| Welcome
to Frangles They say frupdates are the frangles in which we burn / temporally, fremporally, when's it my turn? / to update the frupdates, and say 'sup? to Mangles: The cat on the mat, at Prime Xangles. -poep
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| frangles frupdates | 2009 >2010< |
3/8 - Excuse
Squish seems to be in one of his chronic MPD egoexistential phases right now. That's when he either: A) tags a couple dozen personals onto his list of official alternate personalities and parades around all happy as if he's given birth to a litter of messiah kittens, or B) spends all his Frangles-writing time scribbling schizophrenic paper piles of phonetic gibberish promising he'll fuse all his alter egos into a smaller set of names, when really all he ever ends up with is another larger litter of messiah kittens who don't have the guts to off any of their brethren. But by now we've learned to look on the bright side at these times: whatever the outcome, at least XFBS7 always gets a new monthly GoDaddy bill and a slew of cool sounding but otherwise useless domain names and rehaul projects. Anyway, this is our excuse this week for any lack of productivity a freer might accuse us of (as it's always an ongoing criminal charge whether it contains any validity or not), and invigoratingly refreshingly, it's actually not a bullshit excuse! Bullshit excuses are excuses that would be good ones if they were actually true or plausible or honestly relayed. This is a just plain pathetic excuse any way you slice it, and that's quite enough trash talk about today's excuse without throwing in the rhetorical that it could easily be bullshit as well as pathetic.
3/7 - Material
We're trying hard to stick to our commitment of writing the 7 novas that we announced will be fritten first, before anything else. Part of our drive to do that is not to allow ourselves to go ADHD all the time and just do, like, y'know, like, whateeever and hey what's that out my window is that GOF!! GET OFF THE PEAS oh are you still here?... See? However, we follwed quickly with the announcement that the full frook "Writer's Bricks" (the 7-nova, 343-brick structure map you see here) would be a close 2nd, because we quickly realized, A) Deterring from Writer's Bricks to go write something else is already a naughty deferment habit to get into since we already did that with Kyle, and it would just plain suck to go write random chapters and bricks all the time without seriously finishing a full frook. (Although, on the positive side, since the novas are getting longer than intended, Skip Square One (nova 1 of WB) will actually be a small standard-sized reading book when it's done). And we that realized B) it could potentially be much, much easier to write more WB material with the style / story / etc already fleshed out, where it might be harder or impossible to return much later and replicate the style. And while that goes for any Frangles passage--whatever the size, big or small--in this case we think writing a full frook sooner rather than later would be wise. Then again, we might get additional inspiration for the story in the years to come (WB could be the story of the entire duration of the Finishing of Frangles), but of course, there's always time later to screw you over and re-write the whole damn thing. =)
3/2 - Squish has stolen back his homepage. The general site map for XFBS7 (Xangles Frangles Blorkk Squish7) stuff will now be at XFBS7.net instead of Squish7.com. The site map won't be constantly updated, so don't use it as a source of day to day news. This page is currently the most updated day to day source of news for all things XFBS7. Other pages just have monthly or occasional news postings. (The XFBS7 sitemap is a little grotesque at the moment as the graphics still need to be copied over, but at least it works.)
2/24 - Formats: We've designed the new format that Writer's Bricks pages should be in by the time the first nova is comple. Currently the pages only go forward or back one page: linearly, as you'd read a standard reading novel. As more and more Frangles material is completed and posted, you'll start to see ways to navigate in more directions. A full article has been posted on the example page if you'd like to know more.
2/24 - Xangles News has been updated. It was stuck on October for a long, long time (since October, actually; hrm). We'd written November & December updates but neglected to post them, but now they're there now, and to boot, January and February as well. There really hasn't been much going on on any other XFBS7 updates/etc page lately, because the bulk of the work being put into Xangles/Frangles/etc (i.e. XFBS7) has been on Frangles. Hence this is still your most active & maintained source of news for all things XFBS7 (Xangles / Frangles / Blorkk / Squish7, which we might as stated begin calling XFBS7 rather than "Xangles"... or not, you never know)
2/23 - Art / Wallpapers: We've just started to dive into ChaosPro as a great fractal rendering tool. It doesn't seem to be entirely superior to Fractal Explorer, but in general is a lot easier and more powerful to use. We're just telling you this to counteract the depression of having told you there'd be "fewer pretty things for now". It's still true, but telling you about how we're diving into new methods of doing new "pretty things" hopefully will counteract the truth and create a greater enthusiasm for Frangles artwork & wallpapers.
2/23 - Progress
We've noticed that visits to this update page don't reflect the balance of important information we think we offer here. This definitely our fault, as we've been lazy in organizing the information here into official articles about Frangles. The information here is wonderful to keep up to date with things if you like to follow Frangles' progress day to day, but because it involves so many changing plans, all the really important information about Frangles that only resides here is watered down with repetition from week to week, and sifting through an enormous progress page for specific information you're looking for--even if you've already read it and want to revisit it much later--is incredibly tedious. Since a lot of the information is already written, organizing it into more formal blurbs shouldn't be a major undertaking, and we'll try to get that going soon.
We counted the length of all updates pages from 2009 & this year, and altogether it's about 100-PLP* of prose, much of which needs to be edited away as it's either redundant, or deals with day-to-day issues rather than over all final explanations. Although, note that an enormous part of understanding Frangles is its history and the methods that continuously bring about the "final result" (the result on whatever happens to be!). So it's not just organizing the whole mass of confusing information about what Frangles is about, it's how to organize the history of how it turned into that mass of "current" confusing information! Also take into consideration something else: that we're not even sure how much "history" we want to leave online, and how much to discard. From one pragmatic frangle, it can a greed issue on our part on how to manipulate your malleable freer brains into getting us the most hits (i.e. whether pulling back archived information will get you to check back more and keep current with Frangles, or leave you with too little to read if you come in without having followed that history, or followed it closely). But that's a frangle no around here (cough) subscribes to! (On the other hand, we certainly do agree our honesty is always severely in question, so we'll let you do the math.)
[*PLP = Paperback Lengthed Pages]
2/23
--Brick 13.164 posted. It's a little drafty, but then again, what around here isn't. (Remember that officially the page numbers are 5 digits/bricks but that this choice does not reflect anywhere on the site yet, and may not for awhile. So for instance here, we'd say "13.164 posted" rather than "131.164 posted" even though the latter is the number on the html page.)
--The rest of brick 13.153 (only some is posted) has been firmly drafted as a solid readable 40-PLP scene, and is being (not) revised as we speak. [We *do* mean "scene". While the new nature of having a *40* standard reading page brick in a nova with 1-PLP bricks might seem--or be--awkward placement, the passage itself is (or soon will be) as coherent and meaningful as any other posted brick, which we define as one fully continuous scene of events, like a fulls scene in a movie with no breaks forward. That is to say, it won't be some run-on watered-down uncut ramble (or at least not beyond reason), and will work as well as anything else in and of itself as a well-written brick. (A lot can happen in a Future Fiction Bar).]
[Keep in mind that any brick not immediately preceded by the brick numbered one less than it--i.e. 55.123 is officially the brick that comes before before 55.124 in the single default brick reading order from 11.111 to 77.777--will always link to some higher level html page when you press "previous" or a basic left arrow (such as a page index) rather than to some other random brick that just happens to be written nearby (a couple before it), or some other brick one nonlinear step away just because that's the only polished one "nearby" (i.e. linking 77.222 to 67.222 instead of 77.221). This could get horribly confusing for the freer and tedious for the friter if the forward and back links while reading are always changing around.]
2/23 - Title Grammar
Keep in mind - titles of works are officially designated in Frangles style by capitalizing the first letters of the words in the title (<Pride And Prejudice>, rather than <"Pride and Prejudice">, or <Pride and Prejudice>, etc). There are a bunch of reasons for this.
1) Since Frangles is largely a parody of just about everything else out there, mentioning others' frwoas can happen frequently or in rapid succession. It convolutes prose to write things like <Skip considered whether "Pulse", "Proof", "Go", "Cube", "Cube2", "Cube Zero", or "U-571" were short enough for a headachey updates example line> and makes these passages harder to read. Or awkward, such as <Skip didn't think Pulse, or Proof, or Go, or Cube and Cube2 and Cube Zero for that matter were at all U-571ish>, which just reads like a DVD back cover advertising every reference,* or a list of hyperlinks. [* Nothing referenced via Fair Use need be advertised by any means. In fact, plenty of Fair Use references make negative comments about the references. Frangles in general strives to create respectful, promotional Fair Use environment when copyright issues are in question, as these are types of factors involved in the legality of a right to a reference or passage quote. While we might "make fun" of a lot of stuff (right of parody), we do our best to engineer it all in good humor as you might pass friendly insults at your friends.]
2) Frangles heavily intermingles different layers of real life and freer mediums of all kinds. E.g, the word "matrix" can belong with math and science, or be associated with any of many companies and products that use the word officially in some way, and we might want to mix these up a bit instead of flagging a term in red with, *only the official saga by so and so and nothing else*. So if we wanted to say "the matrix" in a sorta-ambiguous way that could apply to a bunch of things but one that sorta surfaces in particular (whether because it's relevant or because it's the thing that people most usually associate a term with) we might use <The Matrix> to allude to the movie by the Wachowski Brothers (found here), when we might have used <the matrix> instead, rather than specifically flagging the phrase as a reference to an external work. Note Frangles is a 7^5 mathematical matrix of nonlinear scenes, so it's quite literally a "page matrix" or "brick matrix" or "prose matrix" or what have you. But, because the Wachowski Brothers' film is so huge, the term <the matrix> brings forth mental images of the movie with flying colors, so it would be difficult to write long passages where Frangles characters refer to Frangles (or any of a zillion other potential nonlinear conceptions) as "the matrix [of pages/bricks/etc]".
3) Having too much punctuation or bold/italic/underlined text can make areas of passages of prose stick out awkwardly. A whole paragraph mentioning 50 book references all with italics or quotes would detract readability from the rest of the prose, because seeing something stand out strong makes everything else seem more watered down and uncolorful.
4) We're just plain !@#$ing lazy. =P pbblbl
2/22 - Teen Frampires??
A friter had the Metallica-level sell-out idea at the bookstore today of writing teenage vampire characters into Frangles because that's all the rage right now and oh, wouldn't actual hits or even money be a great plus to writing free online reading material. Luckily, there's still enough space in the planned 49-frook blueprints where the greedy idiot might get their way. (They wrote a few pages and the rest of us liked it so much we hacked out all the blood and guts and applied the healthy writing immediately to a scene with Skip instead, mostly just so we don't have to ever read Twilight for inspiration.)
No, seriously, changing/shifting plans & ideas that affect the general Frangles structure & material in a major way has been a concern on our minds. It's just dandy now when we only have a handful of bricks posted, but once we start to fill out / flesh out the 49-frook structure more, many major things will start to become locked into place. Trying to throw a new major idea into Frangles is like a wrench (good or bad) into its whole clockwork of concepts, or like deciding every house in a huge housing complex should have a sun room instead of an extra bedroom (an irony admittedly contrived since vampires wouldn't need the former very much. har, har). A teenage vampire would be as fun and rewarding to write as any other character (and we're also dealing with the complex issue of how to reach the most general audiences as possible, because something as prolific/versatile as Frangles should just naturally demand that flexibility), but throwing in something that changes everything else all around it is the problem; or at least, *will* be the problem when we have these sorts of "big" ideas when we're finally friting brick 77.777 in 50 years (having decided semi-ironically to write it *last*).
2/18 - Advancing Structure Issues
We're finding it quite challenging (translation: "How in the !@#$ are we going to pull anything we've been promising off?!") to start leaping up into the entire new dimension from 7^2 brick structures (novas) to 7^3 (frooks). Skip Square One (13.1) is nearing "completion" (translation: "How in the !@#$ are we ever going to pull finishing 13.1 off?!"), and we're finding more and more how much it's going to need revision and polishing (translation: re-writing and demolishing) before it's up to Frangles standards for a full, finished, self-sustenant, standalone yet perfectly modular frwoa. You may have noticed the hovering (translation: bulldozer wrecking-ball) frangle that 13.1 is becoming a little unbalanced and slightly askew of our intention from when we first started it (translation: 35-PLP bricks vs an intended average length of 1-PLP/brick is nothing less than an utterly *psychotic* deviation)--not just in length but in the coherency and connectivity of its bricks and just about everything else that's supposed to make it a fully coherent, publishable frwoa (translation: the first literary review of Skip Square One will undoubtedly be entitled: "Skip 'Skip Square One': We Wish We Did"), *but*, the good news (translation: bu!@#$ news)--GOF, would you stop that for gods' sakes!? (What?) You know what. (I do not). Stop that. Quit your @#$ interruptions. (translation: good job translating, Krufo! Here's a doggie snack!) Gof! (Alright.) No, seriously; this is starting to plagiarize the opening Holy Grail credits. (translation: "trust us, we weren't plagiarizing from the beginning, really we weren't.") That's it. (what? oh no, not the fluton disrupter.) K, charging. (ooo, I'm scared). And now you're just plagiarizing a login. (translation: here's a shameless link to what we were plagiarizing from the very--@$!!@oouuch! that tickles, don't ever do that ag-##*@that's- all- folks!#$#%3NO_CARRIER
--but the good news is, the difficulties in making 13.1 work well as a whole parallel the difficulties of making the higher structures work well as a whole as well. Hence overcoming the challenges on the smaller level (7^2 structures, or one nova) help overcome the challenges of the larger levels we're working with as well (7^3: a frook, a structure we've barely begun to work with, as not even one 7^2 structure is complete).^
[In fact, you might say we've been consistently working our way up anyway, because as bricks have become longer and longer than the intended 1-PLP/brick original length, we've been working with a higher density of plot / theme / character / etc *per brick*, so when we announced the first sevthing of Frangles* and the entire structure came *down* an axis (49 frooks total instead of 343^), you could see we were *already* working our way up to a higher level complexity (sort of), it's just the bricks were became much longer, making that density of plot / character development / etc thicker. (Think of a ruler with six even marks for measurement changed to a ruler with five even marks for measurement, then think of that as a hyperruler for measuring axes on an XD graph rather than inches or other units, etc!)]
*Anyway*, we're already looking ahead from the plan of the first seven novas announced to be written (131, 221, 311, 471, 561, 651, 741), to think of what to do after *that*, since there are so many other story lines we want to work on too, even if just outlying via blueprints and not actual prose. Keep in mind this nova progression (frook [1>7.3<4.1]) came about largely because we wanted to write a solid story about Skip and Kyle, and choosing which Skip nova and Kyle to write lines up all other 5 novas automatically, like picking two points on a plane which only line can be drawn through, so we don't get much say on the other 5, and hence didn't have much of a say in which novas we wanted to write first, creating the need for planning ahead, so we can also work on some other stories that we do have more planned of.
Of course, this isn't to say that you have to read 5 novas we don't give a shit about! It's just the *order* that's unplanned--since we're excited about all the stories of Frangles--we just don't want to do the *work* of doing them quite *yet*, but of course, in literature you hardly get to do exactly what you want to do all the time; just like you can't draw whatever fractal you like once a few pixels have been chosen. In short, it will just take a little more *time* to adapt currently written & brainstormed material for those particular novas; for instance, perhaps we have a thorough idea of Kyle as a teenager, and a nova axis is such that we need to write him as an old man first. What that takes is adaptation of our beloved characters for other beloved walks of life, which just takes more work rather than less =).
