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A L S O__T O D A Y Getting MUDdy with Xena By Moira Muldoon A new online game lets fans of the TV show explore their textual fantasies - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is the Mac OS8 all that and a bag of chips? Or is it a gigantic waste of time? Weigh in on Apple's latest OS in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Revenge of the early adopters By Andrew Leonard Angry DVD owners didn't like a new video-rental technology -- so they fought back on the Net (04/29/98) Betrayed! By Evan Marx A writer's engagement unravels -- thanks to a telltale e-mail message (04/28/98) Epistolary romance, digital style By Jenn Shreve E-mail has changed how we start relationships, how we keep them going -- and how we wreck them (04/27/98) Love is blind By Lisa Palac She met her sexual soul mate online -- but he wouldn't let her see what he looks like. Excerpt from "The Edge of the Bed" (04/27/98) Do computers boost productivity? By Andrew Leonard According to one student of the numbers, the answer is: No way (04/24/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - _______

starship trouper DOUGLAS ADAMS' NEW "TITANIC" GAME IS JUST THE TIP OF A MULTIMEDIA ICEBERG. BY JANELLE BROWN | - - - - - - - - - - "It's not something I like to chat about, casual-like, but down in the devastation of Hadjadji, desert country of course, and sodden. Sodden. Sodden it was. Sodden, and the sinkimutts up to the top of your wops and your doings jammed -- we had Heckler & Kock & Snartigern & Eaboy & Erasthidmites & Eably's Cousin's Friend Nerick point four-five calibre wossnames, which was always prone to logging, but what we done, we waved them at the tribesmen and when they saw them they thought to themselves ... they thought, blimey, ... .45 calibre wossnames, and charged across the burning devastation and massacred us to the last man, but was we downhearted? No. It was OUR IDEA OF FUN." - - - - - - - - - - | To anyone familiar with the work of Douglas Adams -- and, judging by the sales for his book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," there are at least 15 million readers who are -- this kind of gibberish is a jolly good read. Twenty years after he penned the first book of the "Hitchhiker" trilogy, which envisions intergalactic travel and the meaning of life as the number 42, his bizarre science-fiction worlds are still selling strong. But Adams has expanded far beyond books, and in his most recent incarnation he is at the helm of a modest multimedia empire called the Digital Village. And the above monologue is not from a book, but a conversation held with Nobby the LiftBot, one of the seven characters populating Adams' new game, "Starship Titanic." An imposingly British 6-foot-5, Adams in person is decidedly more sober than his books, and prone to rumination about the future of the digital world. As he recently detailed his vision over tomato consommé: "We are moving towards a position in which all ways we communicate and inform and entertain ourselves are coming down a digital pipe. The Digital Village wants to be in that pipe -- content providers, creators and publishers. We're also happy to drive it by being in other media as well -- television or movies or whatever." Or as the Digital Village Web site touts its future plans: "Bigger than Texas, better than Birmingham, more interactive than a friend's skin." "Starship Titanic" is the first project to come out of that pipe. The CD-ROM, released in mid-April, comes from the school of post-"Myst" immersive environment mystery games. The premise: The Starship Titanic is the world's most luxurious intergalactic cruiser -- "the ship that cannot possibly go wrong." Of course, everything does go wrong (sound familiar?), and your task as an unwitting guest on board is to find out what happened and fix it. N E X T_P A G E .|. Like "Myst" but with some very talkative bots