Fascinating Douglas Adams archive

[Mr. Teatime]

<strong>[Community -> Update]</strong>

The connection to post-apocalyptic media is a bit tenuous, but since we cover the <a href="http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com/">Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie</a> here (because it's about life after the earth is destroyed), I thought people might be interested in <a href="http://www.planetmagrathea.com/afda.html">this archive</a>. It's a collection of all the posts <b>Douglas Adams</b> made on the <a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&l ... s-adams</a> newsgroup, from 1993 to his last post in 1998. Here's one chosen at random:<blockquote><i><b>Details, Details
<br>31st October 1993</b>
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<br>“I've just been looking through some of the postings here, and a very interesting thing emerges. (Well, interesting to me. You can please yourselves.)
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<br>“Here's what happens when I write something - first of all I decide what the story is and, as a way of not actually writing it, start to do some research on some of the information I might need. Finally I get down to writing the actual story, whereupon it turns out to be about something completely other than what I was intending, so none of the research is relevant. So then I suddenly find I'm busy writing about Norse Gods or fighter planes, about which I know zilch. So I rush round to the nearest bookshop to see if they've got anything and they probably haven't. Meanwhile I have to keep going or I'll lose what I'm doing - so I just have to make it up in the end.
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<br>“So when I then read all this extremely learned discussion about the distinguishing features of different fighter planes and what I therefore presumably intended, I feel rather sheepish because I don't know nuffin about any of it. Same with the Norse Gods. It's beginning to dawn on me that the Internet is going to be a great way of getting the information I want when I want it.
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<br>“Except... the other day I was writing a paragraph that had a mild aside about the number of flies in the world and what they probably weighed. I sent some e-mail to a very distinguished zoologist friend of mine, Richard Dawkins, to see if he could point me to some reliable statistics. He forwarded the request on to some world-authority entomologists and evenutually I was swamped with biomass information about the insect world. It was all extraordinarily interesting. Unfortunately I had by that stage decided that it wasn't a very good line anyway, and dropped it. Felt a bit guilty about that."</i></blockquote>It's very interesting reading, and it appears <b>Adams</b> was set on a movie of the Hitchhiker's guide for a long time (he talks about it in his very earliest posts to the newsgroup in 1993).
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<br>In other news related to the movie, <a href="http://www.douglasadams.se/">Douglas Adams Continuum</a> are reporting that there might be a 'leak' of some film footage sometime soon, though I can't get enthusiastic about it until I've seen some solid proof that it won't suck.
<br><BR>Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.planetmagrathea.com/index2.html">Planet Magrathea</A>