Bottom line, we've decided to plan and work on another couple fronts as well. First and foremost, since you're all reading Skip's story now (for lack of anything else to read, hrmph), it would kinda suck to just cut you off from the rest of the frook, so one of our secondary goals will be writing Skip's full story (Frangles 13) as a back burner to these other novas. Kyle's full story will also be considered strongly as well, but initially more of the focus will be on the flow between 13.1 and 22.1 (Skip's first nova and Kyle's first nova respectively) rather than Kyle's full story. Basically, you're already used to Kyle's story dropping off as his first five chapters was the first Frangles material to be written, but you're not used to Skip's story dropping off as it's been progressing from page one regularly onward. Hence, for confusion / frustration continuity, Kyle's five chapters will simply be re-*written* (with no serious promise of continuing the story), while the momentum of Skip's story (Writer's Bricks) should continue to some extent or another, so you aren't *completely* f!@#ed over when 13.1 comes to a conclusion. =)
Other story progressions (brick/nova progressions) we mot be working on as back burner stuff to everything mentioned so far are really really really fuzzy if we're even considering any at all, so for the moment just know that the first nova progression-- (1>7.3<4.1), or {131, 221, 311, 471, 561, 651, 741} will be our primary goal, and Writer's Bricks our second, and Kyle's *full* story somewhere on the back burners too (though note that the first 7th of Kyle's frook is included in our front burner stuff, so we will be working on his story indirectly anyway).^^
[* Not "first sevthing" in that there are sure to be lots more of them, but rather "First Sevthing of Frangles" as a time line landmark, such as BC, e.g. 2 FSF would be two years from that announcement]
[^ Always keep in mind, FYI, that we use base-10 numbers--the normal numbers you're used to dealing with--for just about everything that doesn't involve a page designation. Here we mean "49" and "343" as you'd use them to count apples or blu-ray players. If we used base seven numbers for counting, these would be "77" and "777". Perhaps we should start including both whenever we use a number; one in small print after the other(?)]
[^^We're more or less *purposely* intermingling different notations and conventions for different brick orderings in this blurb, to start getting you used to the reality that those different sorts of notations may exist here or there in a universe as big as Frangles. For instance, if one reads Shakespeare, Greek philosophy, or the Christian Bible, one would generally be familiar with the general structure of these works, but you would recognize the slightly different notation systems labeling those lines, paragraphs, footnotes, chapter numbers, paragraph indentations, etc etc. To be able to have a decent knowledge of these different works, you have to have the versatility to be able to recognize the structures of those works without needing a perfect, precise notation system. If we go from computer science book to computer science book, we'll notice different conventions in function naming; one author might name all their constant variables const_Swallow_Wingspan, and others might not prefix their constants with anything. Again, to be versatile in the world of programming, you must be familiar with all these sorts of differing notations.
In Frangles, if you see (1>7.3<4.1) and elsewhere see (1^.3v.1) --the second being a possible shorthand for the first, a freer should be able to recognize both as meaning the same thing. (Maybe we officially changed from one to the other and didn't haver time to change every single nova ordering on frangles.com and any other place mentioning frangles, not to mention if other sites, let's say, refer to Frangles and we didn't have any way of changing every possible reference using this notation. Or, let's say we added the latter as an *official shorthand* in *addition* to the official *longhand*, but you weren't familiar with the latter. Then the freer (you) would have to be familiar with both to notice them wherever you might see them. Even further, a progression of long handed notations to shorthanded notations for this progression (the first set of. Frangles novas) might go as follows:
#1: <13.1/, 22.1/, 31.1/, 47.1/, 56.1/, 65.1/, 74.1/>
#2: <13.1, 22.1, 31.1, 47.1, 56.1, 65.1, 74.1>
#3: <131, 221, 311, 471, 561, 651, 741>
#4: (1>7.3<4.1/)
#5: 1>.3<.1
#6: 1^3v1
[etc]
2/11 - Fewer pretty colors for now =(
On a serious note (insert joke here on hell freezing over or something funny like that, which would be appropriate if this wasn't serious news item), Squish's eye problems are still pretty bad. He's struggled over the past several months with vitamins, foods, doctors, font sizes & colors, monitors, etc. He says all that stuff individually helps a small amount and in combination help with his ability to look at a screen, but says it's still difficult, and he definitely can't look at a screen for your usual 8-hour day, which hinders his activities, being an online friter / youtuber / webmaster / etcetc.
Fortunately it's not 100% important for him to stare at a colorful screen all day in order to do a lot of what he does, for instance, writing reading material (prose) here on Frangles; text can be minimized to a small box with a black color scheme so that minimal light is emitted from the monitor (or projected onto the wall), and if you're careful and focus on memory techniques, obviously you can type on a keyboard even if a monitor/etc is off. Then it can be a matter of printing long passages to revise by hand and type in revisions quickly on screen, etcetc. He's going to get a voice recognition program (Dragon Naturally Speaking) which will also help him be productive, as you can speak about three times faster than you can type, and as with a keyboard you still don't have to look at a screen, or if a screen is on, a voice recognizer can make it easy to turn away or reposition to avoid staring at a monitor while being limited by a keyboard cord and typing position.
Anyway, what this means for you freers (Frangles readers) is that there'll simply be a lot more text updates around Xangles, Blorkk, Squish7, Frangles, etc, indefinitely rather than graphics, background images, maps/charts, fractal wallpapers, etc. This isn't a major loss as the reading material is the primary thing that Frangles is about. Of course, clearly our focus *could* be on the fractal wallpapers which are incredibly more popular than our nonlinear fiction (most of our wallpapers are at Xangles; only a few are posted here.) But honestly we mostly do the wallpapers to attract attention. Cool looking wallpapers are nothing new and endless ones are out there, but nobody has ever written a fractal nonlinear prose saga. The primary goal of Xangles & Frangles is to influence art in a major way, doing vastly new things with current artistic mediums and experimenting with new ones altogether.
So fortunately, the reading material is the thing Squish (the only significant active friter at the moment, if only because the rest of actually have real jobs; oh wait, we said no humor) can still do the primary Frangles stuff without a lot of trouble. To boot, fractal wallpapers don't require nearly as much time in front of a screen as a lot of other graphic art that requires drawing or time in photoshop editing, etc. We have the artistic method of making our wallpapers pretty down by this point; we have a pattern down enough where we can find a neat fractal pretty fast, hit render and wait a week/month, tag on a small "Xangles" or "Frangles" logo, then cut a 16:9, 16:10, and 3:4 aspect ratio versions and then shrink them all to fit common monitor resolutions. It's certainly a decent artistic process but nowhere near that of drawing animated cartoons or 3D video game, etc.
It's of course rhetorical to state that the rest of us--if there even *is" a rest of us, as only two known friters have been reported to date, and Kyle really isn't doing a damn thing just yet (lazyass !@#!#)--could start dedicating more time to the project, and, in fact, we will! Frangles originally a neat concept, then it worked itself into a more fleshed out project over time, and it's become significant enough to dedicate time to as a sincere professional project with great potential for growth, and (knock on krforbs), professional publication. (Of course, if Squish and/or Kyle are indeed the only friters, they're going to have to work twice as hard to susten* the ongoing farce of our existence.)
["Susten is a special and rare type of Xangles / Frangles invented term: one we feel that the English language could/should already use but doesn't due to a little brain fart or oversight, rather than a term/word particular to the worlds of Frangles, like "freer" or "krforb" or "xite". In this example, we feel the English dictionary should contain a verb and adjective form of the noun "sustenance", just as the noun "sustainment" has the verb form "sustain" and the adjective form "sustaining". People say such and such is "self-sustaining", and we feel we should be able to use "self-sustenant" in the same way; something that feeds on itself and gives itself nourishment like a "self-sustenant frwoa [or work of art]" rather than just having its basic existence sustained). You can find all key Xangles/Frangles terms of every type in the Xangles Index of Terms, which you can return to with the short URL "xangles.com / i"]
2/10 - The 2nd Known Friter!!
With infinite enthusiasm we're proud to announce the possible existence of a second potentially official friter, who mot (may or may not) exist in some way or another outside of being currently announced, and who mot be a clever deception to make you think that there mot be a possibly existent 2nd friter when there's actually not.* (The only known friter previous to the previous sentence was Squish). As if Frangles isn't recursively self- and reality-intertwining enough, the 2nd friter's name is (ugh) "Kyle Kirby". This mot have something or nothing or everything to do with the "Kyle Kirby" Frangles character (character 22), and mot or mot not have everything or something or nothing to do with a version of the Frangles "Kyle Kirby" who eventually found a way to leap up into a higher dimensional reality to become a real real life human being in the real world via his giraffahole (from some frangle out there).
If you find this to be as bull!@#$ a vague and meaningless announcement as any sane freer should find it, we can tell you that there is definitely something significant to this announcement other than a random throw-in comment on this page. Maybe we have a "Kyle vs Kyle" video game lined up, or maybe we encountered a Plutonian-Blorkkan ferret named "Kyle Kirby" who just happened to slurmhole into our living room last week, or maybe Squish has decided to change his name to "Kyle Kirby" in a further plan to eschew Frangles reality and dive deeper into the usual complex obsessive endeavors of any crazy unemployed sci-fi/fantasy writer/D&D-nerd/comedian, so we'll let you sleep on all that and let your imaginations go wild (at least until we're damn well ready to give you any more information (if ever). Pbblbbllbb =P)
[* Apart from official friter(s), there's also the occasional character that has one thing or another to do with Frangles that pops up here and there, such as our beloved "Orbo", a bot orb from the future that hangs around here and does a little maintainance and stuff like that that you may have noticed. But to date Squish was the only official main friter ("Frangles writer", or "fractal writer") that had some sort of (supposed) significant role (whatever that was/is) in the ongoing Frangles project.]
2/9 - Structure
Today we've worked on some structure issues, the types of things we claim we're doing when we're not getting anything posted, though today we actually have proof; and by proof we mean blabbing about structure issues we fleshed out twenty years ago and are posting now to make you think we actually did something today (which, mock sarcasm aside, we actually did). Now if the following is a little confusing or overwhelming, just keep in mind that, A) it's not necessary to understand these structure issues to simply read a Frangles story from page to page, and B) It's actually a lot simpler than you might think; remember extreme simplicity can generate extreme complexity (like with a fractal generated by simple equations), and it can just be a matter of understanding those simple "equations" of Frangles to understand those complexities. Of course, the following may be overly simplistic to someone else; we try to aim for a middle ground that will appeal to everyone, like a computer operation system that anyone can learn but that some people may want to get more "into" and others may just want to learn the extreme basics of. Anyway, here's some key things we've been fleshing out.
As said before, the first 7 novas (Frangles novellas / short books) that in combination will form the first nonlinear Frangles frook (very long book) will be novas 13.1 22.1 31.1 47.1 56.1 65.1 74.1.* The tentative characters for these novas will be (respectively), Skip, Kyle, Suzie (a young unimportant girl who lives on a very important spaceship called the Delbrient), a very ancient/old character tentatively named Obelo (in the ballpark of relating to the Emperor / Yoda / Obi-wan of Star Wars in old age, an older dying Dr. Seldon of Foundation, Merlin, Macros of Magician: Apprentice, and Babylon 5's Lorien), a slightly less old Kroffonian character (i.e. a normal grumpy old man rather than one blessed with the ancient mystical wisdom of all the universe), forest-ish ruling lady akin to Galandriel of Lord of the Rings, the Green Man of the Wheel of Time, the Lady of the Lake, and the large fat fairy in Zelda: A Link to the Past; and finally a middle-aged phylo (philosophy) professor named "Pico" of Zeroa who's story will cover the teaching of a class of phylo students. (Who mot be the same Pico that talks to Kyle in the Kyle example chapters)
Each chapter (7 bricks) of each nova will generally cover 2/3 of one day in that character's life (a waking day, e.g. humans are awake about 16 hours a day and sleep for 8), and that waking day will begin 1/7th of the day later than the previous character, lopping around from the last to the first (i.e. day shift, second shift, night shift, day shift, etc). In terms of an Earth day (24 hours), the seven characters' days will begin at:
Skip - 3:34am (Skip's early train to Flutonia)
Kyle - 7am (waking for school on Earth)
Suzie - 10:26am (waking on the Delbrient ship for day)
Obelo - 1:51pm (or Florbban equivalent, etc)
Kroffonian old guy - 5:17pm (or Kroffonian equivalent)
Lheilia (at night in the forest) - 8:43pm (or Generikan equivalent)
Pico's class - About midnight (or Zeroan equivalent)
Think the show "24", except with 7 equally weighted protagonists in a comedic style rather than one kickass counter-terrorist federal agent in an action-packed drama. (The characters won't necessarily all "wake up" at these times, but it's the time we will jump into their story, progressing in a structured way toward the conclusion of the story of their 2/3-day, ending as any standard linear book chapter might end with a light conclusive note.)
Note that for this kind of symmetry to exist, *all* the characters' starting times are automatically locked into place given just *one* choice of when we'll jump into a character's day. The focus we've chosen here is Kyle, who must wake up around 7am for us to follow his day from dawn to sleep. Luckily, we're not as locked in with all the other characters as their stories don't take place in regular common-day Earth, and we have significant leeway in choosing which 2/3 of their day is the important part to follow (though technically we're not "choosing" at all, given those times are all automatically chosen *for* us given our choice that Kyle wake up at 7am). So clearly our "choices" of the times listed above are not choices at all, but are generated from the lone information: "Kyle--one of 7 characters--wakes at 7am, and each successive character will wake 1/7th of a day later than Kyle." E.g. complexity (precise and seemingly random times) from simplicity (the aforementioned variables).
Not all of the time lines of the 2,401 chapters in Frangles will be structured in this way (booooring), but the choice of what all those other structures will be is an exponentially higher issue than these 7 novas. Lining up about a week in the life of 7 characters is an entire axis below figuring out how those 7 weeks will relate to the *49* weeks of their collective entire stories, and/or to the weeks of other characters, depending on which novas are written after these 7. And not *only* does that higher-dimensional choice affect all of those 49 novas, but structuring those 7 frooks set precedents for the other 297 "weeks" as well (7^5 - 49). [by "week" we mean "set of 7 bricks" just to get an idea of the length of a chapter, not necessarily a week at all],
Note that the next step may not be as simple as saying something like "the next 7 novas after a given one will all start 1 month later than the previous", because we need not choose a simple symmetric pattern. Maybe Skip's seven novas will progress in a totally different way than Kyle's will; or perhaps every other frook of Frangles will be structured in *some* way and the others won't have any apparent crafted structure whatsoever! (Not everything in nonlinear fiction need adhere to a strict mathematical pattern, or every single sentence and word could be predicted! And while from some frangle out there someone has generated that type of story in the format of Frangles with those types of strict guidelines, Frangles doesn't follow that kind of plan, as we're just friters, not krforbs or bot orbs (or so you think)).
We'll keep you superuptodate on relevant structure progress, so check back check back check back.^ =)
[* You can get an idea of the over all nova map of Frangles by examining the circly fractal septagon shape on the main structure page (which incidentally was insanely hard to find in the Mandelbrot set; in fact the equation generating it might be the only shape with 7 even points/sides we've ever found in all fractals we've ever explored). Each dot was originally to represent the set of 343 "Frangles books" that Frangles originally was planned to consist of (one dot per book), but since Frangles has been sevthed, each dot can now represent one nova, and each circle of dots one frook (what a "Frangles book" is now called), although this isn't yet changed or noted anywhere on frangles.com except this updates page due to infinite friter laziness. To visualize how the first seven novas (13.1, 22.1, 31.1, 47.1, 56.1, 65.1, 74.1) line up on this map, just imagine the seven colored cycling dots of each Age (each seventh of the entire septagon) are the circles of the starting frooks in question, and that the lower left dot on those circles is the first nova of that frook. I.e. the third circle of dots (of novas) clockwise from the lower left circle of dots of the lower left age (Flutonia) could be colored to represent Skip's frook (13./), and the lower left dot of that circle would be the main nova being currently worked on (13.1, or "Skip Square One"), and so on for the other 6 novas. Hence the colored cycling can represent the reading order of the seven novas of those given 7 frooks' novas straight through from nova 1 to nova 7 (i.e. reading the frook from the first to last page consecutively as one would read a normal book in the order the pages are written rather than a nonlinear way)]
[^ With all XFBS7 material, we're still in havoc on where to post what and when; the above information has some time-sensitive issues, and yet it could be considered far too much information for an "update". Although it couldn't be inserted as an official "structure" page without extension and polished revision. In combination with Xangles & Blorkk, we may never have any solid idea of when/where/what to post of updates, analyzes, etc etc, but for now and indefinitely just be aware that this page is the most active and up-to-date source of news for all things XFBS7.]
