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The following contains mild spoilers for The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.

Following its birth as a 1978 BBC Radio sitcom through its many and varied adaptations, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy has become an enduring part of our culture. Despite the fact its satire centers on the anxieties of Britain at the tail end of the ‘70s, its unique wit and surrealism have brought it worldwide fame. It is a rite of passage for at least one subset of British teens and their anglophile cousins, as well as a tech culture shibboleth that has embedded itself in the broader culture. Now, it has been reborn as a live immersive theatre production at London’s Riverside Studios that preserves the series most singular quality: Its messiness. 

Given it started as a half-hour radio comedy, Hitchhikers’ plot is surreal, episodic and prone to (what appear to be) digressions. But the broad shape of each version of the story sees Arthur Dent waking up to discover bulldozers about to demolish his home to make way for a new highway. He is distracted from his protest by his friend Ford, who reveals he is not an out-of-work actor, but an alien researcher for a book called The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Minutes later, the Earth itself is demolished to make way for a new interstellar highway, but Ford and Arthur hitchhike onto one of the ships demolishing the planet. 

The “book” itself is in fact a small tablet containing a Wikipedia-style trove of knowledge that acts as the series’ narrator. Still wearing his pajamas, Arthur is dragged across the universe in various adventures which culminate in meeting a group of multi-dimensional aliens looking to discover the ultimate meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Subsequent radio series and novels take the same characters forward, backward and sideways with diminishing returns. Adams’ love of the long shaggy dog joke means that the ultimate question and the ultimate answer is… “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?” “Forty-Two.” (God’s final message to his creation is a similar tale, revealed as “We apologise for the inconvenience.”) 

Image of the Vogon Cargo Hold, one of the immersive sets.

Each adaptation is twisted and turned to suit its new format, so there’s only a handful of essentials. Arthur, Ford, The Book, 42 and the Eagles’ Journey of the Sorcerer (the chorus of which is the theme) are the only mainstays. It should come as no surprise then that generous liberties have been taken here to compress the sprawling journey narrative into a format suitable for a live immersive theatre show. [If you’re unfamiliar, rather than sit and watch the action unfold on a stage, you’re instead walking around an environment with the story taking place in front of you. You can even engage with the actors directly at points, although only if you want to.] Here, you’ll be loitering in the bar of the Horse and Groom pub, the cargo hold of the Heart of Gold, the… cargo hold of the Vogon destructor ship and the factory floor at Magrathea. 

Fenchurch and Arthur lock eyes at the Horse and Groom.

To try and impose some degree of conventional narrative on the story, Hitchhiker’s Live takes the beats of the first story (in all its forms) and the romance from the fourth novel, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. We spend most of our time with Ford (Oliver Britten), while Arthur (Robert Thompson) flits in and out of the narrative as part of his universe-spanning quest to reunite with his beloved Fenchurch (Kat Johns-Burke). We get to spend a little time with Zaphod Beeblebrox (Lee V-G) and Slartibartfast (Richard Costello), while (one form of) Trisha McMillan (Lenora Crichlow) only appears as a recorded voice identified with a photo that looks a lot like a publicity shot from Avenue 5 rather than one taken fresh for this show. 

Slartibartfast (Richard Costello) holds court on the factory floor of Magrathea.

Hitchhikers’ digressive surrealism means it struggles against the limits imposed upon it by any and every medium it’s ever been made into. As someone who grew up with the novel version, I see that as definitive, but even the later works struggled to remain on the page. At times, the immersive theatre format works to the story’s detriment, meaning you’re likely to miss a beat or two if you’re not able to sprint to every corner of each scene. For instance, there were so many audience members gathering around the Jatravartids area that I thought I’d check out the emptier areas first. Which was a mistake, as Humma Kavula then engaged in a big song and dance number center stage that I’d missed the buildup for. Similarly, I didn’t even realize that the show featured Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged (Tom Bowen) until I read the cast list while writing this review.

The abbreviated nature of the storyline means you’re often missing not just the connective tissue but even a lot of the meat from the original. Some of the emotional weight of the set pieces feels unearned because the makers have elided a lot of the necessary everything. When you get to the big finish, it’s hard not to wish we’d seen some of the effort one character has made beyond their hair growing out to mark the passage of time. The more I watched the show, and its many musical numbers, the more I wished its creators had simply made a more traditional stage musical. It would have made for a smoother, more cohesive show, especially given the source material’s thematic and narrative complexity. 

Marvin the Paranoid Android (Andrew Evans) is feeling very depressed.

The immersive format does have its strengths, including the ability to pepper the set with little visual jokes. The Vogon Complaints Office is packed full of gags hidden in boxes and filing cabinets, as are the little references on the screens in the Horse and Groom set. But best of all is any and all time you get to spend with Marvin the Paranoid Android (Andrew Evans), a masterful mix of design, acting and puppetry. Rather than cram Evans into a suit, the actor has the beautiful Marvin puppet on a chest harness, giving it a fluidity of motion and expressiveness that previous versions could only dream of. It helps, too, that Marvin’s perpetual misery beautifully undercuts the more saccharine parts of the story.

