Navigating the Prose
One of the best ways to figure out Frangles is to simply click randomly through a maze of pages and find your way through, figuring out for yourself what it's all about and why whatever you're reading is arranged the way it is. E.g., akin to a new video game of which you haven't yet downloaded the walkthroughs and cheat codes. This a great win-win for us, because when take this approach, it means we don't have to explain a damn thing. Unfortunately, this is our attitude at the very moment, since we have lots of other things to do around here, and this is something you can work on on your own! (In other words, we're simply too lazy to have copied and pasted all the walkthroughs and cheat codes on the main site, but we'll get around to it... grrr).
Actually, in honesty, we're in a very fuzzy area about what details to reveal about the secrets of Frangles and so forth that we'll give away vs. keep to our greedy selves. We've been working out strategies for a very careful and thorough balance. We plan on a site format that's able to take a newbie freer carefully through the steps of discovery on the way to "figuring out Frangles", said loosely, because there's always more to "figure out" around here, just like a fractal may be looked at many different ways in spite of an artist who simply pushed a few buttons on a fractal program.
You may come up with many interpretations we haven't about the things we ourselves have written, just like with any other artwork presented with the intended frangle that what the artist or writer has put out is worthy of acclaim and graduate school analysis. Some such attempts fail; some fly; other stories are put out for no particular reason and then get analyzed to death anyway (Lord of the Rings, for instance; Tolkein had said that the triliogy was simply a story, and was a little amused by the scholars who wrote mighty theses analyzing its themes).
Back to the point (grr). Along the path to franglightenment(?lol), our system will soon involve posting many of the most detailed explanations and analyses we can contr--err, release... which will of course be intrinsically gilded with the danger of rancid drenching guilt if anyone actually reads any of that shit. SO. While we're working on that balance, here are a few real real basics to get going around here. (In all seriousness, please consider carefully your approach to exploring Frangles. If you're very new to Frangles, you may want to read the mobile prose and not even visit the site. Among everything just explained, another benefit of exploring with caution is your imagination has more of an opportunity to bring the stories and prose to life.
Much of Frangles is extraordinarily unique, so you may want to consider giving your imagination some exercise and stick to just the prose for a good long while. Currently, each brick (meaning once individual scene, presented by one single web page, that can be shifted around modularly with other bricks to form different stories and story paths) is labeled with a few navigation items on each page: the brick number, 4 ways to traverse to another brick, a star "wildcard" which might do different things at different times, and a link to the .mobi and .com home pages,with one more link for help:
12-345 < ^ v > * mobi | com | ??
When any of these hyperlinks / navigation links are active, they'll simply be underlined, and those will be the only possible ways to go (imagine a multi-room online text game or mud in which at any point, you may be in a room with a west exit, or a north and south and up exist, or no exit at all!)
12-345 < ^ v > * mobi | com | ??
Now here, we have links to the frangles .mobi and .com homepages (those will likely always be there), a help link to the right, which might bring you to the main help page, or a more specific page more relevant to this particular brick. (A brick is (currently) labeled with five digits from '1' to '7' each, that is, in nonzero base-7. A forward link will increase the brick number by 1, so clicking the forward link here would bring us to:
12-346 < ^ v > * mobi | com | ??
(..And then to 12-347, then 12-351, then 12-352, etc. Count upward like a normal number except go over one digit after 7 rather than with 9, and begin with 1 rather than 0 on a new digit.) Now, on these two particular navigation "bars" (we'll call them this, although it's not quite a bar per se, but it's close enough, and we need a term to refer to them by), we've underlined some of the items. We've done this at
random here. None of the active links (not active here, but the ones that
would be active if this were an active navigation bar) intrinsically necesitate a certain way to go (except for the forward 1 arrow on 12-345 and the back 1 arrow on 12-346; if these two bricks exist, you should be able to go from one to the other and back).
At first we underlined forward 1 (right arrow), forward 7 ("v" or down arrow), the wildcard ('*'), and the 2 home links, plus the help link. Then with 12-346, we've activated the back 1 (left arrow), back 7 (carrot, ^) and forward 7, but not forward 1, and not the wildcard either. This would usually mean that these two bricks are completed, but not the brick before 12-345 (12-344), or following our second brick, 12-346 (12-347). However, bricks 12-355, 12-356, and 12-336 seem to exist, barring a mistake or error (of course, sometimes we write our mistakes off as intentional works of art for some ridiculous reason or another, but that's just about never worked). Then the active wildcard of brick 12-345, again, might bring us somewhere relevent, like a commentary on 12-345.
This is just a rough guide on mini- navigation bars like this that you might see. There might another item, or two, or more, or maybe none at all (i.e. the friter label, in effect, "I was too !@#$ lazy to copy the and paste the navigation links here). As long as you get the gist, you should be fine surfing frangles mobile prose for awhile. Again, there's much more detailed information about structure on the .com site, but do consider the possibility of sticking with one or another, as we've just started frangles mobile and we're really unsure what exactly the relationship is going to be. Certainly many things will need re-writing rather than simply copying and pasting, so if we're doing that anyway, we'll probably throw in some new stuff or twists, etc, to whatever we're putting in frangles mobile. Orrrrr, of course, we could just get really lazy and post the 1500 or so novel-page lengthed pages of frangles stories, articles, blurbs, and those of all related domains into this little crammed mobile page. But even we are really, really, really, not quite totally that lazy.
Check back, check back, check back....