22) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams
Ah, much more fun. For me, the original radio series remains the one and only canonical version of the story, so it’s interesting to review how different bits of it were cut up and pasted together for the novelisation. One bit of good writing that is strikingly out of place is the introduction of Max Quordlepleen, the compère at Milliways: an unusual piece of character-sketching from Adams, which is original to the book, and then doesn’t really go anywhere. (But the Disaster Area section is also original, and delightful.) Interesting that here Zarniwoop is left alone with the ruler of the universe by Zaphod and Trillian, his offence being, as far as I can tell, that he was being a boring git – rather different from the radio version’s dramatic denouement of Arthur abandoning everyone else after he discovers who really was responsible for the destruction of the Earth.
Anyway. Reading the final sections I begin to inderstand why some people are drawn to Ford/Arthur slash, a concept I don’t think I could have imagined until I got to know
Ok, here’s what Tumblr is good at: Tumblr is great for posting quick hits of pictures, videos, sharing links, things like that. These days, if I Delicious something? I almost immediately Tumblr it too, because that’s where my friends are anymore. It’s great for seeing ridiculous things, and it’s a lot of fun.
Here’s what Tumblr is not so good for: it’s not great for actual conversations. They’re happening there anyway, and there’s a lot of good stuff going on, but it’s difficult to keep track of with the reblogging method.
Tumblr is mediocre at: crediting sources. This isn’t actually Tumblr though, they make it really easy to include click-through links and incorporate proper credit, but people are lazy and won’t do it a lot of the time. Really though, people keep talking about how that’s a Tumblr problem, but I sure see it in every social media platform, so I think it’s just a people problem.
It took me a long time to get into Tumblr, but now I love it like cake and use it obsessively every day. I mean, when it’s up and running, which is actually another thing they’re kind of mediocre at. They need more servers or something, I don’t know. I want to say it’s one of those things where the usage exploded way faster than the people running it could ever have expected, but that’s been true for a year or two now, so I’d think they would have sorted it out. *shrug* When it’s up, it’s great!