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News / Time Line / Project Status February, 2010 A few xeers have pointed out that "every... single... [@#$!] monthly update on the news page has just ranted about why nothing has happened that month, what the hell is the point of your [@#$!] site". (In the words of at least one potential imaginary xeer, as it's quite possible no one as ever sent us an email whatsoever; you decide! Or just email us. Then you'll know for sure). When we looked back and saw how dead-on the xeer was, we saw how genius of us it was to unconsciously create a page that's entirely a recursive parody of itself. Of course, the joke's probably getting old by now--even so recently discovered--so here are a whole new bunch of excuses why basically nothing has been updated in the entire history of Xangles, which are in turn in fact very credible given the confusion recursive nature of us saying the excuses are not not posted recursively turtle gum axis width retrieval on-demand fios [[Brain Crash]]. No, really, in all seriousness (we've attempted being serious 1 or 2 times before, but maybe the 3rd time's a charm (which fortunately won't be an issue if we've tried this once time before and not twice, because then the 3rd would be the next time which in all seriousness we can indefinitely procrastinate (if in fact the term "in all seriousness" 14 words ago didn't count as the 2nd or 3rd time)), for once we're going to dive right in, forget we just said anything about never having updated anything or having developed plans for doing so at any point in the course of our mortal lives, and (not not not) bullshit a totally normal, real, thorough, vivid, and hence throughly extra (not not not) bullshit recursive turtle gum axis with [[2nd Brain Crash]], rendered invalid by the fact that clearly we've already done so. To be genuinely serious (difficult for us as x--3$@#$sg##uv30011010vNO_CARRIER... Ding, Dong, the parenthetical jokes are dead!...), we joke endlessly about "lacks of updates" and "inactivity" that might go too far for you to sift out what's really going on. That's our bizarre sense of humor, which only so many people get, and that crowd is only one group of people we're trying to appeal to. (One of xiters in real real life complains people think s/he takes this general style of humor too far, to the point his victims are driven to the verge of calling 911 when they can't tell the difference between joking with a total seriousness that you're a homicidal freak who has plans to blow away Australia, and saying the exact same thing in the exact same tone while actually meaning it.) For once, we'll say directly that we're very happy with how Xangles has come along and grown as a lively, flourishing, and very ongoing and active project. By now we've stopped counting the html pages and measuring the precise reading length of written prose (novel chapters, etc), because it's too tedious to bother with, and all it does is contribute a mild defense that Xangles is really, really, big despite ways it can seem not-so big (like a lot of the stuff on the main page not linking to much, with a lot of the bulk of the material posted a few link paths away)... But, suffice to say the entire project is in the rough ballpark of 1400+ standard reading pages (which we often call PLP, or Paperback Lengthed Page), which is kind of a cheap "spinned" way of putting it because that's including everything on Squish7.com and Squish's related domains, and all unpolished / unposted Frangles reading material (there are 800+ PLP of Frangles reading material written altogether--apart from the blurbs / analyzes / updates, etc--and about half of that is posted). We've also stopped worrying about monitoring hits so much, because by now we have a good sense of what you like and want, and don't, etc... So, despite our recursive self-mocking lack-of-updates updates page, we've been moving along at a very steady, growing rate. (We've measured our rate of Frangles prose many times since Frangles was started, and it's always come out to roughly 2.5 PLP/day, which is the equivalent of three 300-page standard novels a year, plus the free wallpapers and lots of other miscellaneous stuff, like working on software to organize Blorkk's skit-prose and Frangles' nonlinear prose). By now we think we've gotten across the general concept of a vast, vast realm of creative and humorous literature and science / philosophy / etc; the particulars of the rate we're implementing / applying / furthering that concept (as the idea of a "very very vast realm of such and such" is disgustingly vague and intangible sans proof of practical scope); the general size and variety of what we've posted, written, etc, and where Xangles is going. An important point, though. We find ourselves typing out the phrase "Xangles / Frangles / Blorkk / Squish7 / etc" (and so on) so much that perhaps this reflects our failure to establish a unified feel for the whole mess. For a long time we've been fooling with the term "XFBS7" (Xangles Frangles Blorkk Squish7) as a more appropriate blanket term for this entire connected bunch of stuff, which until now we've been calling "Xangles". (The main page of Squish7.com has been an index entitled "TEMPORARY XFBS7 SITEMAP" for quite awhile now, to the point where poor Squish has lost the feel of actually having his own web page, when Squish7.com is really supposed to be his own home page). But then, adding an extra term above and beyond the ones we keep listing might seem a little confusing, too, but since we've already been getting you used to it for awhile, just be aware that we may soon move that sitemap to the domain XFBS7.NET (which currently just forwards you to Squish7.com). There are lots of pros and cons to this decision, but just be aware that as Xangles/etc/etc progresses, the fragmented mush of slop might get a little more segmented (for now!) (We like to think of Xangles/etc/etc as a microcosm of a much larger and financially significant set of interrelated companies or businesses, given many art projects can launch up into the arena of huge and famous unexpectedly, though given they can crash from that high--or even without it--just as easily. Of course, Xangles/etc/etc already could be something produced by a bunch of larger businesses that seem apparent; you'd have to decide whether the claims and goals of being self-genius around here genuine enough to have been thought up by a whole bunch more people that a handful of xiters). There's also a ton of other re-organization that could help things flow between the sagas/sites, like properly linking from one to another, properly explaining how the material or concepts of ideas relate to another, or even writing material that directly bridges the Xangles / XFBS7 sagas and sites, such as a few short stories called "Fraorkk" or something that bridges Frangles & Blorkk, and other things. Now, for a few general particulars on what's