2/8 - Quick Note on Links
If you've ever read a Frangles update (rhetorical since you're reading one now) you may have noticed some Wikipedia- rip-off- style- hyperlinks like this, and this, and this. We do this for a number of reasons: to make our page look pretty, to increase page ratings by "linking to high-quality websites" (if that even does anything), to confuse the freer so you can't parse our convoluted prose, to feign the magnitude of Wikipedia simply by plagiarizing its style, and to scare you off the site so you don't have to suffer through our unproductive random nonlinear fractal blah blah blah bull!@#. Our conventions are similar to Wikipedia, but unlike them, our hyperlinks often contain hidden subliminal meanings and comedic surprises (pbblbbb=P). Unlike ol' boring hyperlinks, seeing a word or phrase link on frangles.com doesn't always tell you what the link will be to (or whether the link will be at all expected whatsoever) and two words/phrases that appear twice (twice) might not always link to the same thing. A few of the many link categories we use are as follows:
TYPES OF FRANGLES LINKS: relevant / non-relevant / non sequitur / definition / rhetorical / internal / external / pun / bad pun / really bad pun / confusing / random / informative / waste of time / broken. (Most of these can be found above).
A couple notes on method: we try to keep links very short (one word if possible) for style continuity and clarity. For instance, a Wii has the same general functional importance as a 22 GHz 700-terabyte hyperulticore processor pentagon-safe personal gaming PC, but hyperlinking the latter term would dwarf the visual weight of the former and even stand out on the entire paragraph/page. Hence usually only the last word or two will be a hyperlink, or some "word in the phrase" if no others are separate hyperlinks such as in "this is a horrible waste of your time". In general if two or more consecutive words are highlighted, this will be one link rather than multiple separate links. (Rarely will Frangles use underlined links as colors usually look more stylish, one exception being where black uniform text is stylistically necessary such as in areas of Flutonia & Zeroa that are all black and white and the only other option is to color a word or phrase gray, decreasing its visibility. Or in this sentence as it's an example of what we're talking about and using a non-underlined link within it would be erroneous.) However, a slash, comma, or period may separate links, so look closely.
On a related tangent, note that all Xangles / Frangles / Blorkk / Squish7 (etc) html is pretty damned sloppy. It all uses the same handful of templates, and almost all have been edited in Kompozer, a free html editing tool, which is always going to be more sloppy than editing the html by hand exactly as it should be. (But gods bless the Kompozer krforbs who do all that shit for us). The worst part about having sloppy html is that XFBS7 domains can show up differently in different browsers & O/S's. Without using basic code that's guaranteed to be generically interpreted the same way on any platform, we can't be sure your page looks like we want it to. (Especially if you're reading on a Plutonian Hypercore 9.9). This is something we mot fix when we damn well get around to (or not).
2/8 - Excuses++
In a bold effort to reach new heights in absurd productivity excuses, we're apparently blaming the Haiti earthquake for our lack of productivity over the past two weeks. Squish has graced us with the brilliant logic leading to this excuse, which necessarily takes a good amount of convolution on the way to its final QED, so please don't follow it as you might see through it.
Squish--still the only known friter, if only because the rest of us don't want to be publically associated with him--generously loaned his self-precious 1.6 GHz 160-gig drive netbook bought "just for writing Frangles because it's easier on my eyes" (Squish has an increasing number of hypochondriac life-threatening eye disorders making each one less credible as they accumulate) to his needy ex-Marine brother for a week to help him take logistics notes over there. With the tragic loss of his ring- of- power- precious slate of tin foil, his hypochondria--sorry, his "eye syndromes"--multiplied a hundredfold to the point they were so horrible that Squish in fact gorged his eyeballs out with a butter knife then discarded them in the garbage disposal (the new ones grown via an experimental stim-cell process had to be surgically reimplanted), emphatically justifying upgrading from his $250 Frangles-writer to a $750 720p / Hi-def / PC / Playstation3 / HDMI / Blu-ray / Wii compatible multimedia wall projector that will still be "mostly for writing Frangles prose in Notepad." Hence Squish claims that his week of inflamed Hyper Computer Vision Eyeball Dispersion Pigment Cancer Disease Syndrome was a noble humanitarian sacrifice, and a valid excuse for not getting anything done around here.
And of course, as we all know, getting used to any new $750 text-editing machine requires a week or two of "pigment calibration" via at least 40 hours of DVD-watching & Fable game playing, because "if I don't push my eyes to figure out when they hurt I won't know how long I can write for". To boot, this process naturally involves more time away from his Haiti-returned netbook, which is an even greater sacrifice of time "if it turns out the [720p / Hi-def / PC / Playstation3 / HDMI / Blu-ray / Wii compatible multimedia wall projector] isn't helping." Finally, since for some reason his new implanted eyeballs have started bleeding again watching the Matrix and Dark City on his entire right living room wall, he has an even more valid excuse for not doing anything, since "I've been in pain for 3 weeks! How the fuck am I supposed to finish nova 1 by April?"
Obviously the rest of us could fill in more, but it's not our responsibility as he's in charge of most of the postable stuff. Squish is fond of reminding us "I'm the most productive person in this whole !@#$ing project so !@#$ off", and while this is sort of true, it's only because the rest of actually have real life jobs. Ouch.
2/7- Would it reveal friters to be antisocial nerds if we posted an update on Superdish Sunday? ... Yes? No? ... Anyone here? Heloooo..??
2/4 - Titles & Segmentation
Note the subtle difference between entitling frook 13 (officially 13./) "Writer's Bricks" vs "Writers' Bricks" (i.e. a singular possessive or multiple possessive apostrophe). The former grammatically implies "a writer's bricks" or "the writer's bricks". Assuming Skip is the writer in question, this would be equivalent to "Skip's bricks". The latter means the bricks of *multiple* writers, such as "Skip's and Toad's bricks" or "Skip's and his freer's bricks" or "The bricks of all the friters of Frangles". We've chosen to use the former simply only it looks more clear, even though we feel the latter is the more appropriate title. This isn't a *horrid* sacrifice for visual clarity, because you can still interpret "Writer's Bricks" as a plural in a sense, if we consider the phrases: *any* writer's bricks, or *each* writer's bricks. Still, it's kind of lonely and lacks the whole happy- collective- novelist- frat- party- feel we'd really rather convey. So, just keep in mind the very title of the frook you're reading isn't 100% appropriate (due only to an impossibility and not lack of diligence) =P.
On a related note, we *do* take delicate care when giving names to a given set of pages (literally billions of stories given enough bricks to combine). These are far too many to name (without a very advanced set of programmed algorithms for a program to generate titles for any given set), but we've recently become exited at the realization of how many of them can actually *have* titles and still be unique from one another (which is of course the first step toward developing those algorithms some day). For instance, we thought up possible titles for the following page orderings within frook 13/:
111 - 177: Skip Square One
111 - 143: A Topicless mush of !@#$
144 - 161: Friting the First Future Future Fiction Fage
144 - 177: Freers & Siffs & Square One Skips
151 (alone) : The First Future Fiction Fage
151 - 157: Future Fiction
151 - 177: Siffs & Square One Skips
161 (alone) : The First Future Future Fiction Fage
161 - 167: Future Future Fiction
1x3 (i.e."1(1>7)3"): Frank's Barstraunt
1x4 (i.e."1(1>7)4"): Office of a Dyslexic Secretary
1x6 (i.e."1(1>7)6"): The Developing Arts Council
111 - 777: Writer's Bricks (frook 13./)
[AxB is often short for inserting any/every brick "x" between A and B. For instance, 1x3 can mean the brick sequence/set: <113, 123, 133, 143, 153, 163, 173>, which in the case of Writer's Bricks is the story of Frank's bar (e.g. every 7 pages from 113 we find Skip in Frank's bar, so the story of Skip's Adventures in Frank's Bar would only include that dimension and leave out the pages in between), but it can also mean "unspecified" brick digit as in brainstorming when a friter knows the written brick is placed in Frank's Bar, but not sure which sour it should be. Here it's basically implied by context which we mean here, but it's clarified in parentheses to be clear. The notation used in the parentheses is explained below (earlier update), and could also be used to describe all the other brick flows listed above, for instance, bricks order 144 - 177 of Writer's Bricks is officially notated as 13.1(44-77)]
Bricks can be combined into so many structures because each brick is written to serve as just another page of the story you're reading (/147 is page /47 of nova 1 of WB, or some other novella if you're reading in some sort of other order), *or* the very first page of the story following that page to the end (/177), *or* the first page of an indefinitely long story, *or* the last page of some indefinitely long story, *or* a totally standalone work! (etc etc etc). Particularly with 13.144 through 13.177, we've given considerable effort into making it possible to start on any of those bricks and have a very coherent story from that brick to the end (we say effort, not success!=P). Of course there's only so many things you *can* give effort to when taking so many zillions of permutations into account, and this just happens to be a few of the nonstandard reading patterns we're taking into account. (Just imagine drawing an area of a fractal pixel by pixel trying to take into account every other pixel in your entire picture; it's very difficult, and the human mind is going to focus on a few similarities to other areas of the picture rather than every single other pixel at once).
You'll notice this particular ordering optimization involves a little re-introduction of characters at the start of each brick ("Frank the Bartender" rather than "Frank"). In Writer's Bricks this works 100% functionally well (non-contrived) because the *plot itself* involves Skip forgetting what happened before and needing to re-narrate or re-experience it. It's going to be more difficult to achieve this affect without the easy out of the plot directly *involving* that re-introduction, which is another reason it's great to start out with Writer's Bricks early on, to understand why such a thing might happen in the future.
Currently a high priority/goal we have is to have enough complete stories (brick/scene orderings that can function 100% as a standalone work that might have been written exactly as such by a sci-fi writer without any outside context) to offer a magazine for publication (such as Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, or Fantasy & Science Fiction for orderings which deal with sci-fi/fantasy themes, and/or any non-sci-fi/fantasy publications where Writer's Bricks material might fit in (a magazine *about* creative writing with stories and articles, or a publication for many various genres). The plan is to present a slightly longer submission than one would normally submit (i.e. the maximum requested length) and give the publisher the opportunity to select the appropriate story for their magazine. We feel this process will have many benefits:
1. Allowing the publisher many options of the material and length to be published.
2. Presenting Frangles' medium in full functionality rather than simply submitting one particular story and claiming "There's a whole bunch more where this came from!"
3. Creating (permanently) the option of many successive stories; i.e. a Frangles Such-And-Such Part I, Part II, Part III, where each "part" serves as a standalone work as *well* as a cliffhanger or piece of a larger story.
In general we think we've done a decent job to date progressing toward our short and long term goals of full modularity (re-arrangeable pieces), as no one's ever really *written* a modular work like this to our knowledge. But keep in mind that in proceeding toward that goal, that posted/published material will always always always be revised, tweaked, or even entirely re-written. Always remember that Frangles is--and perhaps always will be--a *draft*. What works or doesn't work about what you're reading could be completely revised in the future to do the opposite (not work and work, respectively, whichever your preference!) There's no other way to draft a nonlinear work in which every page relates to every other.
[* To say that Frangles may perhaps *never* be a final, polished work is not to say that a fractal nonlinear medium disallows completed frwoas, or frwoas seen as complete from the frangle of the writer who declares "This is my finished work of art and took me bloody 14 years so you damn well better appreciate it's total and utter finality!". I.e. a "finished" story of nine bricks--a 3 by 3 brick structure--can very well exist, just like a trilogy of films/books/poems can be officially published (or a series of 9 of them). This would be a 9-brick nonlinear frwoa that can be read in 9 factorial ways in full, or fewer ways for shorter readings (for instance, the partial frwoa 11, 12, 13). Each reading order/etc in this case would be completely polished to work perfectly the way the friter intends, and each brick would fit exactly with the others in whatever way the friter's designed this 3 by 3 structure to work. We could claim, "Skip Square One is exactly the way we intend it to be!", but this would be utter friter bull@#!, because right now it's basically a haphazard lump of vaguely-coherent nonlinear crud, and this shows through in its context. However, if we *genuinely* claimed that Skip Square One was entirely finished, you would have certain expectations as you would of any published novel you'd pick up at Barns & Noble. So saying Frangles may "never be a completed work" simply means that we're aiming high for the enormous brick structure we eventually want to accomplish (previously 7^6 bricks, and recently sevthed to 7^5), and the project could still take years or decades.]
2/1 - Competence Report
There are barrels and barrels of things to yet explain about the genius (*cough*.. monkeys- on- typewriter- gibberish) design of Frangles and all the unique concepts taken into account while friting, especially in the beginning when the concept is most fresh and alien to everyone used to freeing linear frwoas. Not just things that *will* be revealed about what all this is about, but that you're already reading and may not have noticed, like a poem you enjoy on one level while unaware of depths ingrained in it at the labor of the poet; depths that are foundational to why you might enjoy the poem (whether consciously noticed), as well as depths that you can learn to appreciate if you study them in detail. With Frangles, we try to get those explanations to you in a number of ways:
1) Explaining them gradually on this updates page as certain elements become more prevalent to what's going on currently.
2) Writing polished blurbs / analyzes / etc explaining these things whenever they necessary enough enough to justify prioritizing your migraines above our need to procrastinate.
3) Explaining things *in the prose itself* as the characters talk to one another *about* the styles and themes involved!
4) Giving you insight into the general concepts of Frangles by explaining them elsewhere (i.e. reading about plans for software we need to help do the job gives you insight into how we're going about doing things we need that software *for*).
5) Letting you figure everything out your damn self.
As a quick self evaluation of how we're progressing on these fronts, we give ourselves the following grade report*.
1) moderately tolerable
2) sorta-ish tolerable
3) barely tolerable
4) not tolerable
5) A+
(Please ignore the contrivance of this report for comedic purposes and any lack of accuracy necessary for its humorous nature. The freer may decide whether a fully accurate report would reflect better or worse on our abilities than the one displayed).
[*Frangles' main reading material as is could have been written intuitively without taking into account all the analyzes and complexities and depths we try to present to you (a pop singer might have written a song in five minutes vs taking into account structure principles of music theory--trochees and triplets and sharps, oh my!), though we just happen to be taking all those complexities into account when writing it, and present all that as part of the Frangles experience. (Of course, that could be a burden as well; perhaps analyzing every cold mathematical half-step deters from the intuitive ability to create via passion and not technical detail.)
One might even claim that *any* work of art has infinitely complex elements of structure and character and theme and so on, and the only thing that makes any them worthy of being called great or genius (or not so) is the amount of analysis and professional evaluation sucked out of it by people who have that kind of time. For all the professors and students know, a poem that's analyzed at the college level for decades may have been scribbled on a napkin in 30 seconds while drunk and stoned. So most of the extra complexities and themes and elements we talk about when *analyzing* Frangles rather than writing it are nonessential to its reading and writing, and could just as well not have been written now, or ever. (E.g. Frangles could be analyzed by a bored fractal nonlinear undergraduate some day with the time to actually analyze this random lump of !@#$, who might by chance say the same things we're saying about Frangles if we'd never presented our analysis at all).
