"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story."

But of course nobody is an entirely reliable narrator, and certainly not the author of The Guide so... Maybe?

(Edit: I see a peer respondent already linked it, but I'll leave this anyway)

- F is the 6th letter of the alphabet.

- I is the 9th letter of the alphabet.

- S is the 19th letter of the alphabet.

- H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.

6 + 9 + 19 + 8 = 42. IOW, the dolphins probably manipulated the experiment so that humans would give them more fish.

He wrote back an exceedingly kind hand-written postcard informing me that he appreciated my curiosity but that there was, in fact, no deeper meaning to 42 other than it was a nice-sounding number.

I could swear blind I'd heard/read him saying that it was simply a number that could sound amusing, be pronounced rather incredulously, was big enough for the multiplication at the end not working to work, without being too long to repeat in the actors lines or having an existing "meaning" that he was aware of (so 69 was way out because of reasons, as were things like 88 too for having commonly known (in the UK at the time) bingo calls, etc.).

Then again, my ancestors may have previously sworn blind about the giant mutant star goat thing so you might not want to trust the ponderings of anyone of my lineage...

"The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance."

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9MRYJz9-4

Actually Stephen Fry claims that Douglas Adams told him. But it seems he is taking it to the grave to honor his vow.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27...?

It is rather easy to assume that ASCII and wildcards would be common knowledge since they predate the series while being common knowledge today (at least among those who use computers), but was this true when the series was written? ASCII is by no means the only character encoding scheme and asterisks are by no means the only wildcard character.

And it was totally what he meant. The ASCII wildcard-existentialism theory is too consistent with the themes Adams explores through the series to have been an accident.

I fully agree with Musk when he said he regards the Hitchhiker’s Guide as a great work of philosophy, whether or not he was joking. It totally worked for me as I was trying to progress beyond nihilism.

https://www.harrods.com/en-us/shopping/harrods-no-42-earl-gr...

It's not a binary joke, either.

However, if you add together the numbers on all the faces of a pair of normal 6-sided dice...

I went through a PhD. Should I have worked on an hypothesis that could be tested just by sending a mail, this would have been about the first thing I would have tried to do I think. You know, just to be sure. And I would not have missed the occasion to communicate with Douglas Adams, of course, at least to make this PhD more worth it!

edit: at least, a multi year effort to produce hundreds of pages filled with absurdity was not completely unfamiliar to Douglas, I guess.

I'd recommend the TV show for anyone that has gotten a bit too good at predicting endings a few episodes before the end. This one doesn't follow the traditional story arcs.

Which is admittedly true. But it is still one of those shows where the characters are entertaining enough on their own that you don't even care about the plot, which isn't half bad.

I would not have minded a third season.

10min story bites - cruisy, drama, comedy, horror. Little bit of everything except the usual.

Many games had wonderful worlds to explore, but I am firmly in the camp who believes that obtuse puzzles took the adventure out of adventure games (may they be text or graphical) which led to their premature demise. Thankfully modern IF writers seem to live by a different set of rules.

There's also the matter of Google users who inexplicably lose access to their account, and the response is so utterly obtuse it would cause a Vogon to blush.

I would never wish for any Google or Facebook employee to be "First against the wall" but I do admire Adams' unerring prescience in this matter.

Never did think of an appropriate name for the new desktop though.

edit: thanks for all of the suggestions!

Still a bit sad that "Hitchhiker's" wasn't in the box of questionable disks we got, but "Planetfall" seemed to be inspired by the story (at least the beginning when you're on the ship, ducking Ensign Blather and trying to avoid death in a safety webbing).

Also, recommended modern games to play:

- Anchorhead. Like Alone in the dark, but CLI.

- Spider and Web. Spies-based game based on replaying the same scenes over and over, with gadgets and psychological twists.

- Vicyous Cycles. Same, but in a different way.

- Curses. Time traveling game, medium-hard.

- Jigsaw. Simialr to curser, but much harder.

- Slouch over Bedlam. Victorian setting + steampunk.

put all in thing

For example, there are 10 objects scattered in the game that you have to collect for a puzzle at the end. They are never mentioned when you look around the room. At the end of the game Marvin will ask you for one of those objects. You might be thinking "ok, so if I miss one I still have a 90% chance of completing the game right.", but the game checks and if you're missing one he will always ask for that one object. You have to collect them all.

There's a bit in the article where the author talks about the clues for the Babel fish puzzle, but even he has to admit that the last part is basically just completely random based on what you happen to have in the inventory. Also, he doesn't mention that the puzzle is timed. If you don't complete it in a set number of moves you die. It is a game that is relentlessly unfair to the player.

I know this is a lot of words about an old game, but the Hitchhikers Guide series was one of my favorite books growing up and I was so excited when my parents bought this for the Commodore 64. I played it many many times, had the Babel Fish puzzle and others down pat, but still only made it maybe 1/3 of the way through the game before getting completely stuck.