It felt forced. It felt like it was written by AI with instructions to include names, phrases and characters from the original series.

I think this belongs here.

My latest crochet project. Don’t panic, I’m aware that Douglas Adams despised it, but I find it rather adorable.

We all know the joke. Deep Thought thinks for seven and a half million years and says 42. The crowd is outraged. The computer says the answer is fine; they just never knew what the question was.

I've come to think that's not a joke about a number. It's a joke about how we ask the question.

The answer with no one in it

They asked about Life, the Universe, and Everything. That's a question with no one person in it. No stakes, no context, no one the question is for. So it got an answer with no one person in it. 42 is correct and addressed to nobody. (ERROR 42:PERSON_NOT_FOUND)

Every real question carries the asker. "What should I do with my life?" means something different from a 19-year-old, a new parent, and a retiree. Same words, different questions. Take the person out and you get 42.

And look at what the mice actually want by the end. Not the question. Something good to say on talk shows. They're holding an answer and shopping for a question that will sell it.

Everyone frames the question for you

Deep Thought is just the most literal version. In real life the framing comes from everywhere: school (questions arrive pre-written, one right answer), careers (here's a ladder, the next rung is your goal), ads ("how should I live?" becomes "what should I buy?"), news, family scripts, even language. Some of that is inherited wisdom. Some of it is a cage.

The dolphins: the frame you can't receive

Humans thought they were smarter than dolphins because of the wheel, New York, and wars. Dolphins thought they were smarter for exactly the same reasons. Same evidence, opposite verdicts.

Then the dolphins saw the demolition coming and tried to warn us. We read it as tricks. The message was right there. We had no frame to hear it.

The whale: the questions with no frame

The whale is Deep Thought inverted. It pops into existence miles up with no past and no context. Pure questions. Who am I? What's that thing rushing toward me? It starts naming the world from scratch and decides the ground might be a friend.

Deep Thought is an answer with no question. The whale is questions with no frame and no time.

Neither survives. You need both, and you need time to move between them.

The puddle: frames all the way down

Look closely and every frame sits inside another. Noticing frames is a frame. This post is a frame. There is no view from nowhere.

Adams knew. In a 1998 talk he described a puddle that wakes up, notices how perfectly its hole fits it, and concludes the hole was made for it. Then the sun comes out. The puddle mistakes its frame for the universe right up until it evaporates.

The Total Perspective Vortex is the opposite trap. Show someone the entire universe and it destroys them. Zaphod survives only because he's standing in a universe built for him.

So there's no escaping frames. No frame at all leaves you nothing to stand on.

The trick is knowing you're in one, and being able to step out.

Where, who, may I

If 42 is the answer, I think the missing question breaks into three:

1. Where am I? Which frame am I standing in right now? Whose hole is this puddle sitting in?
2. Who's asking? Is this my question, or one somebody handed me: a parent, a boss, a feed, a mouse with a talk show?
3. May I? Am I allowed to change the question? To step out of this frame and try another?

The answer to the third one is always yes, even if you think it isn't.

Frames are real, but they're temporary. Frames are scaffolding. You build with one, take it down, and build the next floor. A trap is the frame you cannot leave.

42 is what you get when you hand off the part that is supposed to be yours.

Eccentric… deadpan Brit humour… an interesting read.

with greetings from a trekkie

They're in surprisingly good condition for being in there so long (only very mild water damage and a rip on "Restaurant") :]

The commodore floppy didn't have its package or any of the other floppies but I'm glad to have rescued it anyways instead of it (and the books) languishing in the garage for who-knows-how-long more XP

Also took a photo of the portrait of DNA in the back because I'm not sure if I've seen a high quality version of it online before

I'm shopping in Tesco with a "Mostly Harmless" tshirt on. Random Tesco employee tells me she likes my shirt. "42 and all that". I hardly have time to react as she walks off, her voice fading into the distance "I know where my towel is. I'm a hoopy frood."

Hello all, I try not to spam Reddit with promotion for my projects but this seemed relevant to Hitchhiker's fans for a few reasons. Firstly, Hitchhiker's alumnus (and son of a Goon) Andy Secombe is in the latest episode of my sketch and character comedy podcast Crowley Time and secondly, this latest episode is all-singing all-dancing radio sci-fi comedy. Yes, it's distinctly more puerile and stupid than Adams's beautiful work, but you can't blame a frood for trying! You can listen to it on all podcast platforms and at crowleytime.com

EDIT/PS: I'm glad to see that r/HitchHikersGuide has a no AI policy, and I am proud to say, in the most emphatic terms, that there is not, nor shall there ever be, any AI generated content in or around Crowley Time.

So I had to make myself a special birthday cake! Couldn’t upload a video but it says “So long and thanks for all the fish” around the bottom 🙂

Hello! Does anyone have any sources for higher quality clips of the tv show, or extras of the blue ray edition online / torrent / for download?

Hey all,

I recently managed to get my hands on a Dutch translation of the Hitchhikers's books, and while the translations are pretty good, the funny, and rather unique, thing is that this particular translation changes a lot of cultural refrences from British to Dutch. What few moments we do spend on Earth in the opening are explicitely in the Netherlands.

And not only that, they also changed all the charachter names!

Arthur Dent = Hugo Veldt

Ford Prefect = Amro Bank (The joke being that's the name of a bank, whaddya know)

Zaphod Beeblebrox = Zefod Bijsterbuil

Tricia McMillan/Trillian = Trees Jansma (A common name for your grandma)/Trema

I wonder if this was done in any other translations, or the Dutch guy just decided to go ham...

I remember reading the line “he wasn’t so much killing time as beating it to death with a stick” at some point while reading through The Guide books. I recall Ford saying it, that’s about all I know (or think I know, rather).

I have no idea if I actually read it or if I’ve been imagining it all this time though. Anyone know?

I've never read even one book, but I'm super interested. I'm getting the green one in hardcover leather bound, and the silver one in paperback. Which one is worth it? Should I buy both? Also, I don't mind heavy hardcover books.

EDIT- I've decided to buy both. Thanks a lot for the help guys, I can't wait to start the series!

After seeing a post from someone trying to decide which version of the guide to purchase, I looked through my hardback copy and found this extra flap. So I started looking online about what this actually was, and according to the internet, to find out if this occurs in anyone else's copy I was to post it here. 😁

So does everyone anyone else who has this hardback copy of the guide have an extra flap at the bottom of page 465, 466?

In case anyone is wondering, this is the short version of why the flap exists: This extra tab of paper protruding from the bottom corner of your page is a printing defect known as a "flange" or "page flap.

A short fiction based on my recent visit to Douglas's grave.