Phase One, Day Thirteen: Two Hoopy Froods and One Lady Who May Need an Extra Towel

Equally as important as studying the mistakes of past Overlords is engaging in training exercises to make sure you can accomplish basic tasks. Even tyrants of the New World need to put pants on in the morning. My favorite way to practice strategy is one of the oldest text adventure games in the book: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nolan.shtml, just in case the text link fails me).

The objective of the game is very simple: make a cup of tea. In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit I have never made it this far, nor do I know anyone who has. Odysseus claims to have a friend who beat this game, but once you get to the friend-of-a-friend stage, you are in urban legend territory as far as I’m concerned.

A little background: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2 to those in the know) has been a radio show, nearly-six-book trilogy, record, BBC miniseries, computer game, and movie, more or less in that order. It was written by Douglas Adams, a wildly funny man given to infrequent bursts of frantic activity and long stretches of procrastination, punctuated, according to him, with many baths and sandwiches. H2G2 was a cult hit almost from the get-go, and Adams and the gang were worried that when they made a game out of it, it would prove too simple for people who knew the series by heart and impossible for those who were coming to the canon for the first time. The solution they agreed on was to make it maddeningly difficult for everyone.

Play it, I dare you. This game will throw all kinds of seemingly-inconsequential details at you that you will not realize were all-important until it is too late (pick up your junk mail when you leave your house, or you might as well stop playing now. Also, remember to feed the dog a cheese sandwich), and will taunt you when you get things wrong. The hours I spent trying to get ahold of the Babel fish to stick in my ear…. But the thing is, it is addictive. You find yourself insisting that it must be able to beat this. “It’s just a freaking cup of tea!” you will scream at your monitor. “All I want is one stinking lousy cup of TEA!!!” You will never have wanted anything more in your life. Such is the focus, the all-consuming desire, that empires are made of.

Douglas Adams, may you rest in peace, in the knowledge that you always knew where your towel was.

Fortunately, Douglas Adams is not the only mastermind I can use as an inspiration and role model for my own empire. Terry Pratchett is just as funny, and quite a bit more prolific. He wrote the Discworld series (you remember, it’s the one about a flat planet balancing on the backs of four elephants, who in turn stand on the shell of the Turtle, the Great A’Tuin, who forever swims through space), which should tell you all you need to know. In case you need to know more (and because I love talking about Pratchett), remind me to tell you later about his character Havelock Vetinari, the Patrician of the metropolis off Ankh-Morpork and one of the best Overlords I’ve come across yet.

I like Terry Pratchett’s website (www.terrypratchettbooks.com) very much. It’s clean, simple, but ties the theme of his work together very neatly. The icons are all familiar elements of the different Discworld storylines, you can search by book (a handy thing, with a series of more than 40 installments—and Discworld isn’t even all Pratchett has written), and the simple black background keep things from getting too busy.

It took me a while to find a writer’s site that I didn’t like as much, and I was surprised by whose I found myself really disappointed by. Elizabeth Gilbert (http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/writing.htm) is best-known for Eat, Pray, Love, the quest memoir of finding healing through food, prayer, and new relationships in three gorgeous countries. I’m still reading the book right now (book club is at the end of the month), but I’d assumed that someone who’d trekked all over the world and was having Julia Roberts of all people play her in the movie would know their way around the WWW. It’s not an absolutely terrible site, but the yellow background is a little glaring and I’m not a fan of the awkwardly cut-and-paste photo of her (you can see the original white background through her hair). That photo stays on every page, so it took me a few tries to realize I had to scroll down to find the text that had changed. Also, reading lots of italic type on a yellow background was not so fun for my eyes.

I have lots more to tell you, about literary journals and a site that begins to capture the essence of my own dream, but right now, I have a strategy meeting to get to and some tea to make.

One day I will beat that blasted game, and then nothing will stop me ever again.