Clearly no one can post a haiku and claim "This was my life's work" with any credibility sans proof of this (save your estimation of the honesty and credibility of the writer). The only thing that gives those infinite complexities and depths substance is either evaluating them ad nauseum, or presenting proof that they exist or were considered when constructing the final product. The reason we tell you things like, "We could write a 500-page analysis of the 14th sentence of 13.444, but we just haven't bothered, though be assured it's a damn good one!", is to try to get across some of the complexities we're taking into *account* when writing, rather than those that might exist unnoticed. I.e. our excitement for Frangles' complexities are how we *see* the project (even if we weren't writing it), and we would try to convey that excitement even if we weren't friters. [Translation: we're getting better all the time at contriving bull propaganda promoting Frangles' literary worth when really we can't believe you're actually buying all this].
*But*, as for *how* to relay that excitement and complexity we claim that we (by chance) *are* taking into account while writing, we can't do so without that proof, which we generally consider to be credibility based on delivery so far (e.g. an established software company can claim they're working on a really really great video game via their reputation and track record of doing so previously), and the general innocent- before- guilty principle, as as of yet no freers have hacked our lack of data and exposed our nonexistence. And--Where was this going? Orbo, pause that thing. *Orbo*, pause your dictation thingie and replay the past couple paragraphs....stuck? What do you mean it's stuck!?--...okay, okay, that may be, but I find it hard to believe you're *also* stuck in auto-post mode, and forgot to turn revision permissions off. Wait--are you drunk? You're drunk again, aren't you? Well FIND the !@#$ing screwdriver or the Frangles updates page is going to take up half the internet in a matter of seconds given you were drunk enough *last* week to initiate the exponential time accelerator and 50 years may go buy for us until you find that !@#$ing screwdriver! You just can't--GOF!! GET OFF THE PEAS!]
1/25 - Urgg Speech: Ggrurlgrum
You might like to know that Glorg's slur/dialect in 13.153 (Glorg a member of the urgg race from Blorkk which overlaps a little with Frangles) comes from a more fleshed out linguistics system than just picking letters at random. If you want to know more about it you can check out the Ggrurlgrum page on Blorkk.com.* Keep in mind Glorg's speech in Frangles 13.153 is very loosely written and must be polished at some point. Language that fully adheres to the established system takes a nontrivial amount of attention to detail, and of course, as you know, we're pretty lazy. ( Pbbklb=P ). While you're there, you might want to check out the rest of the Blorkk medium section as it's a totally different invented medium than Frangles (a line-to-line nonlinear skit-based reading format called skit-prose), but you don't need to know any of that to check out the Ggrurlgrum page.
[*Blorkk is Xangles saga #2, whereas Frangles is Xangles saga #1, where currently Frangles is the most active Xangles project.]
1/25 - Reading Material - 13.153
We've updated brick (scene/fage) 13.153, of which more will still be posted. This will be about 30 PLP long when fully posted. It's divided into readable segments for the single and sole purpose of finding your place if you don't read the brick in full the first time. The segments have nothing to do with nonlinearity or re-arrangeable fragments or anything like that. A brick (scene/fage) has and will remain the smallest divisible portion of the Frangles structure: a single continuous scene that in combination with others forms Frangles' nonlinear reading structure, which as stated will now contain 1/7 of the bricks announced initially, with a five-digit brick/scene number (12.456) instead of a six digit (123.456), though again this change has not yet been implemented anywhere except talking about the structure on this updates page. As with any kind of major change dealing with Frangles, we'll make every effort to carefully slide you into a change over time. Keep in mind we're talking about a long-term plan for a saga hundreds of standard reading novels long, all utilizing a totally unique and alien artistic medium ("fractal nonlinear fiction"). There will always be changes going on the more we write as we figure out what works and doesn't work about Frangles. Just consider any freer headaches along the way to be a necessary evil on the journey to not just Frangles particular reading material, but to a whole radical new fictional art form of which Frangles will be its first major example. Thank you for flying Frangles and may all your trips with us be as devoid of brain crashes as possible.
1/23 - Terms
The following two term definitions have been written and added to the Xangles Terms Index (which you can always access easily at xangles.com/i or frangles.com/i) at the significant labor of one our more linguistic friters. While this particular term was thought up intuitively without consciously factoring in all the phrases which phonetically resemble it during its coining, we do sometimes take the effort of examining the intrinsic parts of all the words and phrases we want the new term to resemble/convey, and carefully average all the involved syllables via a handful of methods. Hence any term that comes intuitively is a result of those methods as they're training to be able to do so naturally. (We did this careful work on "freer" to determine the absolute best word that sounded like what we wanted it to mean.) In other words, we spent significant time in how to convince you we actually spend time on this stupid !@#$. (But at least there's something we put hard work into, which is just about the same).
flupluple/ fluplupling/ fluplupled/ fluplupally/ (v/n/expl, v'/n, v-, adv) [fluhp LUPP uhl] [Origin 1. A phonetic fusing / condensation of the words and phrases: fly, flew, flap, ruffle, flutter, flop, leave, left, leap, leaped, flee, flip, hover, fled, plop, pester, landed, shuffle, leaf, leaves, rough, flower, florist, floral, foliage, park, food, fed, disrupt, bug, bugged, walk, rustle, fluster, flock, loop, loopy, little, play, pigeon, puddle, pond, trouble, double trouble, triple trouble, quadruple, quintuple, septuple, flirt, friendly, pester, bird, pet, farther, further, feather, feathery, flighty, gulp, trip, free, land, lucky, up, forgettable, forgetful, assemble, pigeon parking, look for pigeons, look for people, up to trouble, up to double trouble, up up and away, up and away, fly in place, people feed, DON'T FEED THE PEOPLE, pigeon feed, FEED THE PIGEONS, found a pigeon, found a person, find a place to feed, drug, drugged, tripping pigeon, trip on a pigeon, try tripping with the pigeons, trip the people, drug the pigeons up and trip on a leaf, tripping on pigeon feed, "Hello, fluffy fellow, drunk on pigeon feed this early already?", popcorn, bread crumbs, popcorn & bread crumbs, bread crumbs & popcorn, found a feather, fluff a pillow, stuff a pigeon, stuff a person, stuff people pull. Origin 2. The sound of flapping wings changing frequency while coming, going, accelerating, or decelerating, e.g. "flupluple" can be broken down into three similar syllables: FLUP . LUP . UL, suggesting a riff of the same repeated sound getting shorter or softer, such as wings flapping faster or getting more distant.] 1. To flap one's wings in an excited, scared, friendly, pestering, ambitious, daring, disgruntled, and/or ambivalent and day-to-day manner, often suddenly or in haste and usually in a small radius, such as when taking off, landing, or removing oneself several feet from danger until the chances for bread crumbs outweigh the risks of a potentially fatal scenario, or to flap one's wings simply to shift velocity, direction, or altitude in the air in a way that requires extra wing movement for a short time as opposed to that needed to maintain a basic course and speed over distance. 2. To do anything at all even vaguely relating to fluplupling, or to any thing or action which even vaguely phonetically resembles it. (See any of many similar sounding variations, each which has a slightly different meaning based on the subset of the phrases that phonetically comprise "flupluple" that most closely resembles that variation.)
flupple/ fluppling/ fluppled/ flupally/ (v/n, v'/n, v-, adv) [FLUHP uhl]: One of the many variations of "flupluple", each which has a slightly different meaning based on the subset of phrases comprising "flupluple" that most closely resembles the variation.
1/22-- Terms
Xangles/Frangles glossary updates/tweaks, incl: brick, fraga, frhaga, nova, Writer's Bricks. Remember you can look the majority of key Xangles terms quickly with the url xangles.com/i (and frangles.com/i until a separate Frangles terms page is up)
1/22-- Legal
- Please see the short first paragraph of the legal section entitled "GENERAL USAGE", stating that Frangles/etc material is for personal, nonprofit use and is not to be mass distributed whether for free or for profit.
- A 4ish PLP blurb has been appended to the legal section as well, the segment labeled "STEAL OUR STUFF FOR FREE", about our adventurous horrific ongiong journey into the guilt of not charging anything for Xangles/Frangles/etc stuff (prose, wallpapers, etc)
1/22-- Discrepancy Fix
We've fixed a discrepancy. Ed and Eagle got reversed up between 13.153 and 13.155. The one finally named Eagle (the slightly more friendly & innocent pigeon) was named 'Id' in 153, by the one finally named Ed (the slightly more bickery one), and then in 155 'Id' was Ed's name in the scene, as 'Ed' was a derivative of 'Id' because he didn't like the name (which he shouldn't even have had, since Eagle was named 'Id' previously.) The error has been fixed so that Ed is initially named 'Id' in 153 instead of Eagle, leaving 155 basically the same but tweaked to compensate for the change. You may want to re-read 13.153 & 13.155 to be clear.* FYI, If you didn't get the Freud joke, Ed starts reading Dr. Vifps's copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams while he's still named 'Id', as the 'id' is Freud's name for the unconscious mind, and Flutonia is a very dream-like realm (especially in a psychiatrist's office).
[*Remember 131.xyz is now called 13.xyz, though the titles of the pages don't yet reflect this change.]
1/21-- Grammar/Style
A small note on style not really worth noting: Whenever a number appears in Frangles prose, it will almost always be represented by a numerical digit or string ('8', '200', etc) rather than a spelled out word ("eight", "two hundred", etc). The reason for doing this is that Frangles often hinges on key numbers, or incorporates an interconnected numerical system or puzzle that mot be connected to plot, theme, (etc), and numerical digits are much easier to pick out when quickly skimming pages of text. Let's say a freer's trying to figure out a math puzzle small or large, they might remember roughly where a significant number was mentioned but not the exact place, making it much easier to find it if it's more noticeable. Granted, often numbers are just whipped out of our asses, but even then they fit into templates in which they could be significant otherwise, for instance in the future if we use posted ones as a foundation for a mathematical puzzle, or create a puzzle and then change the numbers around to fit it.
At the least we can tell you that we definitely have spent time working out math issues--whether small or large or rough or polished--enough to place them in a way that mot now or later or never be part of such a crafted puzzle. For instance, that the duration of our known universe Okuaka is often mentioned to be around 88 billion years is part of a complex system we've at least brainstormed, and may even have thought out thoroughly (or have plans to). You of course only have our word on this, because the situations of us having developed an MIT-worthy field of mathematics based on 88 billion and owning a durable AD&D 1d100 to pick it out, are intrinsically isomorphic. Anyway, if you're an English major and think using "88 billion" or "1,000" rather than "eighty-eight billion" or "a thousand" is a tad improper/lazy, now you know why. (That the entirety of Frangles was invented simply as a method of justifying improper grammar and style is an entirely nother issue. Like the word 'nother'. and using apostrophes to quote " 'nother' ", and inserting spaces in between the apostrophes and quotes of " ' "nother" ' ", etcetcEtc eTC etsetterah.,.,,. Of course, often we are just lazy, but thanks to the two law student interns we know who can always argue those delinquencies away, you'll really never know.)
1/20-- NEW NOTATION
We've been working on a shorthand system for notating a series of Frangles bricks (roughly akin to "pages"): a reading order that all major sub stories of Frangles will be notated with. (A "sub story" being any lengthed story other than reading every single page of Frangles in order, such as reading a single frook or nova). It will be covered in full eventually in the structure area, but here are the basics. (We are presenting this to you now because we're approaching the time when it will be needed to understand where Frangles is going, whereas bringing the notation up from the start would have been unnecessary information). Note that this uses the new sevthed structure where bricks are now 5 digits instead of 6. So, the first series of novas that will be written (the first full frook), will be notated:
This means the fraga goes up from 1 to 7 as the frook goes down from 3 to 4 (wrapping 7 back around to 1), where the first nova will remain 1, and the pages of that nova are read in order from first to last (pages 11 to 77), shorthanded by a slash for "all pages".* So the notation (1>7)(3<4).1/ now describes the following sequence of novas:
Where each nova is read from the first to the last page (/11 to /77). E.g, the brick order 13.111 to 13.177 is the first nova in the list ("Skip Square One"), and the 2nd nova in the sequence is the first seventh of Kyle Kirby's story (22.111 to 22.177), etc. [This notation might also be able to be reduced to shorter notations in the future when we consider a full notation system, such as "(1>)(3<).1/" or "1^3v.1/", but for now this is the main, basic, most understandable notation for an ordering of Frangles pages]
*Officially*, this type of notation will be the numbering system for describing various stories or groupings of Frangles pages (such as one chapter, or a series of frooks), which will be casually referred to as we've been doing. So 13.111 is page 1 of Writer's Bricks (the story of Skip), 13.11/ is its first chapter, 13.1/ is its first nova ("Skip Square One"), and 13./ is the the whole book, which may or may not include the "." for clarity; i.e. "13./" and "13/" shall mean the same thing. (What would the notation for the next steps in this sequence be? Hint: there's no single obvious answer). Colloquially we'll often say things like "frook 13" to refer to the official Frangles page ordering "13./", etc.
[* The slash itself is official shorthand for the full page numbering. I.e. "22./" (Kyle Kirby's frook) would technically be "22.(111-777)", and its first nova would be "22.1(11-77)", though it's not important to dive into all the further complexities of the system while introducing you to its basics. Those depths will be covered eventually; which, by the way, are and will be very carefully thought out. Don't mistake convolution for complexity, or perplexity with power. Having a fleshed out, in-depth, nonlinear ordering notation system for Frangles & similar structures is like a powerful computer programming language which is carefully designed and standardized, which is only confusing if you try to skip ahead to fast before absorbing each step]
1/19-- MAJOR STRUCTURE CHANGE (please ignore)
For no further reason than to confuse the flying fuck out of you on a fleeting friter whim, the structure of Frangles will now be 1/7 the size previously announced. (Not the reading material, but the structure in which that material will line up, given the unexpectedly long Writer's Bricks pages seem to be working well, so there will now be more material per page. We call this type of magnitude alteration "sevthing".) Unfortunately for our entertainment, this sevthing will cause you extremely little suffering, as all posted material will remain more or less the same. The biggest consequence is that plot, story, and character development will be thicker than previously planned in the future to condense longer planned stories into shorter spaces. But, since the future hasn't arrived yet, this is of extremely little consequence to you (although some of nova 1 of Writer's Bricks might be re-written to incorporate more fast moving character depth / etc.) Anyway, The essential changes for you to note in general on structure & structure terminology are as follows:
1) A fage/scene/brick (a continuous indivisible scene) will now and forever be called a BRICK. [until we change our minds next Tuesday]
2) The terms "chapter", "nova", and "frook" will remain the same.
3) The story of each character will be told in 1 frook rather than 7, Skip's story being the frook "Writer's Bricks" which is about 10% completed. Kyle's will cover a year or so in high school life rather than all of high school & college. Plans for that 7-year character depth will not be lost, however, as it will be applied to other characters instead. (E.g. Jebb might study the morals of magic use in his later training rather than Kyle taking a philosophy course in college.)
4) A "frhaga" will now be called a "fraga".
5) 7 fragas is now the full content of Frangles, rather than 49.
6) The page numbering will be 5 digits rather than 6. The third digit from the left will be cut out. I.e. page "131.123" will now be "13.123". The first two digits represent the frook number and the last three the "bricks" of that frook (basically the "pages" of that frook, such as the pages of a printed novel).
7) Your terror at night that Frangles' structure may increase or decrease by a factor of 7 on any given day of the week will now be septupled. [Or at least if you're someone who can't sift our bullshit by now and haven't translated "fleeting friter's whim" to "conclusive decision following a half-year's worth of carefully planned migraines for the best over all system 'built with the freer in mind'", a phrase which itself of course even more extensive bullshit except presented as anti-bullshit to the previous bullshit just to throw you off, just like presenting our own flaws just now as mock self-satire--as well as presenting this presentation itself as mock mock self-satire (if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn't because I'm too drunk on Orbo's frwoa static field to think straight, or think gay even, was that an insertable gay joke? Oh well, whatever, I'm just an intern; if they fire me for homophobia I can always apply for a job at Blorkk or Xangles)--is, you know what, I can't even finish this tangent and my grolg's getting at my peas again so I'd better--GOF!! GET OFF THE PEAS!! BAD GROLF!!)
