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Xangles: A Fuse of Creative Comedy and Philosophy-Science
Truly
bold and creative art doesn't just give us something new and fresh, but
actually transcends the medium its presented in to use it
in new ways, or even establishes an entirely new form of art.
Modern poetry stems from the poets who toss
their English dictionaries and poetry format handbooks out the
window, brainstorm with a misprinted magnetic poetry set, then run all
their poems through an inverse grammar checker to make sure nothing is
correct once they're done.
The modern film and television that
really take us somewhere else and give us the most surreal and dizzying
ride, are the ones that mangle the widely accepted standards of plot
and character and camera placement and editing, and do something really
odd and new. The Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich,
The Twilight Zone, 24, Scream, and early Reality Television,
devirginize us of the type of art they all introduce to us, making the
sex with the endless stream of lame ripoffs to follow decreasingly
worth our time.
Foundation
and Lord of the Rings yank us into
the infectious worlds of galactic empires called Middle Earth and short
pointy-eared psychohistorians which are still all the rage even after
the deaths of Isaac Asimov and J.R.R. Tolkein. Tickle me Elmo set
the ineffable standard for artificially intelligent baby ogres, to the
point where even today, kids scrunch anything fuzzy and vaguely
humanoid to see how many lines of general relativity it's familiar
with. Michael Moschen set standards for all future jugglers by
picking anything from a grain of strawberry Quik to a dead poodle, and
studying the physics of how to bounce it around inside a giant
plastic gerbil ball, leaving the carefully planned reaction of total
bafflement at the gross and explicit waste of free time being
displayed with ethereal pride.
In comedy, of Shakespeare, Abbott
and Costello, The Three Stooges, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, Airplane,
Naked Gun, Douglas Adams, Homestar Runner, and Dude Where's My Car, at least two or three of these played with
their medium in refreshing new ways that were core to their unique
style of humor. But, since breaking from a cliche medium into
something fresh and new has been done to death, we're now in need of
something to save us from the monotony of breaking from the medium in
all the exact same ways. Since originality is nothing new, the only thing left to do is take the ingenius leap of breaking
from it, and rip everyone else off in ways never before concieved
by man.
Xangles is that attempt.
The
fracolic word "xangles" (pronounced "zangles") comes from "x angles," or the ability to see
reality and art from infinite angles--any angle X. It's a
principle of Franglic Phylo, where a frangle is a "fractal angle,"
"phylo" is a shortened term for "philosophy," and fracolics, frangles,
xangles, and phylo, are all basically bullshit terms pulled out of the
depths of the writers' Freudian ids to propose new science and
fiction by smushing together known terms and calling it
genius. The idea of Xangles is to attack and rip off not
just writing, but creative science and philosophy, from multiple points
of view and mediums, to get a better idea of the truth and balance of
everything that's been done to death.
It's
also an attempt to fuse fiction and
science. The greatest respect fictional sciences get is
usually a book such as "The Science of Star Trek" or "The Philosophy of
Battlestar Galactica," where a bunch of experts explain to us
why no
one will ever write a graduate thesis about anything founded on green
aliens or giant shiny toy robots. When someone creates an
entire language such as Klingon or Elvish, or explores an idea for a
science in fiction such as Asimov's psychohistory, these are examples
of creative efforts that exept for random chance, might have been
respected as new
scholastic fields of study. When ideas about philosophy or
science surface in the mind of an individual, this can be applied in
one of two ways: fiction, or non-fiction. It is rarely applied to
both equally and simultaneously.
Xangles is an attempt to be
brain-manglingly prolific in the area of not just one, but both. To see and create new and old art and
science and philosophy, from any and all angle X's. To write a
serious, publishable philosophy paper examining reality from one angle,
then integrate the same concept into fiction to the point where Barns
& Noble has no idea whether to file it under Science, Philosophy,
or Nerd Nonsense.
Xangles
uses humor as the medium of its
fiction, because humor seems to be a bonus. Any story rich in
plot and structure can then be turned into comedy with all the same
depth and character development, except with frosting that even without
the cake comprises its own self-sufficient treat that could stand on
its own. And like cake and frosting, there are always a few
messed up freaks that scrape off one to eat the other, but most
people just eat what the hell
they're dished out, because anyone running a party knows what everyone
likes. Hence, Xangles dishes out new bold & old
comedy-science, from every medium and every xangle possible, because
that basically includes just about everyone who's ever laughed or been
forced to read a book. New
because at least two thirds of Xangles isn't directly plagiarized word
for word, and old because just about anything anyone can write or type
nowadays has all been done before.