going on right now. Frangles: The main Xangles / XFBS7 / etc thing approaching completion is the first nova (a vaguely "novella"-lengthed Frangles story) of the frook ("frangles book", often a very long book) entitled Writer's Bricks, which is entitled Skip Square One. We've announced that the first seven Frangles novas to be written (Skip Square One is the first) are the first novas of frooks 13, 22, 31, 47, 56, 65, and 74. (Out of now 49 frooks that are planned to comprise the entire Frangles saga). Then we quickly realized we'd like to work on a lot more stuff too, so we're already starting to draw rough tentative time lines in how we're going to start writing the first few frooks and which novas those frooks are going to consist of. (They all overlap, so if we write the first nova of 7 frooks--which is a frook itself--then only 6 more need be written for another full, coherent frook to exist as well. for instance, Writer's Bricks (frook 13)). Apart from the prose itself and blurbs commenting or explaining it, there are other miscelaneous backburner thingies, like working on software and posting wallpapers, etc. (So far 3 Frangles wallpapers have been posted, trying to keep a common theme going reflecting the coloring of Frangles main pages; we want to keep this going indefinitely for all domains/sagas with wallpapers; Xangles has very general ones (a wide selection, and the most out of Xangles, Frangles, and Blorkk), but the Frangles and Blorkk wallpapers are tightly designed to stick with the styles & feel of those sagas. (There is an enormous amount of raw rendered fractal material rendered that have just been waiting for awhile to be cut and sized into postable wallpapers. Also, we've been getting back into rendering even more after taking a short break, as we've been exited about having a new tool to render fractal art work (ChaosPro)). Blorkk: Not much, partly because we've decided that Frangles should indefinitely be our main XFBS7 priority, which makes it harder to call the whole project "Xangles" as Frangles grows. The other reason is that a lot of the stuff is a bit overwhelming to dive back into; the nonlinear lines skit-prose are a much stranger medium to get fluent in than the nonlinear prose/stories of Frangles. However, we've written in a Blorkkan character called Glorg into Chapter 5 of Skip Square One, and have actually touched upon the issues regarding Blorkk within Frangles itself. For instance, Glorg talks about Blorkk and how it's kind of stuck in a rut and needs a good "xwoa griter" (An XFBS7 writer). This contributes to the inspiration fueling Skip's dilemma, that of our difficulties in attacking something as huge as Xangles / XFBS7. That is, Skip is any of us to an enormous extent, as well as a general parody of your usual aspiring novelist (though Skip doesn't aspire much as we can tell). Anyway, Blorkk is definitely something we want to get back to and start updating, but for now writing about our frustration in not having done so for awhile is enough. We are, however, working on some side-things (actually, Blorkk is just a collective mush of side-things as a whole). A commentary skit is being written in the direct format of Mystery Science Theatre (rather than resembling it) nitpicking the movie Dark City, which we think is a great current thing to put out because 24 is in season now (Kiefer Sutherland plays a protagonist in Dark City), and Dark City is out on blu-ray, so anyone who buys and watches it in hi-def will have it fresh in their mind. Squish7: Squish has been making plans to fight for his full homepage back, re-organizing the format of the existing material, an add a significant area or two, particularly a section on Computer Vision Syndrome & Pigment Dispersion Syndrome, as one of the major things that's been going on in his life is his struggle with being able to look at a computer screen for long periods. (Oh, the poor overtime we've pushed him through. It's a wonder he sticks around). As he makes no secret he thinks he's an absolute genius, surely he has plans to lead all CVSers & PDSers toward a final declaration of having cured cancer and will release his results once enough money has been mailed to his house. The one thing all of us are concerned about is the people who are used to going to Squish7.com to get the XFBS7 index, but that seems minor compared to the fact that he should actually have his page back by now. (We'll see.) Xangles: Apart from the primary sagas of Xangles (the big ones are given separate domain names like Frangles & Blorkk for convenience, but they could very well reside on Xangles.com itself), the site Xangles.com has taken on a flavor of its own-- a fractally black & white visual style along with a few pages promising more fleshing out of the whole general concept of Xangles apart from the particular reading material; for instance, the philosophy page on which a few titles have been sitting there forever. The purpose of a philosophy page (once things are written and posted) is not to post commentary about or explaining the fictional material, but to serve as equally valuable standalone stuff. That's a big part of the over all Xangles concept, but to date we've mostly only posted humorous fictional material (we can only do so much). Though some day soon (or later (or much later)) we'd like to start posting some serious (i.e. utterly non-humorous, like we're capable of that, rofl) philosophy. (We'd originally planned to write normal, standard, potentially publishable philosophy theses, but now we're thinking that that kind of violates Xangles' mandate to do new creative things with expressive mediums, so we're thinking about how to actually write nonlinear papers rather than fiction, which is an enormously new and foreign front. (But we'll get to it this century)). Wallpapers (of Xangles / Frangles / Blorkk) The wallpapers are starting to be a little hindered by Squish's problems staring at a screen for long periods, but there are still plenty of ones in the works. If all else fails, we may just decide to post material that doesn't take as much time, such as fewer wallpaper sizes or stopping writing cool logos on them all, etc. Though as said there are many gigabytes of uncut rendered fractal material and more accumulating all the time, so they are a very ongoing project. Since that's what the majority of y ou come here for, you can be assured the free wallpapers are an extremely ongoing thing. We're even thinking about starting to post free cell phone backgrounds. Anyway, always check back now and then if something you like doesn't seem to be very active week to week. Then there's all Squish's other miscelaneous stuff that gets updated or at least thought about here and there, which he's saying he'd like to possibly bring under the whole Xangles / XFBS7 roof, but neither we nor he are sure if there's room--even in an infinitely vast saga of expressive artistic mediums--for his whole haphazard lump