STRUCTURE IN SHORT, Frangles is currently a 16,807-brick saga with 2,401 chapters (7 bricks per chapter), 343 novas (7 chapters per nova), 49 frooks (7 novas per frook), and 7 fragas (7 frooks per fraga), where the terms {brick, chapter, nova, frook} are roughly akin to the familiar words {page, chapter, novella, book}, and where each of these groupings is represented by a single digit from 1 to 7 accumulated right to left respectively. (e.g. "12.345", meaning "frook 12, brick 345" or "nova 12.3, brick 45", etc!)
Nothing has yet been changed throughout Frangles.com regarding this structure change, as the original structure is integrated everywhere. Things will eventually be reformatted as time goes on. With any major changes to Frangles, we try our best to make them as gradual and easy as possible. Until then, simply subtract the third digit from the left from any page numbering mentioned and that should just about suffice.
1/18-- Fonts
Just a heads up, the tentative fonts that may be used for each separate age of Okuaka:
1 (Flutonia) - Comic Sans
2 (Earth) - MS Sans Serif
3 (Flurth) - Verdana
4 (Florbb) - Tahoma
5 (Kroffonia) - Trebuchet
6 (Generika) - Georgia
7 (Zeroa) - Times New Roman
These will probably be non-bold, 11-pt fonts, subject to further research and experimentation in what the best all-around average reading environment is. Note that these differ from most of the currently used fonts, mostly because the font structure as a whole was never really considered; we just picked some fonts at random that sort of looked OK.
Please please please please please tell us what you think about the readability of Frangles; this is the most important feedback anyone can give us, as we know our stories kick ass. Are the boxes too wide? Narrow? The fonts too big? Small? We don't get much feedback and even a single email can be vastly helpful as it tells us what other people might think too. (I.e. the ones who read Frangles and don't feel obligated to donate a comment or two... wait, that's like all of you, dammit. Write us now and save a tree, and help knock your ISP off our naughty list of people who won't earn free Frangles action figures and Xangles stealth jets once they're available.)
1/17-- Grammar/Formatting
We ran into a problem when designing the prose scroll box grids when pasting material with long strings that exceed the designated width of the box, making it so you have to scroll across left and right to read some of its contained prose. (Obviously impractical since you can't scroll left and right as you're reading lines horizontally). And since half the point of those grids is to be able to glance at prose structure at once with tiny writing (as well as larger), we have to be careful to not to insert any words or stretches of characters that are exceptionally long.
For instance, if a scroll box fit lines lengthed as follows:
Then an extended string like "Godaammonkeysh#@%6sunnuva$#@$!!" utilizing a lack of spaces to create a certain feel would overrun the text box, and a horizontal scroll bar will appear at the bottom of it forcing you to slide it left and right as well as up and down. Also, even on a reading page that's a normal length wide and can fit the phrase (like the standard reading pages), this creates an awkward break visually, as there's a long blank space if the phrase occurs at the end of a line of text, such as:
Slashes and dashes are especially an annoyance since it's common grammatical usage to join two or three words together. ("The frilly shirt/dress/gown Alice was wearing unfortunately fell off right as she accidentally and humiliatingly stumbled into the wedding of her friend/co-worker/ex-lover Marie to a bot orb from the previous example.") When those two or three words are already long words ("the Christopher-Christina-Christian best friend threesome"), you get the above problems. For these reasons you may notice a little awkward grammar here or there, such as spaces between hyphenated words ("The frilly shirt / dress / gown Alice was wearing fell off again the second time the event was mentioned on the Frangles page, ticking the living Godaammonkey sh#@%6 sunnuva $#@$! out of the Christopher- Christina- Christian best friend threesome currently reading it.") Also the index is a problem as slashes are often used, such in a definition of "freer" which can mean a fractal/Frangles reader/seer/user (i.e. "fractal reader" or "fractal seer" or "Frangles reader" or "Frangles seer", etc), and when the Frangles/Xangles/Blorkk/Squish7 foursome is referred to as a connected thing.
For all these reasons, just be aware that these slightly awkward grammar techniques will be used quite often in the future. Hopefully a bit of your past grammatical/formatting/spelling/etc/etc confusion/annoyance/frustration to date has been cleared up as well, hopefully as thoroughly as a 24-hour coughing-aching-friting-freeing best-single-Nyquil-joke-you-ever-got-on-an-html-page cold syrup/satire prose line would.
1/16
We should have a nice heart-shaped Valentine's Day fractal wallpaper up by then. So check back if you want your computer to look as Val-day hip as possible.
1/15
Fage 131.153 is (unbelievably) still being worked on. We're not stuck on it or anything, it's just this tiny little problem of it becoming 25 @#$ing reading pages (PLP) long. It's all excellent quality reading material--being revised as you'd revise any 25 work of that length into a final draft--it's just deterring even more from the original plan of having every fage (scene) being one PLP (reading page) long. This doesn't affect the structure of Frangles whatsoever, it simply affects the flow of reading a very short passage then a very long one, such as a one-paged chapter in a paperback novel then a 25-page one. In such a novel, that might flow perfectly well, or perhaps not. You really don't know just from the numbers. Likewise, a 25-PLP fage may work out just fine, but then, it may throw the flow of reading the nova from start to finish. (Currently we're working with the idea of the beginning of the nova having short fages, and the middle long pages, and relatively short ones by itself, which itself is a dynamic progression of the structure of the story just as the structure itself follows dynamic characters and events about similar things: the art of writing!). It is closed to finished, though, and will be akin to publishing a decent sized chapter of a normal novel. (We can give you near-total certainty that no other fage of the rest of nova 1 of Writer's Bricks will be this long.)
FYI, this is a type of problem our nonlinear medium will encounter now and then as time goes on: how to squeeze such and such a sized story into such and such a sized space. A single paragraph might have to be lengthened and expanded on to fill up a dozen PLP, or a storage bin of brainstorming material might have to be condensed into a one-liner punchline. At its worst, the problem can occur on much larger scales; if ten whole frooks of Generika stories are written a certain way (i.e. to parody generic fantasy writing which can be extra long) and ten frooks of Jumper the Mutant Orion Frog turned out to be a big lump of itty bitty haikus, then the problem of how to fuse one in harmony with the other is a very serious one. A little further, let's say that that all freers catch a deadly virus and are all going to perish in a few years. Then the whole planned structure might be "sevthed" (i.e. cut to a seventh of its planned length), with massive issues on how to condense huge areas of material to fit smaller areas, and to expand on smaller areas that have to fit larger.
Anyway, this the first example of this sort of problem we're starting to face. Of course, it's of very minor consequence to you since /153 is a very readable, enjoyable chapter, and if it doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the nova, then it all works out perfectly because none of the other fages fit in with it either (which is a very coherent and unified structure indeed.)
1/14
After months of massive headaches that will for the moment eschew any witty description of them given they've worn us down too much to bother, we've penned in the first six novas that will be written. (And by penned, we mean the erasable pen kind that sorta looks permanent until you realize it was erasable ink and someone had sneaked in an eraser past the nightclub bouncer.) They will be novas: 1311, 2221, 3131, 4741, 5651, 6561, & 7471.* This is adding one to the first digit (the age of Okuaka) and the third digit (the first year we follow the character being followed), and subtracting one from the second (that numbered character out of seven for that age of Okuaka), while leaving the last the same (the first nova of the frook in question.) Together these will give you a good cross-section of Frangles' characters, settings and story structures, and will help introduce you to what Frangles is all about. Each will give a sample of one of the seven ages of Okuaka and of one character in that age, and each is the beginning of that particular story line, so you will see how frooks (Frangles books) can parallel each other as well as flow in different directions.
If it sounds annoyingly random at all, keep in mind this is your first exposure to the initialization of what we call a fractal nonlinear saga. Imagine if you'd read nonlinear material your whole life, and then were exposed to the art of linear writing (i.e. beginning to end material). You'd be confused as hell. You'd ask, "WhuwuWAIT.. why is this author starting the story on page 1?", or "I tried reading from the last page backward but the story line didn't make any sense!", or "Do you *really* mean to say that Lord of the Sword is going to be published from book 1 to 7? Can't he at least write the seventh page of each book? How am I supposed to know what's coming?"
Giving a saga a nonlinear page numbering system is extremely simple in and of itself, and is only a bizarre and alien concept if you've never been through it. If you'd followed the progress of the writing of dozens of other nonlinear prose sagas like Frangles--or had a habit of writing in such structures yourself--you would say "Ah, Okay, those are the novellas that Frangles is beginning with" with a mild shrug, just as a Star Wars fan would say "Ah, episode II will be the fifth movie shot, and it's name is going to be... ah here it is: 'Attack of the Clones'. Wait... 'Attack of the Clones'?! That's the lamest !@#$ing title I've ever--@#$fD.." (Not a perfect example.) But George Lucas' nine-book plan (incidentally) is definitely a small microcosm example of Frangles' nonlinear structure: writing stories 4, 5, 6, then 1, 2, 3, then deciding to go a different direction from your overall planned structure and not write 7, 8, 9. This nine-film plan could also be labeled as a 3x3 set of films; three sets of three movies: a trilogy of trilogies. Numbered this way (as Frangles numbers things), this would go: 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, where 11 is Episode 1, 21 is the first Star Wars movie filmed (A New Hope), etc!
So, our announcement of the first seven novas to be written is exactly this, except with more sets of books. Instead of a 3x3 film saga, Frangles is a 7x7x7 book saga (with each book a set of 7x7x7 pages). Hence the announcement "The first Frangles short books [novas] will be 1311, 2221, 3131, 4741, 5651, 6561, & 7471" is just a tiny math leap away from the announcement "The first three of the 3x3-film Star Wars saga will be shot in the order 21, 22, and 23, and after that, 11, 12, and 13 will be produced" Once you're used to that, then with every other nonlinear saga you ever read (if any), such an announcement as this will become easier. And of course, as Frangles itself continues announcing such things, you'll be more used to this sort of thing, too.
Now, diving into a full explanation of what this ordering means, how it came about, how it will function as a unified frwoa (etc etc etc etc etc), firstly, is and always will be TOTALLY UNNECESSARY TO READ THEM (yay), and secondly, way too long to dive into at the moment (yay#2), though you can get into all that eventually if you want to. Otherwise just ignore all that stuff Just as a graduate thesis paper analyzing the infinite symbolism and moral themes of Blue's Clues is unnecessary to watch Blue's Clues, so is it unnecessary to study the complex structure of Frangles in order to read it. Realize this, that someone might have written any given sub-story in Frangles without having planned any of this nonlinear bull!@# hype.
J.R.R. Tolkien said that Lord of the Rings was "just a story!" when faced with the higher-level analyzes of his work. He planned little of the complexities that other people saw in it; to him, it was a story. Not a college textbook. All these types of complexities of any type of story--linear or nonlinear--will be picked up at some subconscious level of the reader, and were written with some subconscious knowledge of them in mind. (That is, when they weren't outright consciously planned.) We say this over and over, because Frangles complexity can be scary. It's simplicity can be scary. And yet, both can be narcoleptically boring if they're understood. That's the versatility of a fractal image, which can look "nifty" or "pretty" or "!@#$ing cool!" at a first glance (or even for a lifetime at looking at them) without having--or ever having to get--a knowledge of all that nerd fractal math and chaos theory: the stuff that can (literally) be studied up to the highest professional mathematics level. To a mathematician, a fractal desktop wallpaper might be a lot more pretty or !@#$ing cool than a non-geek one, but then again, a geek's PC is more for functionality than looking at pretty things (otherwise he'd have a Mac), so perhaps not.
Anyway, what these nova numbers mean, how they'll work out, what it'll mean for you to read them... will all be revealed in time as we progress. For the moment, just start vaguely keeping the numbers in mind (unless you have a Mac, which is totally okay with us, too).
[* - The first 4 digits of a 6-digit fage number is the designation for a particular nova, and the last 2 are the pages of that nova. I.e. The nova being worked on now (the nova called "Skip Square One") is the first seventh of Writer's Bricks, so we add an extra digit. Writer's Bricks is Frangles book #131 (or "frook" #131), and so Skip Square One is Writer's Bricks nova #1 (of 7), which is also Frangles nova #1311. We usually leave out the dot separating the first three digits of a 6-digit fage number with the last (i.e. we would otherwise call Skip Square One "131.1") because it's a little excessive for a 4-digit number, just in the way the number 723,400 needs a comma while "2400" doesn't necessarily need one.]
1/9 - New Frangles wallpaper: "Fluffonia Park"
1/8 - New Xangles wallpaper: "Flame Web"
1/6 - OK so to all you freers who've been biting your nails for the next finished WB fage (131.153), all we can say is,The End of 131.153 is worth the wait. (It has to be, because it's approaching 15-20 PLP long.) Trust us, it's gonna be good (half is posted now.)
1/3 - DID YOU FROW? :: From most browsers, if you click inside on any basic website scroll box, you can then use your keyboard arrows to go up/down and left/right, and the "Page Up" and "Page Down" to go whole screens, and can usually navigate with the scroll wheel on your mouse as well. Note that different methods of scrolling screen by screen can yield different results: a "Page Down" might scroll a half box while a mouse wheel scrolls a full screen, or visa versa, etc.
1/3 - FYI we're aware these updates blurbs are getting a little too long and much for the updates page; we'll re-arrange things eventually, but as with everything else it's a tricky headache as there are so many formats of news / explanations, etc, and dozens of places to put them or re-arrange them (for instance, "Frangles updates" vs "Writer's Bricks updates" vs "About Writer's Bricks" vs "Skip Square One" updates vs "Saga of Skip" etc etc etc). For now it's nice to have a quick page where you know you're getting most of the news/etc. (It won't last forever) =P
1/3
We've put up two rough "prose grids" with the entire 49 fages of Novella 1 of Writer's Bricks ("Skip Square One"), with the unwritten ones blank of course (about 33 are there). Now you can read the entire Nova on one html page. The first one (prose grid 1) has medium print, whose purpose is to be able to see as much at once as possible and still be readable. I.e, if you squeeze 49 scroll boxes onto one monitor you can only read a couple lines of each page without scrolling, or, you'd have to read extremely tiny print, (which is partly the point of prose grid 2). Obviously, squeezing a whole text into a small space is great for understanding structure, but not for reading. But of course, reading one page at a time doesn't give you any visual sense of structure; of course, if you're reading page by page, you understand a lot of the structure by memory, especially if you're supplementing with diagram or map of the pages like on the main Writer's Bricks page. (For reference, we'll call a "grid" a page that contains prose, and a "map" one that simply lists the pages in any sort of chart or diagram, like a site map.)
The more important point of the tiny print of prose grid 2 is that you can enlarge the whole page until each scroll box is a normal, comfortable reading size. Try this: go to grid 2, and hit enlarge or magnify on your browser until the prose is a normal, comfortable reading font like that of the main posted pages that are linked to from the main Writer's Bricks page. Now there's not much difference between reading each page in the scroll box, and reading it alone on the normal pages you've been reading!! (like 131.111). You could actually read all Frangles material pretty comfortably this way. Then with a simple drag you can scroll up or down to get to the next page you want to read. Granted it's not as stylish, but it's more functional and gives you a better sense of structure, and a better method of exploring and understanding that structure.
