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  • Project Galactic Guide (or PGG)

    From @lkosov@tilde.town to tilde.projects on Tue Sep 8 19:46:43 2020
    Another fun, long-forgotten bit of 'net history is Project Galactic Guide, which was born in the (even longer-forgotten) Usenet group
    alt.galactic-guide.

    What was it? A somewhat tongue-in-cheek encyclopedia of universal knowledge (real and... less-real), inspired by the eponymous Guide in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels.

    It never numbered more than a few hundred articles, but it was funny and
    quirky and it predates, for example, Wikipedia, by quite a bit. It used to
    have a website, which was abandoned long ago. Fortuitously, copies survive
    in the Wayback Machine.

    Here's an index by title of all the articles, from 2007:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20071008061047/http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/tindex.shtml

    A few choice examples, with excerpts, follow.

    A Beginner's Guide to Vi: https://web.archive.org/web/20071014202127/http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/2R94.html

    "The best way to recognize a vi user is to listen for the well known sounds "Ooops!," "Aha!" and "Finished, before my partner even have managed to load the text file into
    Word!"."

    The Ladies' Room: https://web.archive.org/web/20071021130640/http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/2S57.html

    "Dr. Georg Schlaufel from the University of Berlin, conjectured that there was a confined disturbance in the Time-Space Continuum in each of these locations, allowing, somehow, more people to fit into a smaller space than previously thought
    possible."

    Ice-Cream-Induced Killing Frenzy: https://web.archive.org/web/20071013183831/http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/2R141.html

    "Several of the guests later complained about finding wooden splinters from the spoon in their ice
    cream."

    Happy Hour, How to Fit In: https://web.archive.org/web/20071014201031/http://www.galactic-guide.com/articles/9S1.html

    "After an unfortunate accident involving my new spaceship (a sleek-looking Mach II Hypership), four Malaroonian prostitutes, and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, I was forced to spend several years trying to fit into the odd culture of the planet
    Earth."

    If you stumble across any other particularly notable entries, feel free to share. :)


    --
    Inanities: gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key) He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113
  • From Dario Niedermann@dnied@tilde.institute to tilde.projects on Wed Sep 9 12:03:03 2020
    On 2020-09-08, lkosov <lkosov@tilde.town> wrote:
    [...]
    alt.galactic-guide.

    What was it? A somewhat tongue-in-cheek encyclopedia of universal knowledge (real and... less-real), inspired by the eponymous Guide in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels.

    It never numbered more than a few hundred articles, but it was funny and quirky and it predates, for example, Wikipedia, by quite a bit. It used to have a website, which was abandoned long ago. Fortuitously, copies survive
    in the Wayback Machine.

    You're in for a treat...

    <https://h2g2.com/>

    For a long time the h2g2 pages were hosted on the BBC website, then they
    got their own domain. Still a cool and unique place to this day, and
    still active!

    --
    Dario Niedermann. Also on the Internet at:

    gopher://darioniedermann.it/ <> https://www.darioniedermann.it/
    --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113