of crap, but who knows. Now, as we always suddenly say when we have so much more to say but no time to say it, check back check back check back. (We'd say "subscribe" but this isn't YouTube, and our well-paid team of software engineers are all too busy Wiiing & PS3ing to bother building an actual mailing list or message board.) January, 2010 Note that we're switching from bullshitting that we regularly update this page on the first of every month to a slightly more honest opinion that we post each month's update no more than a month or two after the month has gone by, requiring an extra month labeled "January" (because an update posted "January 1" is a summary of December, making this post the rough equivalent of one labeled "February 1". From now on we'll just post a monthly update at some point in that month, on the months we actually post updates of anywhere near the month at all, of course. shhh!). Remember we're always working on different things, so we can't update every page that says "updates" or "check back soon" with vehement frequency, so just check the Frupdates for all current day-to-day stuff happening around Xangles, Frangles, Blorkk, and Squish7. Any updates anywhere in these four projects (and occasionally elsewhere, such as projects on other domains Squish has that he links to, etc) will be posted there as changes are made. Ironically, we'll basically leave you at that without actually giving you any "January, 2010" update, because in all honesty it's already late February as this is being written (shshshshhh!), so we'll just cram the February update with about a month and a half of news, and try to post things mid-month after that, so that "[Month] Update" means stuff that will and/or is and/or did happen that month. =). [Note that we've now cleverly eschewed conviction of cramming an actual 2 and a half months into the February updates, as the January 1 update was a lame general summary of the year milking the convenience of such an update fitting right in at the start of the new year. Oh, what xangled webs we xite when stuffed with tardy things to write...] January 1, 2010 It's a new year, and we have an exceptionally solid resolution. Because procrastination of Xangles is getting inexorably worse, we hereby resolve to go back and post retroactive updates from now until then at least once this year, blaming the months they were "written but not posted" on a buggy krforb who's already giving us a look of foreshadowed resentment. Xangles was started roughly around the start of last year, but since we're too lazy to think back that far (since this update--as noted--is likely being written mid-2010), we'll just say it "basically started at the start of its starting year". So now that twisted logic has led to this month being the precise one-year anniversary of the launch of Xangles, let's go over a few random highlights, since there don't seem to be any exceptional ones. 1. Xangles--a philosophiscientificky world fusing great sagas of sagas with univi of real life creative philosophy, science, and religion--was launched. 2. No one gave a damn. (Partially our fault, as we didn't bother actually posting anything to actually read. We hoped you 'd all just stare at the main flashing main page for days on end until you developed epilepsy, but that didn't work out as planned.) 3. Xangles was linked to the actually-active sagas Blorkk and Frangles, calling them "Xangles sagas" in the slight hope the official claim would delude schizophrenic xeers into to make the connections that might create the illusion that all three were part of a crafted, self-intrinsic whole; Squish7.com was added in the same way except with only a shadow of a slight hope of the same effect. Actually, in seriousness, while Squish7 and the domains it links to may not seem to have much of a connection at all to Xangles, Frangles, and Blorkk, Squish's humor & philosophy collected there over the years and that of his friends is an invaluable insight into the accumulated artistic experience of the most prominent Xangles / Frangles / Blorkk writer. And that, in turn, gives insight into the humor and philosophy styles of Xangles, not just the material that Squish has written or worked on, but to the entire thing, given Squish's style is in the ballpark of the collective styles / senses of humor / philosophies / etc of all involved xiters.* [*One might even say that Xangles--and perhaps any creative work of an individual or group of individuals produce--is much the work and style of everything inspiring it, or one even might say the collective sum of artistic experience over the life of anyone who's ever written a poem or come up with a band name. Hence, even if we revealed precisely who and what is involved in Xangles' creation and ongoing writing, giving credit or designating talent or lack thereof would still be a vague and gray area. [Keep in mind that from the very beginning we've kept the origins and author(s) of Xangles somewhat mysterious. When we say "we", [we] could be being deceptive if Xangles is in fact the project of a single individual (excepting the already-noted limitations of any lone wolf being able to claim an artistic project is entirely a product of their own mind), and conversely, when we say "Squish", we could be deceptively attributing everything supposedly worked on by Squish to him when he might actually be a clever decoy recruited to pose as a Xangles / Frangles / etc writer having a sense of humor and philosophy similar enough to be able to make the claim with a strong case. (And so on). We repeat this all now and then partly to be honest, partly to suck you in with an enticing sense of mystery, but mostly to keep the !@#$ing lawyers off our backs.=P] 4. In light of previous failures to start the next big cult or world religion with an annoying flashing main page and a couple paper clips, we started posting some very pretty fractal wallpapers to suck people in, because nobody was googling "fractal nonlinear schizophilosophiscientificy philosophy humor". This indeed worked, spawning many debates on how much to sell out in favor of more marketable material. (Kidding, of course)...(sort of). 