There are even a couple other benefits. Firstly, the main reading pages currently don't have scroll boxes or fixed backgrounds; this is perhaps a little worse for eyes because things are moving around more and your eyes have to adjust a little. Squish--who is extremely sensitive to such things--finds that reading material on a solid, mid-colored background with a small scroll box in the middle (like the reading boxes on the main page) is easiest on his eyes, and reading with bright complex backgrounds moving around a lot (or reading from the very top of the monitor to the very bottom instead of keeping his eyes in a fixed spot) are more troublesome. We can only assume this goes for most people on a less noticeable level. (Think of Squish's eye problems as a great measuring tool for what's good or bad for other people; it's inadvertently an incredible benefit to have that as it helps us create the easiest, healthiest reading environment possible. (Always be aware of eye health when reading any online material.).
The other (temporary) benefit to prose grid 2 is that the main reading pages don't yet have controls to move any other direction than one page forward or back. You currently have to hit back on your browser and click each page you want to read if you want to read in an unorthodox nonlinear order (the whole point of nonlinear prose!) This is in the works, but for now the grids give you a great way of navigating pages. I.e. to read every seventh minute (an important reading order), you simply need read across on a prose map rather than down.
NOTE THAT THE HORIZONTAL/VERTICAL RELATION IS SWITCHED ON THE PROSE MAPS. To read normally you now read the pages down instead of across. This is our bad; this is all rough and it'll take awhile to get everything perfect, if it can even ever be perfect. Note there are limitations to always being able to read in horizontal/vertical order of your preference. For instance, since monitors are more widescreen nowadays, you'd probably want to have a navigation bar to the side when reading prose rather than above or below. But then whatever page maps you wanted to view in that rectangle might have to be organized differently. We can get the interfaces as understandable as possible, but as with any program, there are simply limits in the positions and formats of multiple windows you move around and change.
Remember these are rough first attempts. The tabs need to be much wider on over half the boxes, and the sizing of the boxes might need work (i.e. to be a little bit longer rather than horizontal; but then that might take away from it's navigationalibility [what a cool word!]). But, as soon as all the formatting is worked out properly, these types of grids will be equally preferable as a main method of reading Frangles as the main 1-fage-per-html-page fages you've been reading. Each will have its pluses and minus, and each needs a lot of work. (We're still working on site management software to standardize these reading formats so all that needs to be done is write Frangles in a text file and then insert them into these templates automatically.)
So, check out 1311 grid 1 & 2 (be sure to try shrinking/enlarging the pages!!) and check back here for progress as always.
1/2/10
Ugh. Okay so we put these new menu bars in on the main page (nutshell, frupdates, software, etc)... pain in the butt, but definitely an improvement (some browsers didn't even format our other text bars right that used the html option not to wrap text so you could get a clickable full bar rather than empty space to the right, but this didn't always get read right). It's not that making the menu bars was a pain per se, but dealing with the style of frangles as a whole can be nightmarish sometimes, just like altering the colors of a fractal in just one place would ruin the uniformity of the entire fractal. I.e. fractals integrate on all levels of Frangles, even the formatting which can be (in some ways) a lot harder than other sites (in others, perhaps easier; but we haven't bumped into those yet!).
Anyway, we're changing these little bars (or one of us, anyway), and we figure why not change a bunch of other things; for instance, this puke-monotonous yellow smiley-face background. In fact we've had a plan since the beginning to change around the colors here sometimes, but the yellow just kept sticking for the whole year. Now, after a year, maybe it could be changed, right? It just takes a second to color cycle the background with Gimp or Adobe and upload the new file, right? Ughgh.
In trying this we realized that yellow is the brightest hue (so this black text is very readable), and with any other color the background is too dark for the text to stand out. But we can't make those colors lighter or darker because that violates the bright color scheme (the pure primary and secondary colors you can select in an art program, for instance, pure red is "255 0 0" RGB). So if you think about it, there's something intrinsically unique about this particular "bright pure-color" scheme that is lost without yellow as the main background color. (Any colored font--whether black or white or gray--isn't going to stand out in front of a pure primary/secondary color because those colors are in the middle of the light/dark spectrum). So, if you get sick in the months to come of our puke-yellow/orange background color, now you know why!
Of course we've tried thinking about other formats Frangles could have; like take a really nice bright fractal and make the main page all fractally and stuff, but we ran into trouble with this too. We glanced through all our wallpapers and quickly realized that using any of them would loose the contrast between solid/bold/basic of the main page, and complex/detailed/fractals of all the ages of Okuaka (the actual reading material to your left). Having this page use solid, bright colors makes it stand out from all the complex and detailed fractals elsewhere. We took some time to divide our fractal art into seven general groupings that each look the best for the seven ages of Okuaka, giving all seven common ground (they're all our art and have a style in common, as any artist(s)' works do) yet separating them enough to be separate genres. Any attempt at dividing that fractal artwork into 7 balanced groups plus an extra one that has to stand completely apart from the others is not just hard, but impossible (to a certain extent). Its sort of like trying to take the six mixing wheel colors (red orange yellow green blue purple) and selecting one to stand apart from the others and still have the remaining five a balanced set.
Anyway, bottom line, there are many difficulties to "fractal nonlinear prose" web design that little else faces, just like writing nonlinear prose is a whooole different ballpark than writing any standard novel. (We could continue to bitch about all sorts of other pain in the butt problems but hey, this is supposed to be a happy place! You have enough confusion to worry about around here without the added loss of innocence that we're usually 7x7 times as !@#/*&* confused and frustrated as you! We just figure it helps once in awhile to demonstrate we're not bullshitting you when we whine all the time that "this stuff is reeeally hardd, wwahhh! I want my bottle")
1/1/10 - New blurb on how to read writer's bricks
1/1/10
A note on the size & format of frangles.com: we're quite aware it needs a lot of work, but just know this is on our todo list. For instance, half the site is crammed into the upper left of your screen. This is to make Frangles easier to read on smaller monitors, but of course the space of a larger monitor is wasted. We'll eventually work on formatting the site (and prose) to be as uniform and easy to read on as many different environments as possible, but this is a scary task given how many there are. Also throw in that formatting is much more important for sites you read for extended periods of time than other sites, and it's a huge project to make sure Frangles is easy, accessible, surfable, readable, etc, from anywhere. To boot we're also concerned about long-term effect on the eyes of reading extensively on a monitor. Squish--who has some eye problems--finds that the uniform yellow and small scroll box of this page is very easy to read (for whatever reason), so who knows exactly what the perfect reading formats are, but we're working on figuring it out. (E.g. one thought we have is that colors could be cycled as you're reading somehow to avoid staring at the same pigments for too long).
We also starting to work out long-term plans for adapting Frangles for cell phone browsing, and easy browsing for smaller devices like netbooks. Our main concern is whether to actually re-write the material itself above and beyond arranging it for an easy-to-read format. E.g. Perhaps fage 131-111 could be reduced to ten to twenty sentences to get the basics down in a microcosm on a cell phone, for which you'd want to click around and surf various pages faster on the go. (This would also yield an interesting "lite" version of Frangles where the freer can surf its structure and get the main ideas down without reading every page in detail.)
Of course, it's not even possible in a single html file to optimize for all reading environments (you can just get a sorta-good average that won't look perfect on any of them.) A text box might need to be 300x300 rather than 50x50, or 80% of a table rather than 20%. Therefore, part of this long-term formatting goal is to create different reading environments and interfaces. For instance, this page as it is now looks good on a small to mid-sized monitor, but on a larger one, all the extra space to the right and below could be used to view extra things. Comments, or bonus diagrams, or multiple prose pages side by side (or in grids) rather than just one. That's part of our long-term plan for frangles.com, as well as a prime goal for our future fractal/nonlinear reading/editing software.
1/1/10
Quick note: You might start noticing a lot of words that use *asterisks* instead of slicker looking html italics throughout frangles.com, as well a few more spelling or punctuation errors than before. This is because (firstly) we're copying / cutting / pasting more and more between various miscellaneous text files and html files, and haven't developed a solid writing/editing process with uniform formats for all Frangles prose & articles (fonts, italics, spaces/tabs, page numbers, file names, etc).
For instance, it's best to have all Frangles prose saved in simple, standard text files, so we can throw that into various other reading interfaces as needed (like the web, or a word processor, or the software we'll eventually write, etc). But of course that involves standardizing the formatting of those text files (tabs, spaces, italicized words, fonts etc), and then transposing that formatting into the other formats like html, which makes inserting tabs tricky. Even in html we have multiple formats we're experimenting with, like the new 1311 prose grid, not to mention our html itself which is kind of sloppy and nonstandard; we're using the free html editor Kompozer which doesn't format exactly how we'd like. In particular, we want to make our html as easy and O/S-uniform as possible.
Eventually we should have these things down better (or automated), but we're just too lazy to make sure every file and format is perfectly spell checked and formatted short-term, as this will all be re-done eventually as a whole soon enough.
1/1/10
Here is our first attempt at a functional 7x7 prose grid of nova 131.1 This contains all the posted "Skip Square One" material (The first nova of Writers Bricks) in 49 little scroll boxes (one fage per box). You can actually read the entire 200 PLPs of posted Writers Bricks material on this one html page, though it would be tedious in a standard view as the boxes are very tiny to fit them in. Although, it's semi-readable for long passages if you enlarge the page (not just the text); Google Chrome is the only browser we know of that can do this. (We highly recommend Chrome for reading and surfing and resizing frangles.com). Note that even though the text and the boxes enlarge, still, there's no more text per box as the page increases. Obviously a fully comfortable reader that allows you to surf and read Frangles pages with ease is something that will take time to develop. [See /software for our progress on the development of better reading/editing software and interfaces]
Of course, while not super for reading long passages, it's still invaluable as a reading and editing tool. The ability to read/edit a huge structure of frangles pages on a single screen allows much more insight into that page structure than reading each page separately. Note this chart is flipped from horizontal/vertical from the vertical/horizontal structure of the page maps on the main Writers Bricks page. That means that on this grid you read downward to read the book normally like a regular book (progressing right as you finish a column), and across to skip every 7th page, moving downward at the end of each row. (another way of reading the 49 pages). (Rather than visa versa for the regular page).
1/1/10 - New section: Software
1/1/10 - Welcome to the new year. That is, if you're a living in 21st century 188th billennia Earth. Everyone else, welcome to the end of this sentence. (And a new updates page.) You can read last year's Updates by clicking '2009' at the top of the page any time you want to return to Kansas. Our new year's resolution?? Uh, we'll let you know in about 364 days.
(GO TO 2009)
Squish seems to be in one of his chronic MPD egoexistential phases right now. That's when he either: A) tags a couple dozen personals onto his list of official alternate personalities and parades around all happy as if he's given birth to a litter of messiah kittens, or B) spends all his Frangles-writing time scribbling schizophrenic paper piles of phonetic gibberish promising he'll fuse all his alter egos into a smaller set of names, when really all he ever ends up with is another larger litter of messiah kittens who don't have the guts to off any of their brethren. But by now we've learned to look on the bright side at these times: whatever the outcome, at least XFBS7 always gets a new monthly GoDaddy bill and a slew of cool sounding but otherwise useless domain names and rehaul projects. Anyway, this is our excuse this week for any lack of productivity a freer might accuse us of (as it's always an ongoing criminal charge whether it contains any validity or not), and invigoratingly refreshingly, it's actually not a bullshit excuse! Bullshit excuses are excuses that would be good ones if they were actually true or plausible or honestly relayed. This is a just plain pathetic excuse any way you slice it, and that's quite enough trash talk about today's excuse without throwing in the rhetorical that it could easily be bullshit as well as pathetic.
3/7 - Material
We're trying hard to stick to our commitment of writing the 7 novas that we announced will be fritten first, before anything else. Part of our drive to do that is not to allow ourselves to go ADHD all the time and just do, like, y'know, like, whateeever and hey what's that out my window is that GOF!! GET OFF THE PEAS oh are you still here?... See? However, we follwed quickly with the announcement that the full frook "Writer's Bricks" (the 7-nova, 343-brick structure map you see here) would be a close 2nd, because we quickly realized, A) Deterring from Writer's Bricks to go write something else is already a naughty deferment habit to get into since we already did that with Kyle, and it would just plain suck to go write random chapters and bricks all the time without seriously finishing a full frook. (Although, on the positive side, since the novas are getting longer than intended, Skip Square One (nova 1 of WB) will actually be a small standard-sized reading book when it's done). And we that realized B) it could potentially be much, much easier to write more WB material with the style / story / etc already fleshed out, where it might be harder or impossible to return much later and replicate the style. And while that goes for any Frangles passage--whatever the size, big or small--in this case we think writing a full frook sooner rather than later would be wise. Then again, we might get additional inspiration for the story in the years to come (WB could be the story of the entire duration of the Finishing of Frangles), but of course, there's always time later to screw you over and re-write the whole damn thing. =)
3/2 - Squish has stolen back his homepage. The general site map for XFBS7 (Xangles Frangles Blorkk Squish7) stuff will now be at XFBS7.net instead of Squish7.com. The site map won't be constantly updated, so don't use it as a source of day to day news. This page is currently the most updated day to day source of news for all things XFBS7. Other pages just have monthly or occasional news postings. (The XFBS7 sitemap is a little grotesque at the moment as the graphics still need to be copied over, but at least it works.)
2/24 - Formats: We've designed the new format that Writer's Bricks pages should be in by the time the first nova is comple. Currently the pages only go forward or back one page: linearly, as you'd read a standard reading novel. As more and more Frangles material is completed and posted, you'll start to see ways to navigate in more directions. A full article has been posted on the example page if you'd like to know more.
2/24 - Xangles News has been updated. It was stuck on October for a long, long time (since October, actually; hrm). We'd written November & December updates but neglected to post them, but now they're there now, and to boot, January and February as well. There really hasn't been much going on on any other XFBS7 updates/etc page lately, because the bulk of the work being put into Xangles/Frangles/etc (i.e. XFBS7) has been on Frangles. Hence this is still your most active & maintained source of news for all things XFBS7 (Xangles / Frangles / Blorkk / Squish7, which we might as stated begin calling XFBS7 rather than "Xangles"... or not, you never know)
2/23 - Art / Wallpapers: We've just started to dive into ChaosPro as a great fractal rendering tool. It doesn't seem to be entirely superior to Fractal Explorer, but in general is a lot easier and more powerful to use. We're just telling you this to counteract the depression of having told you there'd be "fewer pretty things for now". It's still true, but telling you about how we're diving into new methods of doing new "pretty things" hopefully will counteract the truth and create a greater enthusiasm for Frangles artwork & wallpapers.
2/23 - Progress
We've noticed that visits to this update page don't reflect the balance of important information we think we offer here. This definitely our fault, as we've been lazy in organizing the information here into official articles about Frangles. The information here is wonderful to keep up to date with things if you like to follow Frangles' progress day to day, but because it involves so many changing plans, all the really important information about Frangles that only resides here is watered down with repetition from week to week, and sifting through an enormous progress page for specific information you're looking for--even if you've already read it and want to revisit it much later--is incredibly tedious. Since a lot of the information is already written, organizing it into more formal blurbs shouldn't be a major undertaking, and we'll try to get that going soon.
We counted the length of all updates pages from 2009 & this year, and altogether it's about 100-PLP* of prose, much of which needs to be edited away as it's either redundant, or deals with day-to-day issues rather than over all final explanations. Although, note that an enormous part of understanding Frangles is its history and the methods that continuously bring about the "final result" (the result on whatever happens to be!). So it's not just organizing the whole mass of confusing information about what Frangles is about, it's how to organize the history of how it turned into that mass of "current" confusing information! Also take into consideration something else: that we're not even sure how much "history" we want to leave online, and how much to discard. From one pragmatic frangle, it can a greed issue on our part on how to manipulate your malleable freer brains into getting us the most hits (i.e. whether pulling back archived information will get you to check back more and keep current with Frangles, or leave you with too little to read if you come in without having followed that history, or followed it closely). But that's a frangle no around here (cough) subscribes to! (On the other hand, we certainly do agree our honesty is always severely in question, so we'll let you do the math.)
