The forum at the end of the universe

February 14, 2011 12:01 PM

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Starship Titanic website sat a specious message board with posts by the senior crew of the fictional ship. This is not its story." The Economist blog "Babbage" explores (in decidedly Adamsian style) the fascinating story of the Starlight Lines forum and its "accidental" community, as told by Mefi's own Yoz Grahame in this truly epic comment from last December.

(Also, just out of curiosity, did anyone ever manage to get the game running using the guide from the post? Because I got contacted by a couple of people afterwards who were having trouble, but didn't hear about anyone actually getting it working.)

posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter-Related at 12:01 PM (18 comments total)

All of my posts lately seem to be saying something along the lines of "thanks for posting this" but there it is, thanks for posting this.

I missed the original thread, but found it fun and fascinating to go through, even though I never have and likely never will play the game.
posted by Stagger Lee at 12:43 PM on February 14, 2011

I tried, but could not get the game working. I got the Mac OS working all right [on XP], but installation of the game never succeeded, and I gave up after a few days' fiddling. I kept all the files, though, just in case.
posted by tomboko at 1:08 PM on February 14, 2011

Starship Titanic was an epic video game based on a story by Douglas Adams that he was also supposed to turn into a book, but—as is invariably the case with every story involving Mr Adams, deadlines, promises to keep said deadlines, promises following failure to keep promises to keep said deadlines, and so on—he did not.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." — Douglas Adams
posted by grouse at 1:19 PM on February 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

bugger... a posts in the MeVerse on Adams and Vonnegut on the same day? Is this my past catching up to me? All we need now is a Henson post now.
posted by edgeways at 1:41 PM on February 14, 2011

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." — Douglas Adams

This is what I think every time I hear one of them flying past me.
posted by ocherdraco at 1:49 PM on February 14, 2011

How about random musings on a Muppets version of the Odyssey?
posted by kmz at 1:50 PM on February 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

How about random musings on a Muppets version of the Odyssey

I haven't even clicked the link, but I already have the whole thing cast in my mind. Scary.
posted by hippybear at 2:22 PM on February 14, 2011

Yup, pretty much the same casting. Even scarier!
posted by hippybear at 2:23 PM on February 14, 2011

That was pretty much my favourite post of the year Rhaomi, with or without Yoz's comment. Tasty work
posted by Jofus at 2:29 PM on February 14, 2011

I tried, but could not get the game working.

Consider yourself lucky.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 2:31 PM on February 14, 2011

I tried, but could not get the game working.

Consider yourself lucky.

If I remember my encounters with this game correctly, it was working, but I was still convinced it was broken.
posted by hippybear at 2:34 PM on February 14, 2011

Rhaomi: " (Also, just out of curiosity, did anyone ever manage to get the game running using the guide from the post? Because I got contacted by a couple of people afterwards who were having trouble, but didn't hear about anyone actually getting it working.) "

I've downloaded the files to my Ubuntu laptop but haven't had time to mess with them yet. Hopefully this weekend after I'm not so crazed.
posted by zarq at 2:41 PM on February 14, 2011

Yep, I managed it. It was a bit of a pain, but all the info needed was on the sites you linked to. It's a fun game and I had been trying to get it to work for years. I played it when it was new and had good memories of it, but nothing seemed to work until your post. Thanks, Rhaomi!
posted by Zero Gravitas at 3:48 PM on February 14, 2011

Can we get rhaomi an HTML entity? Maybe a small crown?
posted by boo_radley at 4:41 PM on February 14, 2011

i never got it to work on my macbook pro (10.6.6). the instructions didn't quite work for macs, and i had to fiddle with a bunch of things. i got the emulator running, loaded the disk images, even got it to install... but when it came to play it asked me to insert the cd. (i actually even tried burning the disk images to CDs to try to trick the emulator, stupid as that sounds, but that obviously failed).

my friend tried on windows vista and also failed.

if there's anyone who figured out how to get it to work on either of these systems, i'd be ETERNALLY grateful. (please oh please!)
posted by timory at 6:07 PM on February 14, 2011

I am an Economst reader but somehow I have never come across the Babbage blog. Nice to discover it at last!

Many thanks for this and the original Starship Titanic post.

Live long and prosper, share and enjoy.
posted by philipy at 6:23 PM on February 14, 2011

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." — Douglas Adams

I loved this quote until I read the Nick Webb biography of Adams, and holy crap, the years of misery behind that joke!
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:44 PM on February 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

Wow. Like seriously. Wow.
posted by From Bklyn at 12:15 AM on February 15, 2011