that was actually the reason why she met with Edward/petitioned him - because her relatives swindled her and her sons of her first husbands inheritance). After Richard seized power and declared her marriage invalid and her children bastards she lost the right to any inheritance either. It was commonly expected that after the death of the King Dowager Queen would be provided for usually by the new King (her son most commonly), but since Elizabeth’s marriage was proclaimed null she lost the status Dowager Queen. She was given annuity by Richard (and there is actually no evidence that her ever paid that sum to her) and was put in charge of his squire meaning she lived by the pension that Richard has appointed to her and not any revenue of her own. When Henry Tudor became king and married Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth of York he reinstated Elizabeth Woodville as Dowager Queen, her children as royal princesses. Elizabeth was given some property that she would take revenue from as the Queen Dowager (giving her a grant for life of six manors in Essex and an annual income of £102). However in February 1487 all the lands granted to her were taken away from her by the King to be given to her daughter Elizabeth of York (it’s most likely was because the new king didn’t have enough money to support the new established court and Elizabeth Woodville was likely not against transfering her income to her own daughter). Elizabeth Woodville was given annuity by Henry instead and retired in Bermondsey Abbey. Hence when she died other that that annuity she had nothing of value to leave to her children.

#elizabeth woodville #edward iv #15th century #wars of the roses #medieval #anonymous #ask

[kjond]

#42 #42 the wildly improbable ideas of douglas adams #books & libraries #dirk gently #douglas adams #publishing #zz9 plural z alpha #the meaning of liff #doctor who #poetry #savetherhinos #rhinoceros

[iztarshi]

Febuwhump - Immortality

Fandom: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Girl Genius

Note: Turtles as Jägers

You sit on the pavement outside the Castle. There’s an awful lot of Jägers doing the exact same thing, bodies loose and exaggeratedly casual, games of cards being played on the pavement with the usual cheerful arguing reduced to a mutter. No one becomes a Jäger without riding with them first, which means everyone here has someone they know inside. Someone who might become a brother. Or they might not. You know the odds as well as any of them and the fact that the odds can be just as bad in battle doesn’t help at all. In battle you could do something, throw your body between Mikey and the enemy even if he yelled at you afterwards.

”Raph, you can’t fight my battles for me! Just because I’m human doesn’t mean I’m useless.”

“Hy know dot, little man. Big man. But Hy em bigger und hyu is hundreds ov years younger.”

“Yeah, but I’m good at this. I’ve got the skills. I’ve got the flamethrower.” Mikey, not yet five feet, glares and you, going on for seven feet and covered in scales, cower back.

Leo laughs. “He’s got de intimidation factor too.”

Leo is lying on his back, hat over his eyes. He’d look relaxed if he wasn’t chewing his claws so hard he’s broken one. He’s not even complaining about his pretty scarlet claws being ruined and demanding glue.

You pull Leo’s claws away from his mouth and he pushes his hat back to glare. For a moment you think there’s going to be a fight. You���d almost welcome a way to release the tension except it’s the wrong moment, the wrong mood. All around you are other Jägers, also not fighting. Leo rolls onto his front instead and rests his chin on your thigh.

”Dot line needs to be higher,” Leo says.

“Shot op und stop micro-managing,” Donnie growls, painting a little higher with the ink. “Hy haff done this before.”

“Hyu vouldn’t know it,” Leo says.

“I think it looks fine,” Mikey says, smiling. The outline of a Jägersymbol is on his skin, just in ordinary ink right now but it’s ready to be tattooed.

Donnie picks up the needle and you say, “Did hyu clean it proper? Mikey iz human.”

“Hy sterilised it, yez,” Donnie says, rolling his eyes.

You watch as he pokes the needle again and again into Mikey’s skin. Mikey smiles and smiles through the process.

“Now hyu will be a brother forever,” Leo says. “Effen if hyu leave, get married, buy a house…”

That and not the pain makes Mikey scowl. “I’m not leaving.”

You fold a hand over his shoulder, careful of your claws. “But hyu’d still be our brother if hyu did. Hyu don’t need to do anyting to make dot true. Hyu ken liff hyu own life.”

“This is my own life,” Mikey says, firmly.

Donnie is scribbling something in a book. A quick peek over his shoulder reveals probability calculations, done over and over again. The answer always comes out to about one-in-ten.