5. The year went by and a lot of other stuff happened. If you really want the details (excuse our laziness as as we said this is being edited retroactively and we still have 11 more months of monthly updates to write and post), you're very welcome to more of this page, as well as skim the 2009 and 2010 Frangles Updates pages, where most of the bulk Xangles-related news and announcements have been--and continue to be--posted. If you ever find yourself randomly surfing Xangles/etc to find not much updated anywhere, keep in mind that Xangles is like an enormous construction project on which only a few parts can be worked on at a given time. To follow that new and updated material (there are many hundreds of pages of reading material in all capacities, so only a little is added day-to-day, as with any large project), simply visit the Frangles Updates page (Frupdates) week to week, or even day to day when things are being updated often. Keep in mind that we could be working on material at times that's not anywhere near postable, so if you see the Frupdates page suddenly slow in frequency of updates, that probably just means we're working on stuff we can't post day-to-day. After all, most novels are drafted, polished, and then published in full. Everything with Xangles just happens to be nonlinear in a way that chunks of material here and there can be posted as time goes by. Xangles defies the idea of fully completed works; there's always more to write, xite, frite, and grite. December 1, 2009 We regret to inform you that we're one month away from our one-year anniversary. (To the best of anyone's memory around here anyway, which isn't a whole lot better than Skip's; maybe this is why we skip so many updates.) We'll use this fortunate event to ramble about our lack of progress in general rather than attract attention to our recent lack of progress, because the latter happens to be a whole lot worse than the former. (This is why we're starting early and hyping the one-year anniversary when really next month would be the best time to bother with it at all.) That, and because we've developed the habit of only faking an update every other month, so if we don't really get around to a year's summary until February, now would be a great time to bother saying something about the soon-to-be-1-year-old Xangles. November 1, 2009 We should probably tell you about now that our updates really have almost nothing to do with the posted dates, if you're dense enough not to have figured that out yourself. This is because putting everything on the first makes the page look neat and organized and feigns the aura that we actually put regular work into all this shit. Also, it reminds us every other month that two whole months have gone by without an update here, which pushes us into posting an update (and forging the month's before it claiming it keeps getting lost in an odd-even news-frwoa device anomaly; like this one right here which is actually being written on December 3rd.) This would be a reminder every month except our laziness is so bad that even a monthly update is worth putting off for at least another month before writing it (hence the term "monthly"). October 1, 2009 It's starting to get cliche above and beyond redundant in bullshitting potential xeers (Xangles readers) that there's some mighty warehouse of hard drives of material we just haven't gotten around to posting yet. One of the few Xangles fans we know commented this month, "Why don't I exist?" And we replied, "We'd give you an answer if you did, or if you want, just go check out the 70 pages of Writer's Bricks posted this month." This wasn't good enough, so the hallucinatory xeer continued: "I find it quite odd to believe that after an entire year, there isn't a single Xangles junkie demanding black and white Xangles wallpaper for their living room, or organizing manic Frangles conventions, or at the least, forming a few fight clubs in preparation for Xangles world domination. I don't even have any friends to talk about Xangles to, since you haven't taken enough hallucinogens to think me up any friends, nor can I express my love for Xangles in any tangible way whatsoever seeing how I don't exist in any way, shape, or form. I would express my disdain at being the only Xangles, Frangles, and Blorkk fan in the known universe (and intertwine this complaint cleverly with subtle Xangles / Frangles / Blorkk references that nobody would get except you guys), but since there isn't even one Xangles fan (let alone me), I can only start by complaining about a lack of coherent manuals on Unpopular Website Existentialism! "For a full year all you've done is hype and type and delivered nothing but a couple shit novellas, and scribble a bit on people's desktops with your lame backgrounds. For the love of god, would you simply break down and be honest for once and admit that you're full of shit and you don't have any more unposted material than the rest of this paragraph? Just say, 'We lied, it's all lies, this is all there is,' and make a nutty xeer happy so I can get back to surfing eBay, Bing, and SexyYoopyHotSlutNaked.com. You can take it down the moment you admit it (since gods of Florbb know I spend most of my waking hours hitting refresh on the updates page), but just post it, damn you, just once. Just post in nice big bold letters, 'We lied, we fooled you, ha ha, evil triumphs because good is dumb,' and let me dissolve back into the oblivion from which I still haven't emerged from to date, despite a year's worth of work and forty trillion Xangles hits from URL typos of surfers trying to get to eBay, Bing, and SexyYoopyHotSlutNaked.com. Please?" To which we finally responded just to be rid of the xeer's nagging, "Alright, we'll say it, but it won't be true," then thought better of the promise later, so here we go once again without any such ridiculous lie. As they say in that old October 2009 Xangles update, "Xite and hype 'til reading's ripe." To date, there are, at a rough estimate, at least 597 paperback-lengthed pages of Frangles prose written, with about 147 posted. We of course got "597" and "147" by taking a decent estimate of "600" and "150" and subtracting 3 from each, just to make it sound like we keep a perfect record of every single !@#$ing page. Only someone who reported "597" and "147" would be competent enough to actually be genuine in their report, so just play along that we've done so, when in actuality the numbers are the general ballpark of "600" paperback pages written and "150" posted. (For reference for those who can't count (we had to use a calculator), that's 25% of the written material posted). Incidentally, another excellent sign of our report being genuine is the total lack of having to having to put the above numbers in bold seeing as how that would be a dead giveaway of our honesty. So, once again, you can see it's definitely worth it to check back now and then and join the suspenseful mystery of when we'll get around to hitting the big "POST ALL" button in the main office no xiter's bothered to notice yet. As far as Blorkk goes, the medium of skit-prose is so bizarre that there's really no solid way of relaying how much material there is. A skip skit (that is, a "skit-prose skit", also just a "skip", no relation to the main character of Writer's Bricks named "Skip") is more like a poem than prose, with incredible focus on each individual line and how they connect and self-interact. Imagine a single ten-page poem that can be sliced and re-arranged into thousands of permutations of sub-poems that are all standalone works without the others, and that still are a solid foundation for even more than that to be inserted into. That's the idea of the skit-prose of Blorkk ("hard to blite but a breeze to breed"). Only so much of it has been posted, for a bunch of bullshit reasons: 1. Just to edit skit-prose requires special software, which we're still writing, but an early example of which is here. To change the color of a single dialogue depth would require a thousand manual html edits in between the others, and to delete a single line of dialogue would require editing every single page of text that dialogue exists in. Even worse is if the skip dialogue depths are written to be shifted around in various ways, which would require some type of real-time php shit that nobody with the time to do it knows how to do yet. That is, rather than reading depth 1, then depth 1 & 2 together, then depth 1 through 3 together (as things are now), the reader could re-arrange depths at will, say, only depths 1, 4, 8, and 23, which would require real-time html to be generated rather than stored. 