Xangles Online
Xangles
Online ("XO", primarily Xangles.com, Frangles.com, Blorkk.com) is
what we consider published Xangles material. Other than in our
heads (and those of who we drill our nonsense into whether they like it
or not) and our bonfires of endless papers at home, Xangles
generally only exists online. To get around, it's very important
for a xeer (that's you) to understand the basic scope and structuring
of XO. Xangles Online is not a place where every corner is updated regularly. Far from it, in fact. Xangles is vast,
and to portray that vastness, we put up a lot of things that we have
plans for to eventually be or do something. Consider Xangles an
enormous city just starting to be built, with only a handful of corners
being worked on at any one time. Or consider it a pain in the ass
nonlinear video game that teases you by letting you visit the plethora
of places you can't do a damn to get into because you're not at that
point in the game.
For instance, for two years our philosophy
section consisted of a handful of titles of unwritten papers to give
you a taste of what our official philosophy may consist of. Now
it consists of an immersive blurb of excuses why you still may
have to wait awhile longer. Consider this a
cool-looking transport pad in your favorite video game that but
for a single binary variable (locked / unlocked) would take you to the
really cool part of the game if you were done with all the boring
initial shit. Or, perhaps you can consider it an expansion pack
with a continuously postponed release date due to unforseen wrenches.
Our wrench in this
case is our masochistic decision to write our philosophy papers purely
nonlinearly. They will consist of a slew of paragraphs that may
be re-arranged in various orders to form a self-similar set
of different particular papers. Given that we only have the
slightest clue on to actually do that (even with our skill and
experience writing nonlinear fiction), the section will stand as
annoyingly blocked as the everlocked transporter pad.
One
unorthodox thing XO does is span different domain names for the same
general website. It does this for its most active sub-projects,
Frangles & Blorkk (frangles.com & blorkk.com). This is
because it's sub-project are so significant that they would constitute
a full interactive websites if they weren't part of a larger project.
In fact, they basically do, minus a few references to the other
projects. This is not to say this is the only connection;
everything is very integrated on endless levels, we've just had
difficulty conveying those connections with clarity. One might
even consider the xangle or frangle--that is, the point of view--that
Xangles & Blorkk are other people's standalone external projects
and all we' ve done here is link to them calling them our own sagas!
Even the visual styles, etc., are extremely different; we think
we've done a good initial job xuct-taping the visual similarities (and
all the functional similarities) together, but there's endless work to
be done to unify things as a more coherent whole.
If you
look very closely at all the fractal images across Xangles, Frangles,
& Blorkk, you will see many similarities. Much imagery
contains the same or similar types of fractal patterns as another.
We think this definitely comes across subconsciously, but it is
generally difficult to notice plainly. For instance, as this is
being written, the center of the main logo (EPILEPTICS - do not click) contains at its center an extremely similar fractal septagon to that on the Frangles structure pages,
but the similarity is largely irrelevant if not noticed and explained.
In time, not only will these visual structures reflect each
other, but the prose and stories and themes themselves should be
interconnected isomorphically with the connections between the visual
structures (if that made any sense). (It didn't.) (Much.)
The
best way to read Xangles Online is just to start clicking around
randomly. The idea of our modularity means everything should make
more and more sense the more you click. Little is written so that
you have to read such and such in a particular order. As you
read, you may find you want to return to other things you read and
didn't follow as much in the past. Just remember to only click on
the rarely updated areas once in a great while, and you can keep up
with the more-updated areas more frequently. If you're in doubt
which are which, simply follow the daily/weekly progress of whatever
we're updating at the frangles updates page at Frangles.com/UP.
(this applies to all of Xangles, including Blorkk, not just
Frangles; Frangles just happens to be the saga we've been working on
the most). On a month-to-month basis, you can check in with the
Xangles News at Xangles.com/news.
Nutshell, click around
randomly, and you'll figure out whether you're someone to whom things
will start making more sense eventually, or less. Either way, good luck finding your way
out, because even surfing a brainstorming for the rough idea of absolutely
everything can make it hard to find the exit.
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