You put an arm around his shoulder and pull him against your side, he leans into it with a grumble but the pencil keeps going. On the other side of you, Leo peeks up at him, before looking away again to lose himself in his own thoughts.

”He asked me!” Mikey shouts. “Master Saturnus asked me! I’m gonna be a Jäger!”

You freeze, all three of you freeze, and you should congratulate him. You understand the honour that has been done to him. You remember. Even if you had died then you would have died a Jäger, you would have died for the Master. But this is Mikey, little Mikey, who loots artworks instead of gold.

“There’s a moch higher chance hyu vill simply die,” Donnie blurts out. “Nine in ten pipple dun survive the Jägerdraught.”

“Not how I vould haff said it, but Donnie’s got a point,” Leo says. “Hy mean, congratulations and everyting, but are you really sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Mikey says. “You know how much I’ve wanted this. I’m gonna be like you guys.”

“Mikey,” you say. “Vot if hyu die?”

“I’m going to die anyway,” Mikey says. “Way before you do. Even if I live to be old you guys will still keep going after I’m gone and you’ll forget me the way you forget everyone who rides with you.”

“Not hyu,” Leo says, finding the words for all of you. “Ve could no more forget hyu than ve could a Heterodyne.”

Mikey reaches out and squeezes Leo’s arms. “You’re not going to forget me because I’m not going to die. I’m going to live forever and set the world on fire and I’m going to do it with you.”

When one of his hands lets go of Leo and reaches for you you wrap an arm around them both and pull Donnie in with the other.

The Doom Bell rings and the square goes from quiet to utter silence. Master Saturnus enters first, hair wild and stride loose with exhaustion, but still radiating energy and satisfaction.

Behind him come the survivors. Still mostly human looking, but stumbling with rearranged muscles under their skin. Grinning with still blunt teeth but grins sharp with something new.

Mikey stands among them.

You don’t know who moves first. Whether it was Leo, rolling from lying against you to standing in one swift movement. Whether it was Donnie, forgetting his notebook as he runs. Whether it was you, running, running, as the crowd around you surges forward in the same motion.

The three of you hit Mikey together and he goes down beneath you. He’s laughing, poking you between the ribs with newly-minted claws. He smells of sweat and pain and pack, the Dyne singing in his blood.

“I told you,” he says, wild and joyful. Then he laughs and says with mischief in his eyes. “Hy told hyu. Hy told hyu all.”

#crossover #rottmnt #girl genius #febuwhump

[tenfoldrage]

WHAT FAMOUS AUTHOR DO I WRITE LIKE?

Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English writer and dramatist. He is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started life in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.

Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), Last Chance to See (1990), and three stories for the television series Doctor Who. A posthumous collection of his work, including an unfinished novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.

Adams became known as an advocate for environmental and conservation causes, and also as a lover of fast cars, cameras, and the Apple Macintosh. He was a staunch atheist, famously imagining a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks, "This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!" Biologist Richard Dawkins dedicated his book, The God Delusion (2006), to Adams, writing on his death that, "Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender."

tagged by: stole it from @thecptn

tagging: @isbrilliant @carbondated @cosmicangsts @bravevolunteer and anyone else who wants to

#[ i like that i got someone who wrote doctor who episodes lolol ] #[ i've never read the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy so now i feel like i should ] #/ out of character #/ dash games

[scotianostra]

William Playfair the Scottish engineer and political economist was born on September 22nd 1759.

I read one article about Playfair that describes him as “a kind of Forrest Gump of the Enlightenment” perhaps a bit harsh, he has also been described as a bit of a scoundrel, whatever you make of him, William Playfair changed the world forever in the way w look at statistics, with his invention of graphs and pie charts, where would our political commentators be nowadays without them?!

I would say he was a bit of a polymath, another source in my opinion is more accurate, Playfair is without doubt to many of you out there “the most famous man you have never heard of” he rubbed shoulders with the era’s many giants, switching careers at the drop of a hat, and throwing himself headlong into history-changing events, from the storming of the Bastille to the settling of the American “Wild” West.

Playfair was the fourth son of the Reverend James Playfair of the parish of Liff & Benvie near the city of Dundee in Scotland; his notable brothers were architect James Playfair and mathematician John Playfair, a very clever family, to say the least.

He was in turn a millwright, engineer, draftsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, spy, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, convict, banker, ardent royalist, editor, blackmailer and journalist.