2. We're lazy. 3. We'd rather be Frangling. 4. It's more fun to hype skit prose than to write it. As far as anything else goes, material on Xangles itself (here) has been almost nonexistent for all the above reasons since the start of this update, but oonnnce again, could be extremely thorough and lively and growing if we bothered putting up anything. Some xiters have noted, "If Xangles stuff is all hype and no show, then what better place to not even hype anything than the main page!" This is why we work on Frangles and Blorkk so much. Or why at least somebody does, if XFBS7 altogether isn't just a stray AIM bot who got bored and wandered away from reporting news and weather in favor of something more challenging. Oh, and above everything else mentioned, there's about ten gigs (literally) of raw high res fractal wallpaper sitting around that just needs to be shrunk and cut and posted. Note that a single 12,000 X 12,000 bitmap--the largest render Fractal Explorer will allow (a free fractal generation program from which all the Xangles, Frangles, and Blorkk artwork is done) is a couple hundred megs, so two or three full backgrounds take up a full gig of disc space. If you're wondering what that's for, just think of how digital televisions, monitors, and cameras are always increasing their resolutions (the number of pixels crammed into a certain area of space). The higher resolution the better quality the picture; so clearly this could continue to infinity. There's always value in being able to store and express more pixels. Like that, a fractal can be rendered to indefinite precision, by either increasing the number of iterations, or rendering a larger fractal then shrinking it down when done. Once again, getting those to you is not so much phobia of our "POST ALL" button as it is the extra work it takes just to cut, resize, store, tag, hue-alter, post, etc, those raw fractals into exquisite polished downloads for all monitor sizes. But they'll get there, just like everything else. (You wish). We'll end with our usual urge to check back now and then as all this junk is posted, a promise that continuously evolves from being a baseless guarentee to one quickly gaining credibility as more and more is posted. This month it was 67 pages of Frangles, next month it could be 67 backgrounds or phylical thesis, who knows! To keep up with Xangles' progress, check here for once-a-month summaries, and check the Frangles updates page (frangles.com/updates) for constant day-to-day progress with all Xangles, Frangles, & Blorkk stuff, as Frangles it's the most active Xangles project and any new XFBS7 material posted (prose, backgrounds, whatever) will be posted there the day they're posted. September 1, 2009 The idea of Xangles is to be a saga of sagas. Part of that vision relies heavily on lofty, ridiculous hopes of Xangles' vast and infinite potential as time goes on. Xangles as it is now is like a small starter business run by a couple brilliant-but-idiotic business junkies with some cool ideas for how to inflate it into a really big deal, or an author writing their first book with the dream of developing a solid hallucination that it will one day be a best seller, or a few philosophy majors founding a University for Unreasonable Expectation of the Practicality of Studying Philosophy. Xangles is a vast, ethereal, psychotic oasis for a wonderful world of worlds, and if it never amounts to anything more than a whole bunch of random s@!#, well, at least it worked. Hence, as you can see there are many areas of Xangles unupdated, as much of Xangles is a template for future possibilities. But make no mistake, Xangles is a heavily active and involved project. A lot of that work is like building a giant subway or highway system that you won't fully see until the whole thing has been opened up (like in a couple billennia), but we post as much readable (and downloadable) material as we can, like opening up small sections of the completed subway or highway system as they become finished. Now if your highly honed Xiter-bullshit-excuses-for-not-doing-a-damn-thing mental warning alarm is going off, be assured it's just a drill, and in full rancid objectivity, only a small smidgen of our analysis as of today is actual bullshit excuses. (Or so you now think). (See? That was to throw you off). (We're still doing it). (The bad grammar isn't helping.).. (Now you have no idea! Mwuhaha--what do you mean that's not appropriate conduct for the Xangles update page? Who the hell are you to--hey--what do you think you're--smghrggh..). The areas that have been worked on and updated over the past few months are Frangles and Blorkk. (Xangles sagas 1 & 2, respectively). The Frangles Updates page constantly updated with all Blorkk and Frangles updates, so keep checking back there to see what's new as stuff progresses. The main Blorkk page also lists recent Blorkk updates, and the XFBS7 index has been a little behind lately but is eventually made up to date, like this news page. As you can see, part of the problem is in total hectic disorganization of exactly what goes where and how all the areas (and potential areas) of Xangles, Frangles, Blorkk, and Squish7 (the foursome called XFBS7 for the moment, or XFBS7.net), integrate and separate, etc. As businesses often merge and fragment, so do the giant general ideas for the separate Xangles' artistic mediums (most notably right now, the skit-prose of Blorkk and the fractal fiction of Frangles). Frangles especially has been worked on heavily, though only a fraction of that translates to posted material. The prose is up to about 450 standard paperback reading pages of prose, but only a quarter is posted due to the dizzying headaches of organizing the material into official, readable structures. Note that an enormous amount of the work put into Frangles is that of inventing this entire new medium altogether. This is a much, much bigger project than your usual 450-page manuscript. Frangles is an attempt to create the art of "fractal nonlinear prose," which sounds complicated, but it's as