[*PLP = Paperback Lengthed Pages]
2/23
--Brick 13.164 posted. It's a little drafty, but then again, what around here isn't. (Remember that officially the page numbers are 5 digits/bricks but that this choice does not reflect anywhere on the site yet, and may not for awhile. So for instance here, we'd say "13.164 posted" rather than "131.164 posted" even though the latter is the number on the html page.)
--The rest of brick 13.153 (only some is posted) has been firmly drafted as a solid readable 40-PLP scene, and is being (not) revised as we speak. [We *do* mean "scene". While the new nature of having a *40* standard reading page brick in a nova with 1-PLP bricks might seem--or be--awkward placement, the passage itself is (or soon will be) as coherent and meaningful as any other posted brick, which we define as one fully continuous scene of events, like a fulls scene in a movie with no breaks forward. That is to say, it won't be some run-on watered-down uncut ramble (or at least not beyond reason), and will work as well as anything else in and of itself as a well-written brick. (A lot can happen in a Future Fiction Bar).]
[Keep in mind that any brick not immediately preceded by the brick numbered one less than it--i.e. 55.123 is officially the brick that comes before before 55.124 in the single default brick reading order from 11.111 to 77.777--will always link to some higher level html page when you press "previous" or a basic left arrow (such as a page index) rather than to some other random brick that just happens to be written nearby (a couple before it), or some other brick one nonlinear step away just because that's the only polished one "nearby" (i.e. linking 77.222 to 67.222 instead of 77.221). This could get horribly confusing for the freer and tedious for the friter if the forward and back links while reading are always changing around.]
2/23 - Title Grammar
Keep in mind - titles of works are officially designated in Frangles style by capitalizing the first letters of the words in the title (<Pride And Prejudice>, rather than <"Pride and Prejudice">, or <Pride and Prejudice>, etc). There are a bunch of reasons for this.
1) Since Frangles is largely a parody of just about everything else out there, mentioning others' frwoas can happen frequently or in rapid succession. It convolutes prose to write things like <Skip considered whether "Pulse", "Proof", "Go", "Cube", "Cube2", "Cube Zero", or "U-571" were short enough for a headachey updates example line> and makes these passages harder to read. Or awkward, such as <Skip didn't think Pulse, or Proof, or Go, or Cube and Cube2 and Cube Zero for that matter were at all U-571ish>, which just reads like a DVD back cover advertising every reference,* or a list of hyperlinks. [* Nothing referenced via Fair Use need be advertised by any means. In fact, plenty of Fair Use references make negative comments about the references. Frangles in general strives to create respectful, promotional Fair Use environment when copyright issues are in question, as these are types of factors involved in the legality of a right to a reference or passage quote. While we might "make fun" of a lot of stuff (right of parody), we do our best to engineer it all in good humor as you might pass friendly insults at your friends.]
2) Frangles heavily intermingles different layers of real life and freer mediums of all kinds. E.g, the word "matrix" can belong with math and science, or be associated with any of many companies and products that use the word officially in some way, and we might want to mix these up a bit instead of flagging a term in red with, *only the official saga by so and so and nothing else*. So if we wanted to say "the matrix" in a sorta-ambiguous way that could apply to a bunch of things but one that sorta surfaces in particular (whether because it's relevant or because it's the thing that people most usually associate a term with) we might use <The Matrix> to allude to the movie by the Wachowski Brothers (found here), when we might have used <the matrix> instead, rather than specifically flagging the phrase as a reference to an external work. Note Frangles is a 7^5 mathematical matrix of nonlinear scenes, so it's quite literally a "page matrix" or "brick matrix" or "prose matrix" or what have you. But, because the Wachowski Brothers' film is so huge, the term <the matrix> brings forth mental images of the movie with flying colors, so it would be difficult to write long passages where Frangles characters refer to Frangles (or any of a zillion other potential nonlinear conceptions) as "the matrix [of pages/bricks/etc]".
3) Having too much punctuation or bold/italic/underlined text can make areas of passages of prose stick out awkwardly. A whole paragraph mentioning 50 book references all with italics or quotes would detract readability from the rest of the prose, because seeing something stand out strong makes everything else seem more watered down and uncolorful.
4) We're just plain !@#$ing lazy. =P pbblbl
2/22 - Teen Frampires??
A friter had the Metallica-level sell-out idea at the bookstore today of writing teenage vampire characters into Frangles because that's all the rage right now and oh, wouldn't actual hits or even money be a great plus to writing free online reading material. Luckily, there's still enough space in the planned 49-frook blueprints where the greedy idiot might get their way. (They wrote a few pages and the rest of us liked it so much we hacked out all the blood and guts and applied the healthy writing immediately to a scene with Skip instead, mostly just so we don't have to ever read Twilight for inspiration.)
No, seriously, changing/shifting plans & ideas that affect the general Frangles structure & material in a major way has been a concern on our minds. It's just dandy now when we only have a handful of bricks posted, but once we start to fill out / flesh out the 49-frook structure more, many major things will start to become locked into place. Trying to throw a new major idea into Frangles is like a wrench (good or bad) into its whole clockwork of concepts, or like deciding every house in a huge housing complex should have a sun room instead of an extra bedroom (an irony admittedly contrived since vampires wouldn't need the former very much. har, har). A teenage vampire would be as fun and rewarding to write as any other character (and we're also dealing with the complex issue of how to reach the most general audiences as possible, because something as prolific/versatile as Frangles should just naturally demand that flexibility), but throwing in something that changes everything else all around it is the problem; or at least, *will* be the problem when we have these sorts of "big" ideas when we're finally friting brick 77.777 in 50 years (having decided semi-ironically to write it *last*).
2/18 - Advancing Structure Issues
We're finding it quite challenging (translation: "How in the !@#$ are we going to pull anything we've been promising off?!") to start leaping up into the entire new dimension from 7^2 brick structures (novas) to 7^3 (frooks). Skip Square One (13.1) is nearing "completion" (translation: "How in the !@#$ are we ever going to pull finishing 13.1 off?!"), and we're finding more and more how much it's going to need revision and polishing (translation: re-writing and demolishing) before it's up to Frangles standards for a full, finished, self-sustenant, standalone yet perfectly modular frwoa. You may have noticed the hovering (translation: bulldozer wrecking-ball) frangle that 13.1 is becoming a little unbalanced and slightly askew of our intention from when we first started it (translation: 35-PLP bricks vs an intended average length of 1-PLP/brick is nothing less than an utterly *psychotic* deviation)--not just in length but in the coherency and connectivity of its bricks and just about everything else that's supposed to make it a fully coherent, publishable frwoa (translation: the first literary review of Skip Square One will undoubtedly be entitled: "Skip 'Skip Square One': We Wish We Did"), *but*, the good news (translation: bu!@#$ news)--GOF, would you stop that for gods' sakes!? (What?) You know what. (I do not). Stop that. Quit your @#$ interruptions. (translation: good job translating, Krufo! Here's a doggie snack!) Gof! (Alright.) No, seriously; this is starting to plagiarize the opening Holy Grail credits. (translation: "trust us, we weren't plagiarizing from the beginning, really we weren't.") That's it. (what? oh no, not the fluton disrupter.) K, charging. (ooo, I'm scared). And now you're just plagiarizing a login. (translation: here's a shameless link to what we were plagiarizing from the very--@$!!@oouuch! that tickles, don't ever do that ag-##*@that's- all- folks!#$#%3NO_CARRIER
--but the good news is, the difficulties in making 13.1 work well as a whole parallel the difficulties of making the higher structures work well as a whole as well. Hence overcoming the challenges on the smaller level (7^2 structures, or one nova) help overcome the challenges of the larger levels we're working with as well (7^3: a frook, a structure we've barely begun to work with, as not even one 7^2 structure is complete).^
[In fact, you might say we've been consistently working our way up anyway, because as bricks have become longer and longer than the intended 1-PLP/brick original length, we've been working with a higher density of plot / theme / character / etc *per brick*, so when we announced the first sevthing of Frangles* and the entire structure came *down* an axis (49 frooks total instead of 343^), you could see we were *already* working our way up to a higher level complexity (sort of), it's just the bricks were became much longer, making that density of plot / character development / etc thicker. (Think of a ruler with six even marks for measurement changed to a ruler with five even marks for measurement, then think of that as a hyperruler for measuring axes on an XD graph rather than inches or other units, etc!)]
*Anyway*, we're already looking ahead from the plan of the first seven novas announced to be written (131, 221, 311, 471, 561, 651, 741), to think of what to do after *that*, since there are so many other story lines we want to work on too, even if just outlying via blueprints and not actual prose. Keep in mind this nova progression (frook [1>7.3<4.1]) came about largely because we wanted to write a solid story about Skip and Kyle, and choosing which Skip nova and Kyle to write lines up all other 5 novas automatically, like picking two points on a plane which only line can be drawn through, so we don't get much say on the other 5, and hence didn't have much of a say in which novas we wanted to write first, creating the need for planning ahead, so we can also work on some other stories that we do have more planned of.
Of course, this isn't to say that you have to read 5 novas we don't give a shit about! It's just the *order* that's unplanned--since we're excited about all the stories of Frangles--we just don't want to do the *work* of doing them quite *yet*, but of course, in literature you hardly get to do exactly what you want to do all the time; just like you can't draw whatever fractal you like once a few pixels have been chosen. In short, it will just take a little more *time* to adapt currently written & brainstormed material for those particular novas; for instance, perhaps we have a thorough idea of Kyle as a teenager, and a nova axis is such that we need to write him as an old man first. What that takes is adaptation of our beloved characters for other beloved walks of life, which just takes more work rather than less =).
Bottom line, we've decided to plan and work on another couple fronts as well. First and foremost, since you're all reading Skip's story now (for lack of anything else to read, hrmph), it would kinda suck to just cut you off from the rest of the frook, so one of our secondary goals will be writing Skip's full story (Frangles 13) as a back burner to these other novas. Kyle's full story will also be considered strongly as well, but initially more of the focus will be on the flow between 13.1 and 22.1 (Skip's first nova and Kyle's first nova respectively) rather than Kyle's full story. Basically, you're already used to Kyle's story dropping off as his first five chapters was the first Frangles material to be written, but you're not used to Skip's story dropping off as it's been progressing from page one regularly onward. Hence, for confusion / frustration continuity, Kyle's five chapters will simply be re-*written* (with no serious promise of continuing the story), while the momentum of Skip's story (Writer's Bricks) should continue to some extent or another, so you aren't *completely* f!@#ed over when 13.1 comes to a conclusion. =)
Other story progressions (brick/nova progressions) we mot be working on as back burner stuff to everything mentioned so far are really really really fuzzy if we're even considering any at all, so for the moment just know that the first nova progression-- (1>7.3<4.1), or {131, 221, 311, 471, 561, 651, 741} will be our primary goal, and Writer's Bricks our second, and Kyle's *full* story somewhere on the back burners too (though note that the first 7th of Kyle's frook is included in our front burner stuff, so we will be working on his story indirectly anyway).^^
[* Not "first sevthing" in that there are sure to be lots more of them, but rather "First Sevthing of Frangles" as a time line landmark, such as BC, e.g. 2 FSF would be two years from that announcement]
[^ Always keep in mind, FYI, that we use base-10 numbers--the normal numbers you're used to dealing with--for just about everything that doesn't involve a page designation. Here we mean "49" and "343" as you'd use them to count apples or blu-ray players. If we used base seven numbers for counting, these would be "77" and "777". Perhaps we should start including both whenever we use a number; one in small print after the other(?)]
[^^We're more or less *purposely* intermingling different notations and conventions for different brick orderings in this blurb, to start getting you used to the reality that those different sorts of notations may exist here or there in a universe as big as Frangles. For instance, if one reads Shakespeare, Greek philosophy, or the Christian Bible, one would generally be familiar with the general structure of these works, but you would recognize the slightly different notation systems labeling those lines, paragraphs, footnotes, chapter numbers, paragraph indentations, etc etc. To be able to have a decent knowledge of these different works, you have to have the versatility to be able to recognize the structures of those works without needing a perfect, precise notation system. If we go from computer science book to computer science book, we'll notice different conventions in function naming; one author might name all their constant variables const_Swallow_Wingspan, and others might not prefix their constants with anything. Again, to be versatile in the world of programming, you must be familiar with all these sorts of differing notations.
In Frangles, if you see (1>7.3<4.1) and elsewhere see (1^.3v.1) --the second being a possible shorthand for the first, a freer should be able to recognize both as meaning the same thing. (Maybe we officially changed from one to the other and didn't haver time to change every single nova ordering on frangles.com and any other place mentioning frangles, not to mention if other sites, let's say, refer to Frangles and we didn't have any way of changing every possible reference using this notation. Or, let's say we added the latter as an *official shorthand* in *addition* to the official *longhand*, but you weren't familiar with the latter. Then the freer (you) would have to be familiar with both to notice them wherever you might see them. Even further, a progression of long handed notations to shorthanded notations for this progression (the first set of. Frangles novas) might go as follows:
#1: <13.1/, 22.1/, 31.1/, 47.1/, 56.1/, 65.1/, 74.1/>
#2: <13.1, 22.1, 31.1, 47.1, 56.1, 65.1, 74.1>
#3: <131, 221, 311, 471, 561, 651, 741>
#4: (1>7.3<4.1/)
#5: 1>.3<.1
#6: 1^3v1
[etc]
2/11 - Fewer pretty colors for now =(
On a serious note (insert joke here on hell freezing over or something funny like that, which would be appropriate if this wasn't serious news item), Squish's eye problems are still pretty bad. He's struggled over the past several months with vitamins, foods, doctors, font sizes & colors, monitors, etc. He says all that stuff individually helps a small amount and in combination help with his ability to look at a screen, but says it's still difficult, and he definitely can't look at a screen for your usual 8-hour day, which hinders his activities, being an online friter / youtuber / webmaster / etcetc.
Fortunately it's not 100% important for him to stare at a colorful screen all day in order to do a lot of what he does, for instance, writing reading material (prose) here on Frangles; text can be minimized to a small box with a black color scheme so that minimal light is emitted from the monitor (or projected onto the wall), and if you're careful and focus on memory techniques, obviously you can type on a keyboard even if a monitor/etc is off. Then it can be a matter of printing long passages to revise by hand and type in revisions quickly on screen, etcetc. He's going to get a voice recognition program (Dragon Naturally Speaking) which will also help him be productive, as you can speak about three times faster than you can type, and as with a keyboard you still don't have to look at a screen, or if a screen is on, a voice recognizer can make it easy to turn away or reposition to avoid staring at a monitor while being limited by a keyboard cord and typing position.
Anyway, what this means for you freers (Frangles readers) is that there'll simply be a lot more text updates around Xangles, Blorkk, Squish7, Frangles, etc, indefinitely rather than graphics, background images, maps/charts, fractal wallpapers, etc. This isn't a major loss as the reading material is the primary thing that Frangles is about. Of course, clearly our focus *could* be on the fractal wallpapers which are incredibly more popular than our nonlinear fiction (most of our wallpapers are at Xangles; only a few are posted here.) But honestly we mostly do the wallpapers to attract attention. Cool looking wallpapers are nothing new and endless ones are out there, but nobody has ever written a fractal nonlinear prose saga. The primary goal of Xangles & Frangles is to influence art in a major way, doing vastly new things with current artistic mediums and experimenting with new ones altogether.