In 1780, he went to England, engaged as draftsman and personal assistant of the inventor James Watt at the steam engine manufacturing works of Boulton & Watt in Birmingham in 1777, where he received a scientific and engineering training.

On leaving Watt’s company in 1782, he set up a silversmith business in London, which failed. The first of many failures.

In 1787 he moved to Paris, taking part in the storming of the Bastille two years later. As a spy for the British Government, Playfair devised a plan to undermine the revolution by effectively destroying France’s new currency, the assignat by flooding the country with counterfeit notes – they were so good, the Assignat lasted just long enough to destroy the French government.

He also became involved in a speculative but successful scheme to sell land in the colony of Scioto in New York State to Frenchmen wanting to emigrate

Returning to London in 1793,he opened a “security bank”, which also failed. From 1775 he worked as a writer and pamphleteer but Playfair’s main achievement lies primarily in his innovations in the presentation of quantitative information by means of graphs and charts, which first appeared in his Commercial and Political Atlas, published in 1786. It contained 43 time-series plots and one bar chart. It has been described as the first major work to contain statistical graphs. 

Playfair’s Statistical Breviary, published in London in 1801, contains what is credited as the first pie chart. He was the first to use shading and colours, thus incorporating elements of classification into the quantitative depiction. The quality and detail of his work was such that in the two centuries since there has been no appreciable improvement of his basic designs.

After the Bourbon restoration in France, William Playfair returned to Paris, where he edited a journal called Galignani’s Messenger. He had to flee the country a second time when prosecuted for libel, and thereafter spent his time writing in London.

Like many of today’s charts, Playfair set two sets of facts beside each other to tell a story to help people understand complex issues at a glance.

“As the knowledge of mankind increases, and transactions multiply, it becomes more and more desirable to abbreviate and facilitate the modes of conveying information,” he explained. “Men of high rank, or active business, can only pay attention to outlines… It is hoped that, with the assistance of these charts, such information will be got without the fatigue and trouble of studying the particulars.”

When he died at the age of 64, Playfair had invented a universal language useful to science and commerce alike and though his contemporaries failed to grasp the significance he had forever changed the way we would look at data.

#Scotland #scottish #statistics #businessman #engineer #draftsman #history

[aircommndr]

I write like: Douglas Adams

Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English writer and dramatist. He is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started life in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.

Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), Last Chance to See (1990), and three stories for the television series Doctor Who. A posthumous collection of his work, including an unfinished novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.

tagged by: stole from @warriorsparked !

tagging: @blackwldcw , @biggest-ultra-mags , @13urningstars , @staticsqueaks , anyone else who wants to!

#BIGGEST FUCKING COMPLIMENT OF MY LIFE??? DOUGLAS FUCKING A D AMS??? #mY BELOVED #i am zim! ; ooc 💥 #follow the leader ; memes 💥

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I created this blog on August 11, 2020. At that time, I had barely started my journey into British comedy. I mean, some stuff I’d known for most of my life. My dad showed me the Monty Python movies + Flying Circus when I was much too young to understand them, but just barely old enough to find anything at all funny in them, enough to insist on watching them over and over, until I got old enough to get more out of it. I think I may have actually been too young to understand quite a bit of the English language when he first showed me Mr. Bean, but I could still understand some of the slapstick stuff. I was slightly older, but still quite young (maybe 8 or 9) when he got me into the shows of which my parents had every episode on DVD, and I’d watch them over and over and over for years: Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, Ripping Yarns, Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister.

My dad showed me The Thick of It not long after it first started airing, when I was around 15 years old. I quickly became hooked. A while later, he took me to see In the Loop in our local independent theatre, just after it was first released. My Armando Iannucci obsession grew from there.

My dad had all of The Goon Show on cassette tapes, and he used to play that on road trips when I was a kid. He also had a CD of The Complete Beyond the Fringe, as well as Alan Bennett monologues, all of which I used to love. He had Billy Connolly CDs that I didn’t understand, and VHS tapes of The Secret Policeman’s Ball that I basically memorized.

And of course there was Douglas Adams. When I was about 10-12 years old, my dad read me all his books. I could have read them by myself, but I enjoyed the shared experience, so we sat in the living room while he read them out loud. All five Hitchhiker’s Guide books, both Dirk Gently books, Last Chance to See, and The Salman of Doubt. The Meaning of Liff books I read on my own.

