Inspired by the ease of use of Imgur and the utility of a good old fashion phone call, I decided to create a Reddit-centric platform for super-lightweight, authentication-free voice channels. Go to channel42.io, generate a new subchannel, share that Room’s URL as you see fit, and chat by voice. Anyone who visits the URL is automatically connected w/ mic. Rooms are capped at four people, and expire after two hours. I created a 90 second walkthrough of how it works here.
On Reddit, the people we want to talk to are all around us, Channel 42 is just a voice layer to use as needed. Sometimes interactions on this site outgrow the message board format. In some situations, it’s better to chat by voice, which conveys infinitely more bandwidth and nuance. Do we really need to share credentials (discord, email, phone, etc) just to have a quick chat with someone? Seems like overkill. Thats where Channel 42 comes in.
Traveling? In my experience travelers love to share tips and tell stories - DM someone who has been there and posted about it, ask if you can chat. Have a dream job? Pick the brain of someone in your future career's sub. Love debate? Dive into the issues with someone you engaged on r/changemyview. You get the idea. This is a gift for you all, do with it as you please.
Let me know what you think!
edit: spelling, added a few words for flow
Cool idea. What happened to the first 41 channels???
We don't talk about those! No in all seriousness I wanted channel19 because channel 19 is what truckers use to communicate on old CB radios. But it was taken. So I started searching around and found 42. According to hitch hikers guide to the galaxy 42 is the meaning of life so I thought it would be fun
It's actually just the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. They asked Deep Thought what the answer was without knowing what the question itself was, so while they knew the answer was unmistakably 42, it has no meaning without knowing the question (which was left unspecified for both those asking and the readers).
Yes appreciate the clarification! It's been a while since my last readthrough I am probably due
Don't feel bad, yesterday I was reading the forward to the hitch hikers omnibus and was shocked to discover that Fords' last name is prefect and not perfect as I have believed for years. thanks dyslexia.
I must say with my current reread I still find myself having a good chuckle here and there.
enjoy.
P. s. May I recommend the audio production hexagonal phase iirc it was a blast!
Haha, "Perfect" seems like just the kind of name he would pick for himself, it really fits his character!
I'm amused at the thought of you getting to the part where mentions how he named himself after a car, and thinking that Ford must have had a model called the "Perfect". :)
They did have a Prefect, though.
No way! Did they name it after the Hitch Hiker's character?
No, it began production pre-war. He was named after the car.
I know. We were literally just talking about Ford Prefect being named after the car, I was mightily confused why you thought that the fact Ford had a car named a Prefect would be new information. :)
This is why we have the /s markup!!
You've been a redditor since 2005, you should be used to navigating the internet without such niceties. /s
I'm pretty sure they found the question in a later book. Earth was the computer created to find the question and moments before it did it was destroyed. Arthur Dent was there moments before. Ford Prefect suggests that because he was maybe he could get the question by randomly drawing scrabble tiles from a bag. He did and >!it was a math question that equalled 42.!<
Huh. Marvin also knows it, he offered to tell everyone but they were busy so he never brings it up again.
Classic Marvin
It's such a shame he got shot in the face.
Nice.
That always bugged me.Feom the first book Marvin says he has a brain the size of a planet. Coincidently, Earth was a computer the size of a planet, and the characters never connect the dots.
It's been a long time since I read these books. Does Marvin actually says that he knows the answer?
Yeah, they are falling into a sun or something, second book I think? Or maybe it is as they escape the mice planet.
Marvin says he can read the question in Arthur's brain waves, but then they have an idea to save themselves, so they rush to do that and marvin goes off to sulk.
As someone with only 35ish% knowledge of what's going on in this thread, your comment was defo the clincher to me being stumped.
Guess I need to go read it!
Pretty good books on the whole, though they do suffer somewhat from being iconic, in that quite a few other works have done something similar later on, so it loses some of the impact the originality of it had.
I feel that way with films/movies occasionally. (The most recent being Everything Everywhere all at Once, which, although was a decent film, felt as though it was lauded as the first moving picture with colour and sound.)
Anyway, unpopular opinions to myself and all that.
Oh no, it's better. >!The question did not even equal 42!<
because >!the experiment was corrupted by a crash landing of the B ark, full of a whole civilizations worth of unwanted people.!< Rip Douglas Adams, you truly were one of a kind.
Or there really is something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
it can be both
Nah, just Earth. And not the Earth really, just the people from there.
The question was determined to be >!What do you get when you multiply six by nine. The joke being, it does clearly not equal 42. As they pointed out they always suspected something was fundamentally wrong with the universe. !<
Lol, I think I remember this now. Didn't the bag run out of letters? I think I remember thinking it would've been the rest of the problem if they had more. It's been nearly 20 years since I read it.
It does. In base 13 :D
Douglas Adams might have been a sorry case, but he didn't wrote any jokes in base 13.
I read somewhere else that it picked 42 because that’s the ASCII code for the * symbol, which is often seen as a “joker” or “everything” symbol in code.
That's a fan theory debunked by the author. It's just a random number with no inherent meaning.
Supposedly Stephen Fry knows what the "real" reason is, but he promised Douglas Adams that he'd never tell.
Gotcha, noted. Thanks for letting me know.
I thought it didn't multiply to 42 and there was a joke about the universe being a little off?
Yes, a few of the other commenters pointed this out. My memory was off. As Adams said in the foreword, hopefully this sets the record straight or at least firmly crooked.
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Alongside the implication that humans were not an integral part of the Earth for the purposes of discerning the Ultimate Question, the math problem is probably just a joke and wasn't intended to serve as the actual Question.
54?
What do you get if you multiply six by nine?
14 used to be the calling channel for non-truckers in the UK, 19 for truckers as per US.
I didn't know that! Interesting.
Channel 9 serves a similar purpose on VHF for boats.
I thought you just liked Deadmau5
I almost forgot about dead mau 5
He was correct.
Interestingly enough 42 is used in some remote indigenous communities as the general community VHF band
It was meant to be! Thanks for sharing