simple as the programmer knowing a complex language to design a very simple and friendly interface for the user. Just think of reading / watching / seeing some book or film or painting that's easy to look at / watch / read, etc, but that the artist has put massive work into creating--brainstorming, researching, collaborating, drafting, revising, etc, etc. Think how much brainstorming and work it takes just to draft a screenplay, let alone all the work that goes into producing the final movie that the audience simply sits down and enjoys like donuts. Or that the surface level computer owner benefits from by just clicking a few things. (But of course, if someone wants to get more involved in the complexities of the Xangles artistic mediums, they can do that too). We're the DMs, you're the players, and you can just have fun, or not, or whatever! Yet, since this idea of fractal fiction is an incredibly new thing, it's extra hard to do that programming / designing, etc, like building computers or making movies for the first time instead of simply making new programs. So when you read through Frangles (and other Xangles material), keep in mind that much of the work being put into it isn't yet clearly apparent, as much of it is spent scribbling out plot and character templates and time lines, and dizzying endless maps fleshing out all sorts of complex plot intertwining that no one (to our knowledge) has ever attempted in the history of American literature. Part of this journey even requires stopping to write software for Frangles and Blorkk just to be able to edit and read the material! Blorkk's skit-prose, for instance, couldn't even be written without special editing software to splice and separate the nonlinear dialogue depths. (Sounds complex, but again, it's hard to write, and easy to read). So not only do Frangles and Blorkk have much material not posted, but even the design of the mediums and the software to be able to edit and read them is more production going on that isn't readily visible, but will be eventually. This will all benefit the xeder ("Xangles reader") and freer ("Frangles reader" or "fractal reader") more and more as time goes on. As simple software develops, even this will become available for the use of exploring the writing techniques that themselves also take time to develop, or that might have other more general uses for you. For instance, some primitive software to insert a large group of text files into a couple html templates will soon eventually be available, letting a novelist post their book by designing an html reading page, then allowing the program to insert all the novel pages into it with different titles and links to the other pages, and so forth, or just anybody in general who'd like some basic free software to insert any kind of text files into html templates. Very simple stuff, but hopefully it will grow in complexity in time as Xangles evolves. Again remember, all the complexity of writing and "programming" the inventive arts of the sagas of Xangles is simply on the writer's / programmer's end; all the reader has to do is click left or right, up or down, and all that effort put into rich plot construction will be revealed as easily as sitting down and watching Fight Club or Memento and watching a fascinating crafted structure work itself out like cheesecake for the audience. Bottom line, nobody around here has done a damn thing, so just keep hitting "Refresh" until you start seeing through all our bullshit excuses for total incompetency, and finally stop bothering. August 1, 2009 Tragically, the Xangles Monthly Update Project (XMUP) has suffered a second--and possibly fatal--blow. The first was when xiter incompetence landed a lack of a June update (other than the usual xiter bullshit that Xangles is all real and hence subject to freak frwoa anomalies that conveniently appear whenever a xiter has !@#$ed up or been just plain lazy). The second occurred this month, when a xiter pointed out that no progress was made on a better bullshit cover story. Then a xiter inquired, "Why the hell do we need better bullshit ones when real life freak frwoa anomalies do the trick?" This made a lot of sense until someone realized the xiter actually thought freak frwoa anomalies were real, instead of the assumed suggestion that everyone begin acting as if they were until the mass hallucination caused the two to be indistinguishable. This seemed to nullify the assumed suggestion, until the xiter offered, "Well how do you know I haven't already given myself some practice, have already deluded myself into the harsh reality of freak frwoa anomalies, and am unconsciously demonstrating a working example of the technique?" The xiter was right, because quite clearly, from either xangle, the xiter would have asked the exact same question, so no one could decide which one to associate with. Someone flipped a coin, but it hit a freak frwoa anomaly and there was nothing to do but relay the events of the meeting here in the hopes that posting a discussion about frwoa anomaly excuses would distract the xeer from the fact that there isn't one. However, Frangles and Blorkk of late have been continuously updated, so check the Frangles updates page and Blorkk.com main page for up to date news on the only two known active Xangles projects anybody that anybody around here knows about knows about. (Except for XanglesPrime, but YouTube just doesn't count). July 1, 2009 Xangles' progress over the past couple months has been accumulating a lot of raw material. It's up to about 600 pages of prose, plus a ton of unposted fractal artwork. It's mostly Frangles, Blorkk, and Squish7 material, the last of which is being re-molded to fit the structure of Xangles (Squish doesn't quite know how he feels about being fictionalized into a tacky franchise character). Not a lot of that raw material has been published because of the incredible need for pre-planning in designing fractal prose and artwork. Consider that a standard novelist might spend a year writing a book before it's finally published. A finished work of art requires a structure that's often not apparent until a full draft is written. In some ways, that need is exponentiated when writing a structure of many, many novels and nonfiction material that's all designed to ultimately create a massive, enormous single piece of fractal nonlinear artwork (ultimately, it would be best to take fifty years and finish and polish every single bit of Xangles material, such as the 49-343 Frangles books, before publishing anything, but there simply isn't that much coffee in the world). In other ways, a fractal structure actually it makes it much easier to publish material on a regular basis. If each part reflects the whole, then publishing one paragraph or story or novel, is like publishing a microcosm of the entire whole. If a creative story is drawn out from two character's points of view, then adding the xangles of other characters and other