I also need to heap praise upon the guide segments, both in their animation style and for Tamsin Grieg’s narration. I’d say Grieg (Black Books, Episodes)  is the true heir to original voice Peter Jones’ crown, bringing a perfect blend of voice-of-God exposition and dry undercutting. In fact, you’ll struggle to find a bad element in the whole production, especially in the well-choreographed set pieces where the cast acts against pre-recorded footage. It’s a technical marvel in several ways and it is obvious that every person involved in its creation is operating with a bottomless pit of love for the source material and Adams. It’s just that all of those elements don’t quite cohere enough to push the show from good and entertaining through to being a must-see. 

Consequently, I’d say if you’re local to London and are even vaguely familiar with Adams’ work, you should go and enjoy yourself. But I might warn Adams devotees from further afield they may find the production underwhelming if they’re making a big trip to go and see it. Like every other Hitchhikers’ adaptation, it’s a mess, but then the messiness has always been at least half the point.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-live-is-an-enjoyable-mess-140000853.html?src=rss 

I sat down to write this story hoping to point people to deals on RAM kits for their gaming PC builds, but after an extensive search, I’m sorry to say there aren’t any promotions worth even considering. Sure, if you visit Newegg or Amazon, you’ll find plenty of bundles listed as Black Friday specials, but following a quick visit to PCPartPicker or CamelCamelCamel, you’ll find many of those aren’t deals at all. 

Take this 32GB kit of 6,000MHz DDR5 RAM from G.Skill I found on Newegg. It’s one of the few “good” deals I found, but there’s a catch. It’s listed at $20 off its current $400 MSRP, with an additional $30 off if you use a promo code. To sweeten the deal, Newegg is even throwing in a NZXT all-in-one liquid cooler valued at $160. But here’s the thing, according to PCPartPicker, that same kit cost $155 a couple of months ago. Unless you can make use of the free cooler, you don’t need me to tell you $50 off a RAM kit that used to cost less than half of what it costs now is not a great buy. 

And it’s not just that one set of sticks from G.Skill — nearly every kit of DDR5 RAM I could find has increased in price in recent months. For instance, Amazon has listed this 32GB bundle from Crucial at $322. A little more than a month ago, you could get that same kit for $175. 

If it feels like the pandemic all over again, when it was impossible to buy a GPU at MSRP, you’re not far off the mark. Once again, there’s a component shortage, but this time around, it’s not cryptomining causing an insatiable demand for parts. Instead, it’s the booming AI industry buying up every RAM stick it can for their data center builds. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s been hard to ignore the amount of money that’s been thrown around by NVIDIA, Microsoft and others.  recently. Much of it has been of a seemingly circular nature, but that hasn’t done anything to dent demand for both short and long-term memory. 

The problem is that many of the companies that produce consumer-grade memory, including heavyweights like SK Hynix and Samsung, also make memory for AI servers, and most of the RAM coming off those production lines is going straight to high-volume clients like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, demand for RAM has been so strong that even the price of some DDR4 memory kits has gone up — if you can even find the older format in stock.      

A statement CyberPowerPC posted earlier this week gives a sense of just how dire the situation is right now. “Recently, global memory (RAM) prices have surged by 500 percent and SSD prices have risen by 100 percent,” the company said on X, adding it would be forced to increase the price of its pre-built PCs.

As a consumer, there’s little you can do at the moment. You can either buy now and pay extra, or wait in hopes the price of RAM will stabilize sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, with no signs of the AI boom cooling down in the immediate future, it’s hard to know when things might change. Save a bubble pop, the price of RAM is likely to remain high into early 2026, with the possibility of a trickle effect to SSD and GPU pricing.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/there-arent-any-black-friday-deals-on-ram-this-year-and-you-can-thank-ai-for-that-130000335.html?src=rss 

Two more Apple products, specifically Maps and Ads, could be big enough to be designated as gatekeepers under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The EU has announced that it has received notifications from the company that those services meet DMA thresholds. It will now have 45 days to decide whether to designate Apple as a gatekeeper for either of them.

Under DMA rules, services that have 45 million monthly active end users and 10,000 yearly business users in the past three financial years can earn the “gatekeeper” designation. That means to say, they’re considered to have a significant impact on their markets. Apple already has several products with the designation, namely the Safari web browser, the iOS and iPadOS, as well as the App Store. As such, it has to adhere to a strict set of rules for those services and is prohibited from favoring its own products over rivals and from locking users into its ecosystem.

Apple has submitted an official rebuttal and will discuss with the EU why Maps and Ads shouldn’t be designated, according to Reuters. The company said Maps sees very limited usage in the EU compared to its competitors, such as Google Maps. It also denied the Apple Ads is a major player in the bloc’s online advertising industry and said that it has minimal share compared to ad services by Google, Meta, TikTok and even X. “We look forward to further explaining to the European Commission why Apple Maps and Apple Ads should not be designated,” Apple said in a statement.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-eu-says-apple-maps-may-be-big-enough-to-be-considered-a-dma-gatekeeper-130000965.html?src=rss