* Id: ExtrapDNA * Revision: 2 * State: approved * * Log: * Revision 1 1999/01/27 St\'ephane Lussier * Initial submitted version. * * Checked-out 1999/05/15 Roel van der Meulen * * Checked-in with * Revision 2 1999/05/31 Roel van der Meulen * Edited and author-approved. * * Checked-out 1999/10/19 Mark Seaborn %t Douglas Adams' Fans, Psychological Profile Of %n 8S ready for review %s Why Can't Douglas Adams Fans Take His Procrastination For What It Is? %a Stephane Lussier (slussier@bigfoot.com) %d 19990108 %i Douglas Adams' Procrastrination And Its Effect On His Fans %i Chronic Extrapolation Disorder (CED) %i The Douglas-Adams Disease %i The Maddening Influence Of Douglas Adams %i Fandom-Induced Lunacy %x Writing Style, Douglas Adams' %e Somewhere in the world of science-fiction, there exists a writer known as "the very late Douglas Adams". He isn't dead. He isn't subject to frequent death threats either. He just takes time to do things. A _lot_ of time. His work remains in progress so long, seeing generations and generations of deadlines pass, that years later, by the time he comes back to it, it has turned into something almost unrecognizable -- probably a new life form. Because of this, some of his projects are now known to behave just like the apocalypse does: repeatedly announced but never actually coming. Many of his fans have long speculated on the meaning of this. They have spent days and nights chatting and pursuing threads, confronting the hidden mysteries of what may never come, trying to discover new enchantingly extravagant ways to relate deadlines to apocalypses, and to relate the procrastination of Douglas Adams to the procrastination of God[1]. For years, they tried to explain the unexplainable, to connect every little thing they knew to every other little thing, and to the greater things, which in turn were also connected to each other in their own incredible ways. With time, they came to find many intricate solutions. Of course, you should not trust any one of them. Chronic extrapolation is a very widespread condition amongst Douglas Adams fans and should in no way be made fun of. Tactful hitch-hikers prefer to speculate along with the fans, and to engage into semi-logical threads of exotic nonsense, rather than to ruin the fun with a boring accusation of lunacy. Real hitch-hikers shouldn't have any difficulty in adopting such an attitude since they usually suffer from the same mental quirks themselves. Perhaps the best known symptom of the disorder is the unnecessary urge to apply one's own, more or less limited, intellect to the invention of elaborate, semi-scientific nonsense. The chronic extrapolator will find strange new ways to make up meanings about meaningless numbers and go on endlessly about it in USENET groups. He will fabricate the most paranoid conspiration theories just to admire their aesthetics. He will dream up unbelievable cosmologies and forget to teach them as new religions. He will engage into unreliable pseudo-science for the burst of a joke instead of for the money. Economically speaking, chronic extrapolation can lead to a tragically impractical life. There is an alarming lack of scientific progress in finding a cure to this condition. The only research to have been done has come from hi-tech firms' management personnel who could no longer stand the conversations that some of their engineers where having. Common sense told them that it was impossible for them to have any control on what people cared to talk about, but they decided to disregard common sense and act anyway. Human resources experts worked intensively to identify problems that suited them and proposed solutions that suited them even more. Sadly for them, it only lead to far more annoying jokes. Their analysis showed that many science-fiction fans believe that this lack of interest for elaborate futilities can only be caused by excessive mind-numbing activity [2]. Because of this conclusion, it is more than likely that people suffering from CED will continue to amuse themselves with useless nonsense, no matter what is done against it. It is still unknown what effects on world economy it will have. [1] Not that he/she/it/they exist(s). Not that he/she/it/they don't (doesn't) exist either, whatever he/she/it/they might be. So let's not mention him/her/it/them anymore so we can stop using too many pronouns. He/She/It/They probably don't (doesn't) exist anyway. [2] The business people's analysis also argues that since CED victims can be an unreliable bunch of self-entertaining mythomaniacs, it isn't worth the effort for anyone to study this claim any further. %e *EOA*