And Radio 4, I can’t forget about Radio 4. He got me into The News Quiz and The Now Show in about 2009, and I’ve been listening to those ever since. And there was frequently some Radio 4 comedy or other playing in his car when I was a teenager.

The point is that Britcom wasn’t completely new to me in 2020. My dad had raised me on it. I didn’t understand everything about it from a younger age, but I at least knew how some of it worked. In early March 2020, I happened across s01e01 of Taskmaster on YouTube, and said, “Oh look, British comedy, like that other stuff I like. I wonder what this is?” Then Romesh Ranganathan threw the watermelon the floor, and it was the funniest fucking thing I’d ever seen in my life. By complete coincidence, about a week later, the world happened to end. Leaving me with enough time to watch every episode of Taskmaster, but that wasn’t enough, I loved it so much that I wanted more time with those people. So I Googled them, and found that a lot of my favourite Taskmaster people could be found on other panel shows regularly. But many of these were long-running panel shows, with more than 100 episodes, and obviously I didn’t have time to watch all that. But then I remembered that the world had just ended, and I could watch whatever the hell I liked.

So I watched every episode of Taskmaster, and then every single episode of WILTY and 8 Out of 10 Cats and Catsdown. And then I watched every episode of Mock the Week and Big Fat Quizzes, and I created this blog in the middle of that.

I made a list of panel shows + sitcoms I wanted to watch. It took me a couple of years to work through that list. It added QI + Amstell-and-later-era Buzzcocks to my long-running panel shows, as well as a lot of other sitcoms and sketch shows and shorter panel shows and other TV shows (Russell Howard’s Good News/Russell Howard Hour, Mash Report, New World Order) and books and radio shows and collections of stand-up sets. I went through that entire list, while posting on this blog about my progress.

It was about a year ago that I finished all the stuff on that list, and then got into The Bugle. I went from there into being more interested in stand-up than in panel shows or sitcoms, and that’s pretty well led to where I am now. I first bought a Bandcamp recording by a man named Daniel Kitson in June 2022, and I have not known peace since. That led directly to August 2022, when I came across that video of those people taking apart a cow on stage, and I have definitely not known peace since I found that.

Part of my original Britcom list involved all 126 hours of the 2006-2008 episodes of the Russell Howard and Jon Richardson BBC 6 Music radio show. Russell left the show in 2008 because he basically got too famous to keep it up, and Jon kept running episodes, co-hosted with Matt Forde and various other guests, for the next few years. I’ve listened to every episode of those Jon and Russell years, but none from later. I actually have all the post-Russell era of that radio show downloaded to my hard drive, but I have not listened to them. It’s too depressing.

That’s the actual point of this post. All that other stuff is just background to the actual point. The background establishes my credentials, that I know British comedy. You know that stereotype that all autistic people are eight-year-old white boys who are obsessed with trains? Well I am an eight-year-old white boy, and these are my trains.

So I can say with certainty that I have checked, I’ve checked thoroughly and carefully, I’ve checked all of the comedy in Britain. And I can confirm that the saddest thing that’s ever happened in all of British comedy is the single fact I know about the Jon Richardson era of that radio show (which I know because someone on this website told me, I still haven’t listened to the episodes), which is that the first song he chose to play in the first episode he ever hosted post-Russell Howard was I Can Do It Without You by Kaiser Chiefs.

I wrote this entire post because that song just came up in my YouTube recommendations, and then I remembered that fact, and I would like to explain how qualified I am to say that that is the most depressing thing that has ever happened in British comedy. I mean, I realize we have a more recent thing that’s obviously objectively sadder and also indirectly involved Jon Richardson:

And, you know, Rik Mayall was cool. The last episode in season 4 of Blackadder was pretty rough. But nope, sorry, the saddest thing to ever happen in British comedy is Swindon-era Jon Richardson ending Russell Howard’s last radio episode by saying good luck but it’s fine and he doesn’t even need him, and then playing a Kaiser Chiefs song on the next episode. Whatever bad directions Russell Howard’s gone since, and whatever comparatively less bad but maybe not ideal directions Jon Richardson’s gone since, they will always have the time 126 hours of buildup led to the playing of a Kaiser Chiefs song somehow being one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard of.

(I’m like… sort of joking. I mean I’m joking about it being literally worse than Sean Lock dying. But it’s genuinely pretty fucking depressing. Fucking hell.)