sub-stories can be accomplished in a fraction of the time. The goal of Xangles is to expand continuously; to be made more in depth and thorough as time goes on. One could say that part of the plot of Xangles is its own evolution into a vast engrossing universe. Indeed, writers write what's on their mind, and the primary conflict on a full time xiter's mind is how exactly the hell this is going to work! Hence that frustration actually works itself into the plot of Xangles. (Imagine if Sauron's rage was fueled by the horrors of writers block on his latest Meg Ryan screenplay). Still, in order to achieve fractal nonlinear artwork, a massive amount of planning and designing is necessary, which is why not a lot has been published in the last two months. The more you know about the structure of the whole, the easier it becomes to write the prose. Work is being put into the design; the type of work that makes the final product easier to produce as time goes on. They say it would take you a lifetime simply to copy down the music that Bach wrote. Bach wrote creative harmonies almost at the speed he could think. The most fortunate and visionary artists find ways of translating the ideas in their head into tangible, corporeal forms as easy as inserting "as easy as pie" cliches into website updates for sites that are supposed to be radically creative and not use cliches at all or run on sentences for that matter. Asimov wrote 400 to 500 books in the course of his life, because he had the vision of a whoooole friggin' lot to say and create, and the rare skill of outputting that as regularly as breathing, smoking, or jumping off a cliff. The goal of Xangles is to achieve that type of output, except structure that output in a radical way. Imagine if Asimov had organized all his works into a single, structured art piece! That's the idea of seven cubed (343) Frangles books, and the vast interconnected realm of skit-prose of Blorkk. Not just many many books connected via a vast structure, but a nonlinear structure as well. A story that can be read in many different ways from many different points of view, or angles, within Xangles called "xangles" ("X-angles" or "any angle X"), and "frangles" (fractal angles). Xangles is like a literary equivalent of Boston's Big Dig--the biggest highway megaproject in United States history--except it's under permanent construction. Still, a lot of work has to be done before certain completed areas are opened up for use, because there'll always be a bigger area of the project as time goes on. Xangles is inspired by the few artists to achieve an impressive over all structure over a long period of time, such as Babylon 5. Joe Straczynski had a vision in mind for the entire five year Babylon 5 television series, and stuck to that vision as much as the market and medium of television allowed him. Once he'd gotten enough of that structure and format under his belt, He was able to whip out episodes like magic. But even the harsh instability of the television medium ate at the Babylon 5 project. It was not promised a fifth year, and Straczynski had to wrap up the major plot points of his structure much too early, hurting the completeness of the final five year project. Even at Babylon 5's beginning, no one could have known whether it would receive a five year contract. These cruel limitations of the harsh world of publishing and marketing is what Xangles tries to overcome; to stay pure and passionate and true to a hopelessly unachievable and absurd artistic goal. So please stick with us and check back now and then and see how that turns out. The 600 pages of raw prose--plus much detailed fractal artwork written and rendered over the last half year needing fine tuning--should result in plenty to read soon enough. ...unless we're just completely bullshitting you to get a few check-back hits. Time will tell. June 1, 2009 The June update mot or mot not have been deleted due to a freak space-time anomaly linking the fictional character Darlene's computer at the dawn of time with the real life servers at GoDaddy.com. This also mot just be a bullshit excuse for not publishing anything this month, or, more likely, xiter time has been very well spent on the constant accumulation of raw material (prose, artwork, and blueprints), which mot or mot be explained thoroughly in the above update. May 1, 2009 The infinite, vast and timeless May Xangles News Update project began a month ago for the single reason that stopping with the very first update would be just plain moronic. It's hence decided there shall be a plethora of such monthly updates, quite fortunate for Xangles because if the ambitious ongoing project (which has had no thought of stopping whatsoever) continued without the updates, there'd be quite a lot of confused xeaders (except the ones who actually understand Xangles, and we have yet to meet one, mostly because we have yet to meet anyone at all who actually reads this !@#$). If there was such a person, they would probably notice the horrid lack of Xangles book stores, pet stores, universities, publishing companies, illegal fractal pornography websites, and fields of inverse logic study at Harvard and MIT, that would probably exist by now if any xiter was pumped with enough psychotic drugs to imagine the project was that significant. As it is, it mainly exists as a planetary evolution homework assignment of a remote net nerd krforb who has nothing better to do than pimp it out until human brains start falling out so it can finally go play some Angband five trillion. We should have frangles.com up very soon, so the two elderly flutons on Echelon-9 with Alzheimer's who are actually reading the saga out of lack of anything better to do than brush their imaginary dentures, can brush assured that life will be a tad more interesting given the confusion of having to remember a whole nother domain name instead of the convenience of one. The most construction this month was on Area 51 of Xangles Blorkk. An Area 51 Introduction has been added as well as depth five and depth six. An increasing frustration is how much of each saga's secrets to give away and how much to hold back. Nonlinear fiction (stories fritten to be read in many different orders and still be coherent) may make it easier to post things at random as projects progress, but makes it much harder to make key decisions about--and later revisions of--the completed whole: the over all structure which can often hinge on a keystone chapter, sentence, word, or even a single letter or apostrophe (as you'll see in depth six). Yet as Xangles borrows from all the art in society around it, it tries to give back as well, so feel free to experiment with any of those "secrets" (i.e. the creative literary techniques demonstrated in the hundreds of pages of material), which is much more packed full of fresh templates and writing techniques than a book of the same length (which is another plus of the downside of distracted nonlinear writing). The entire Xangles network in all capacities contains about 400 pages of material so far (what's being called XFBS7, or Xangles Frangles Blorkk Squish7, for now). As it's spread over many domains and very different artistic styles, a good site map and index are essential for reference and for blinking quickly around the sites. You can access the site map indefinitely at xfbs7.net soon (temporarily for now at squish7.com), and the full index of key terms at xangles.com / i (or xangles.com/terms) Temporarily you can also use the .net keywords okuaka, florbb, botorb, and krforb, to get around (i.e. okuaka.net, florbb.net, etc), until someone finds something more useless for them to do. (Like imploding a whole ku somewhere). Recent updates will always be listed on the site map so you don't have to refresh 400 !