Beware of the Leopard: the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy podcast

Join Mark, Danny and Jon Bounds as they play through as much of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game as they could. Spoiler: it's not much.

This was recorded live on Friday 25th May 2018, for Towel DAy.

Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the M section of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Towel Day is coming!

Join us on Friday 25th June for a special live event! Follow @btlpodcast for details.

New York

In So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Ford Prefect has a dream in which he meets a creature formed out of the pollutants of New York's East River.

“I instinctively feel”, says the creature, “that I need to be beautiful. Am I?”

NowWhat

The planet of NowWhat was named after the opening words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across light years of space to reach the furthest unexplored outreaches of the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell. There weren’t any other towns to speak of. Settlement on NowWhat had not been a success and the sort of people who actually wanted to live on NowWhat were not the sort of people you would want to spend time with.

Arthut finds NowWhat after a year traveling to the spacial coordinates of the Earth, but ends up here, which is another planet along the probability axis.

NutriMatic Drinks Dispenser

The NutriMatic Drinks Dispenser is Sirius Cybernetics' machine that delivers a cup of liquid that is almost, but not entirely unlike tea. It does this by analysing the user's brain to see what they might find neutritional and enjoyable, but no-one knows why, because it invariably spits out the same liquid.

Octraventral heebiephone

The octraventral heebiephone is a musical instrument that needs more than one mouth to play.

Oglaroon

In one corner of the eastern galactic arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire “intelligent” population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.

Old Thrashbarg

Old Thrashbarg is an enthusiastic storyteller. A bullshit artist from Lamuella, who Arthur learns to tolerate with a degree of detatched irony.

Join Mark, Jon and Jon as they traverse the M section of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Mice

Trillian - remember her? - kept some pet mice, who turned out to be the most intelligent beings on earth. We still don't know what species they are when they're not projecting themselves as little furry cratures with a cheese fixation.

Milliard Gargantubrain

The Milliard Gargantubrain is a super-computer from Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond.

Milliways

Milliways is the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It was either built on the remains of Magrathea, or Frogstar World B, whichever you prefer.

A Bastablonian ad agency came up with the tagline "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways".

Mind zoo

Marvin was once the star exhibit of a mind zoo. He had to sit on a box and tell his story whilst people told him to cheer up and think positive.

Missing matter of the universe

For a long period of time there was much speculation and controversy about where the so-called “missing matter” of the Universe had got to. All over the Galaxy the science departments of all the major universities were acquiring more and more elaborate equipment to probe and search the hearts of distant galaxies, and then the very centre and the very edges of the whole Universe, but when eventually it was tracked down it turned out in fact to be all the stuff which the equipment had been packed in.

Multicorticoid Perspicutron Titan Muller

The Multi-corticoid Perspi-cutron Titan Muller is a super-computer of unspecified parameters and focus. Deep Thought calls it a cybernetic simpleton in comparison to itself.

Murray Bost Henson

Murray Bost Henson is a journalist Arthur knows, with odd turns of phrase like “Arthur, my old soup spoon, my old silver turreen”.

Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the M section of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Matter transference beams

Ford and Arthur are teleported from the smouldering remains of the Earth to the Vogon ship, via a matter transference beam. A song that regularly used to be chanted by huge crowds outside the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Teleport Systems factory on Happi-Werld III goes "If you have to take me apart to get me there, then I don't want to go".

Max Quordlepleen

Max Quordlepleen is the MC at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. He's an absolute pro, who divides his time between this upscale restaurant and the Big Bang Burgar Chef.

Megabrantis

The Megabrantis cluster is the political hub of the galaxy. The Vogons migrated away from their homeworld to setup shop here. Brantisvogan is a planet within the cluster, and you can go back to episode 8 to hear all about that.

Megadodo Publications

Megadodo Publications was once the home of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and one of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor. I think we can assume that Playbeing is another Megadodo rag, so presumably the company was doing fairly well.

Mella

Mella is a Golgafrincham woman Arthur meets (along with Agda) on the prehistoric Earth.

She had recently escaped a lifetime of staring every morning at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit tubes of toothpaste in the art department of a Golgafrinchan ad agency.

We never got to find out what happened between Mella and Arthur, because the book ended.

Memory dump module

A memory dump module is a small unit that Ford uses to copy data from his Guide (after wiping off the bits of fluff and biscuit crumbs). Adams clearly understood not only the need for data portability, but that people would be pretty careless with these devices. Nowadays we call them USB sticks or something similar.

Join Danny, Jon and Mark as they barrel through the M section of the Guide.

Links

Danny joins Mark and Jon Bounds to discuss crisps, Sundays and Zeno’s paradox. It’s all in the L section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Links