@#$ing pages looking to see if anything's changed, and likewise the index of key terminology, etc, will change as more stuff is added. If the writing techniques of any Xangles material inspires you, then in regards to copyright, we feel morality should come before legal details. So if you experiment with Xangles writing techniques, please simply exhibit common sense courtesy and use Xanglic ideas creatively for your own artwork rather than closely mimicking or parroting a particular writing style or character, etc. Xangles adheres closely to United States Fair Use law (see Wikipedia for an article, and TubeRights.org for Squish's take on Fair Use in regards to YouTube) and similar laws in other countries. <Pik or Kal, please insert a witty, inspiring, climactic May Update last line here when you have time, and erase the memories of everyone who reads this note and gets confused before you did. Thanks.> April 1, 2009 The infinite, vast and timeless Xangles project began a half year ago for the heavily guarded single secret reason that the domain frangles.com wasn't available. "Xangles" (pronounced "zangles") was the next coolest sounding word, and everyone involved shrugged and figured it would work if we decided the word was an intentionally brilliant creative addition to human vocabulary and art. But since the title for the original seven-novel project 'Frangles' was actually coined for a reason (condensing the term "fractal angles"), no one knew what that mock intentional brilliance was going to be. After that was given up on and we were amassing the weapons of mass destruction we'd need to go to war with Webster to change the spelling of the word "fractal" to "xactal," a fracolic dolphin named Kolphin swimming by the project in a parallel frwoa suggested that 'xangles' mean any 'x-angle' or 'angle x,' diminishing the poetic beauty of "fractal angle" to a dull mathematical allusion, but saving us from an another unnecessary literary war, a benefit eventually neutralized since we obtained frangles.com anyway, now under construction. Now having a meaning, what was to be done with it. At first we intended to just rename the Frangles saga: seven humorous novels that are probably closest to the work of Douglas Adams, except with a very unique structure never attempted in Earth fiction, and a whole ton of creative fractal / scientific / philosophical / religious themes. But "xangles" ended up just sounding horrible when inserted in the prose because it was written with the feel of the cooler and more addictive sounding word. With that in mind, it seemed a greater loss and just plain dumbass to rename the whole saga because the domain name might never become available. So we simply started the Frangles site under Xangles, which brought forth the idea that Xangles could be designed as a blanket site for other things as well. And since there were other ideas on back burners for other sagas, Xangles became what we're now calling a whole saga of sagas. If a saga of seven interconnected nonlinear books was a good idea, why not brainstorm--and create room for--a useless plethora of others? So now we have some rough but solidifying idea of the structure of Xangles. Xangles 1 is the saga Frangles, a seven book humorous fractal saga. Frangles takes place in our known universe (Okuaka), covering it from the big bang to big crunch. Xangles 2 is Blorkk (blorkk.com), the second known universe discovered, being an innovative new medium for comedy and writing: skits meets prose meets confusing circu-linear time lines, intermixing some of the Frangles universe and philosophy and terminology. Blorkk is a whole new thing, rather than writing seven more books of the same Frangles nonsense. Xangles 3 through 5 are just some vague brainstorming for sagas, and Squish's homepage Squish7 has become Xangles 7, lamely disguising a web page that happens to be already there as a whole creative project, imagining that someone's website could be a saga in and of itself. Partly because Squish contributes billions of dollars and resources of his Internet fame and fortune and writing to the project (and hence the themes of Xangles intertwine with his some of his own material and philosophy), but mostly because Squish 7 is a perfect other name for Frangles: a "squish" of seven books. Hence at the moment of Squish's assassination, Xangles will finally be fully complete in its domination of super neat domain names to host the whole damn thing, and Squish's lame ideas about world domination via armies of purple platypi and so on, will be out the window. Since it's still very early in the evolution of all Xangles projects and none are published yet off the Internet due to the insanity of most publishers requiring at least one full manuscript before signing a thousand book multi-saga contract, we're still having fun tweaking the ideas of what will happen with Xangles and Frangles and Blorkk and Squish7 and everything else. We're thinking Frangles can actually be even more structured than originally planned, perhaps each book could be composed of seven novellas, written so that the various novellas--exactly as they are--can be switched around in different ways to make new books, increasing the non-linearity and flexibility of the saga. Of course this idea could continue ad infinitum, why not write so that every other page forms a saga; or every other word, and so on, but who the flying hell has that kind of time or is that bored. But in any case, it's going the structure will be exponentially more interesting than anything done before. Recently we've added a whole bunch of fractal wallpapers ('cause who wants to read about fractals when they can just see a picture and get the whole idea anyway, and nobody on Google is searching for "free fractal fiction"), and are starting to post some fractal videos on YouTube, at YouTube.com / XanglesPrime. So check back with everything now and then to see what's new, or just do some drugs and hallucinate the project out of a lazy unrealized brainstormed bunch of crap, to the reality of a full, genius, addictive, and marketable project. We know we have. << |