So fortunately, the reading material is the thing Squish (the only significant active friter at the moment, if only because the rest of actually have real jobs; oh wait, we said no humor) can still do the primary Frangles stuff without a lot of trouble. To boot, fractal wallpapers don't require nearly as much time in front of a screen as a lot of other graphic art that requires drawing or time in photoshop editing, etc. We have the artistic method of making our wallpapers pretty down by this point; we have a pattern down enough where we can find a neat fractal pretty fast, hit render and wait a week/month, tag on a small "Xangles" or "Frangles" logo, then cut a 16:9, 16:10, and 3:4 aspect ratio versions and then shrink them all to fit common monitor resolutions. It's certainly a decent artistic process but nowhere near that of drawing animated cartoons or 3D video game, etc.
It's of course rhetorical to state that the rest of us--if there even *is" a rest of us, as only two known friters have been reported to date, and Kyle really isn't doing a damn thing just yet (lazyass !@#!#)--could start dedicating more time to the project, and, in fact, we will! Frangles originally a neat concept, then it worked itself into a more fleshed out project over time, and it's become significant enough to dedicate time to as a sincere professional project with great potential for growth, and (knock on krforbs), professional publication. (Of course, if Squish and/or Kyle are indeed the only friters, they're going to have to work twice as hard to susten* the ongoing farce of our existence.)
["Susten is a special and rare type of Xangles / Frangles invented term: one we feel that the English language could/should already use but doesn't due to a little brain fart or oversight, rather than a term/word particular to the worlds of Frangles, like "freer" or "krforb" or "xite". In this example, we feel the English dictionary should contain a verb and adjective form of the noun "sustenance", just as the noun "sustainment" has the verb form "sustain" and the adjective form "sustaining". People say such and such is "self-sustaining", and we feel we should be able to use "self-sustenant" in the same way; something that feeds on itself and gives itself nourishment like a "self-sustenant frwoa [or work of art]" rather than just having its basic existence sustained). You can find all key Xangles/Frangles terms of every type in the Xangles Index of Terms, which you can return to with the short URL "xangles.com / i"]
2/10 - The 2nd Known Friter!!
With infinite enthusiasm we're proud to announce the possible existence of a second potentially official friter, who mot (may or may not) exist in some way or another outside of being currently announced, and who mot be a clever deception to make you think that there mot be a possibly existent 2nd friter when there's actually not.* (The only known friter previous to the previous sentence was Squish). As if Frangles isn't recursively self- and reality-intertwining enough, the 2nd friter's name is (ugh) "Kyle Kirby". This mot have something or nothing or everything to do with the "Kyle Kirby" Frangles character (character 22), and mot or mot not have everything or something or nothing to do with a version of the Frangles "Kyle Kirby" who eventually found a way to leap up into a higher dimensional reality to become a real real life human being in the real world via his giraffahole (from some frangle out there).
If you find this to be as bull!@#$ a vague and meaningless announcement as any sane freer should find it, we can tell you that there is definitely something significant to this announcement other than a random throw-in comment on this page. Maybe we have a "Kyle vs Kyle" video game lined up, or maybe we encountered a Plutonian-Blorkkan ferret named "Kyle Kirby" who just happened to slurmhole into our living room last week, or maybe Squish has decided to change his name to "Kyle Kirby" in a further plan to eschew Frangles reality and dive deeper into the usual complex obsessive endeavors of any crazy unemployed sci-fi/fantasy writer/D&D-nerd/comedian, so we'll let you sleep on all that and let your imaginations go wild (at least until we're damn well ready to give you any more information (if ever). Pbblbbllbb =P)
[* Apart from official friter(s), there's also the occasional character that has one thing or another to do with Frangles that pops up here and there, such as our beloved "Orbo", a bot orb from the future that hangs around here and does a little maintainance and stuff like that that you may have noticed. But to date Squish was the only official main friter ("Frangles writer", or "fractal writer") that had some sort of (supposed) significant role (whatever that was/is) in the ongoing Frangles project.]
2/9 - Structure
Today we've worked on some structure issues, the types of things we claim we're doing when we're not getting anything posted, though today we actually have proof; and by proof we mean blabbing about structure issues we fleshed out twenty years ago and are posting now to make you think we actually did something today (which, mock sarcasm aside, we actually did). Now if the following is a little confusing or overwhelming, just keep in mind that, A) it's not necessary to understand these structure issues to simply read a Frangles story from page to page, and B) It's actually a lot simpler than you might think; remember extreme simplicity can generate extreme complexity (like with a fractal generated by simple equations), and it can just be a matter of understanding those simple "equations" of Frangles to understand those complexities. Of course, the following may be overly simplistic to someone else; we try to aim for a middle ground that will appeal to everyone, like a computer operation system that anyone can learn but that some people may want to get more "into" and others may just want to learn the extreme basics of. Anyway, here's some key things we've been fleshing out.
As said before, the first 7 novas (Frangles novellas / short books) that in combination will form the first nonlinear Frangles frook (very long book) will be novas 13.1 22.1 31.1 47.1 56.1 65.1 74.1.* The tentative characters for these novas will be (respectively), Skip, Kyle, Suzie (a young unimportant girl who lives on a very important spaceship called the Delbrient), a very ancient/old character tentatively named Obelo (in the ballpark of relating to the Emperor / Yoda / Obi-wan of Star Wars in old age, an older dying Dr. Seldon of Foundation, Merlin, Macros of Magician: Apprentice, and Babylon 5's Lorien), a slightly less old Kroffonian character (i.e. a normal grumpy old man rather than one blessed with the ancient mystical wisdom of all the universe), forest-ish ruling lady akin to Galandriel of Lord of the Rings, the Green Man of the Wheel of Time, the Lady of the Lake, and the large fat fairy in Zelda: A Link to the Past; and finally a middle-aged phylo (philosophy) professor named "Pico" of Zeroa who's story will cover the teaching of a class of phylo students. (Who mot be the same Pico that talks to Kyle in the Kyle example chapters)
Each chapter (7 bricks) of each nova will generally cover 2/3 of one day in that character's life (a waking day, e.g. humans are awake about 16 hours a day and sleep for 8), and that waking day will begin 1/7th of the day later than the previous character, lopping around from the last to the first (i.e. day shift, second shift, night shift, day shift, etc). In terms of an Earth day (24 hours), the seven characters' days will begin at:
Skip - 3:34am (Skip's early train to Flutonia)
Kyle - 7am (waking for school on Earth)
Suzie - 10:26am (waking on the Delbrient ship for day)
Obelo - 1:51pm (or Florbban equivalent, etc)
Kroffonian old guy - 5:17pm (or Kroffonian equivalent)
Lheilia (at night in the forest) - 8:43pm (or Generikan equivalent)
Pico's class - About midnight (or Zeroan equivalent)
Think the show "24", except with 7 equally weighted protagonists in a comedic style rather than one kickass counter-terrorist federal agent in an action-packed drama. (The characters won't necessarily all "wake up" at these times, but it's the time we will jump into their story, progressing in a structured way toward the conclusion of the story of their 2/3-day, ending as any standard linear book chapter might end with a light conclusive note.)
Note that for this kind of symmetry to exist, *all* the characters' starting times are automatically locked into place given just *one* choice of when we'll jump into a character's day. The focus we've chosen here is Kyle, who must wake up around 7am for us to follow his day from dawn to sleep. Luckily, we're not as locked in with all the other characters as their stories don't take place in regular common-day Earth, and we have significant leeway in choosing which 2/3 of their day is the important part to follow (though technically we're not "choosing" at all, given those times are all automatically chosen *for* us given our choice that Kyle wake up at 7am). So clearly our "choices" of the times listed above are not choices at all, but are generated from the lone information: "Kyle--one of 7 characters--wakes at 7am, and each successive character will wake 1/7th of a day later than Kyle." E.g. complexity (precise and seemingly random times) from simplicity (the aforementioned variables).
Not all of the time lines of the 2,401 chapters in Frangles will be structured in this way (booooring), but the choice of what all those other structures will be is an exponentially higher issue than these 7 novas. Lining up about a week in the life of 7 characters is an entire axis below figuring out how those 7 weeks will relate to the *49* weeks of their collective entire stories, and/or to the weeks of other characters, depending on which novas are written after these 7. And not *only* does that higher-dimensional choice affect all of those 49 novas, but structuring those 7 frooks set precedents for the other 297 "weeks" as well (7^5 - 49). [by "week" we mean "set of 7 bricks" just to get an idea of the length of a chapter, not necessarily a week at all],
Note that the next step may not be as simple as saying something like "the next 7 novas after a given one will all start 1 month later than the previous", because we need not choose a simple symmetric pattern. Maybe Skip's seven novas will progress in a totally different way than Kyle's will; or perhaps every other frook of Frangles will be structured in *some* way and the others won't have any apparent crafted structure whatsoever! (Not everything in nonlinear fiction need adhere to a strict mathematical pattern, or every single sentence and word could be predicted! And while from some frangle out there someone has generated that type of story in the format of Frangles with those types of strict guidelines, Frangles doesn't follow that kind of plan, as we're just friters, not krforbs or bot orbs (or so you think)).
We'll keep you superuptodate on relevant structure progress, so check back check back check back.^ =)
[* You can get an idea of the over all nova map of Frangles by examining the circly fractal septagon shape on the main structure page (which incidentally was insanely hard to find in the Mandelbrot set; in fact the equation generating it might be the only shape with 7 even points/sides we've ever found in all fractals we've ever explored). Each dot was originally to represent the set of 343 "Frangles books" that Frangles originally was planned to consist of (one dot per book), but since Frangles has been sevthed, each dot can now represent one nova, and each circle of dots one frook (what a "Frangles book" is now called), although this isn't yet changed or noted anywhere on frangles.com except this updates page due to infinite friter laziness. To visualize how the first seven novas (13.1, 22.1, 31.1, 47.1, 56.1, 65.1, 74.1) line up on this map, just imagine the seven colored cycling dots of each Age (each seventh of the entire septagon) are the circles of the starting frooks in question, and that the lower left dot on those circles is the first nova of that frook. I.e. the third circle of dots (of novas) clockwise from the lower left circle of dots of the lower left age (Flutonia) could be colored to represent Skip's frook (13./), and the lower left dot of that circle would be the main nova being currently worked on (13.1, or "Skip Square One"), and so on for the other 6 novas. Hence the colored cycling can represent the reading order of the seven novas of those given 7 frooks' novas straight through from nova 1 to nova 7 (i.e. reading the frook from the first to last page consecutively as one would read a normal book in the order the pages are written rather than a nonlinear way)]
[^ With all XFBS7 material, we're still in havoc on where to post what and when; the above information has some time-sensitive issues, and yet it could be considered far too much information for an "update". Although it couldn't be inserted as an official "structure" page without extension and polished revision. In combination with Xangles & Blorkk, we may never have any solid idea of when/where/what to post of updates, analyzes, etc etc, but for now and indefinitely just be aware that this page is the most active and up-to-date source of news for all things XFBS7.]
2/8 - Quick Note on Links
If you've ever read a Frangles update (rhetorical since you're reading one now) you may have noticed some Wikipedia- rip-off- style- hyperlinks like this, and this, and this. We do this for a number of reasons: to make our page look pretty, to increase page ratings by "linking to high-quality websites" (if that even does anything), to confuse the freer so you can't parse our convoluted prose, to feign the magnitude of Wikipedia simply by plagiarizing its style, and to scare you off the site so you don't have to suffer through our unproductive random nonlinear fractal blah blah blah bull!@#. Our conventions are similar to Wikipedia, but unlike them, our hyperlinks often contain hidden subliminal meanings and comedic surprises (pbblbbb=P). Unlike ol' boring hyperlinks, seeing a word or phrase link on frangles.com doesn't always tell you what the link will be to (or whether the link will be at all expected whatsoever) and two words/phrases that appear twice (twice) might not always link to the same thing. A few of the many link categories we use are as follows:
TYPES OF FRANGLES LINKS: relevant / non-relevant / non sequitur / definition / rhetorical / internal / external / pun / bad pun / really bad pun / confusing / random / informative / waste of time / broken. (Most of these can be found above).
A couple notes on method: we try to keep links very short (one word if possible) for style continuity and clarity. For instance, a Wii has the same general functional importance as a 22 GHz 700-terabyte hyperulticore processor pentagon-safe personal gaming PC, but hyperlinking the latter term would dwarf the visual weight of the former and even stand out on the entire paragraph/page. Hence usually only the last word or two will be a hyperlink, or some "word in the phrase" if no others are separate hyperlinks such as in "this is a horrible waste of your time". In general if two or more consecutive words are highlighted, this will be one link rather than multiple separate links. (Rarely will Frangles use underlined links as colors usually look more stylish, one exception being where black uniform text is stylistically necessary such as in areas of Flutonia & Zeroa that are all black and white and the only other option is to color a word or phrase gray, decreasing its visibility. Or in this sentence as it's an example of what we're talking about and using a non-underlined link within it would be erroneous.) However, a slash, comma, or period may separate links, so look closely.
On a related tangent, note that all Xangles / Frangles / Blorkk / Squish7 (etc) html is pretty damned sloppy. It all uses the same handful of templates, and almost all have been edited in Kompozer, a free html editing tool, which is always going to be more sloppy than editing the html by hand exactly as it should be. (But gods bless the Kompozer krforbs who do all that shit for us). The worst part about having sloppy html is that XFBS7 domains can show up differently in different browsers & O/S's. Without using basic code that's guaranteed to be generically interpreted the same way on any platform, we can't be sure your page looks like we want it to. (Especially if you're reading on a Plutonian Hypercore 9.9). This is something we mot fix when we damn well get around to (or not).
2/8 - Excuses++
In a bold effort to reach new heights in absurd productivity excuses, we're apparently blaming the Haiti earthquake for our lack of productivity over the past two weeks. Squish has graced us with the brilliant logic leading to this excuse, which necessarily takes a good amount of convolution on the way to its final QED, so please don't follow it as you might see through it.
Squish--still the only known friter, if only because the rest of us don't want to be publically associated with him--generously loaned his self-precious 1.6 GHz 160-gig drive netbook bought "just for writing Frangles because it's easier on my eyes" (Squish has an increasing number of hypochondriac life-threatening eye disorders making each one less credible as they accumulate) to his needy ex-Marine brother for a week to help him take logistics notes over there. With the tragic loss of his ring- of- power- precious slate of tin foil, his hypochondria--sorry, his "eye syndromes"--multiplied a hundredfold to the point they were so horrible that Squish in fact gorged his eyeballs out with a butter knife then discarded them in the garbage disposal (the new ones grown via an experimental stim-cell process had to be surgically reimplanted), emphatically justifying upgrading from his $250 Frangles-writer to a $750 720p / Hi-def / PC / Playstation3 / HDMI / Blu-ray / Wii compatible multimedia wall projector that will still be "mostly for writing Frangles prose in Notepad." Hence Squish claims that his week of inflamed Hyper Computer Vision Eyeball Dispersion Pigment Cancer Disease Syndrome was a noble humanitarian sacrifice, and a valid excuse for not getting anything done around here.
And of course, as we all know, getting used to any new $750 text-editing machine requires a week or two of "pigment calibration" via at least 40 hours of DVD-watching & Fable game playing, because "if I don't push my eyes to figure out when they hurt I won't know how long I can write for". To boot, this process naturally involves more time away from his Haiti-returned netbook, which is an even greater sacrifice of time "if it turns out the [720p / Hi-def / PC / Playstation3 / HDMI / Blu-ray / Wii compatible multimedia wall projector] isn't helping." Finally, since for some reason his new implanted eyeballs have started bleeding again watching the Matrix and Dark City on his entire right living room wall, he has an even more valid excuse for not doing anything, since "I've been in pain for 3 weeks! How the fuck am I supposed to finish nova 1 by April?"
Obviously the rest of us could fill in more, but it's not our responsibility as he's in charge of most of the postable stuff. Squish is fond of reminding us "I'm the most productive person in this whole !@#$ing project so !@#$ off", and while this is sort of true, it's only because the rest of actually have real life jobs. Ouch.
2/7- Would it reveal friters to be antisocial nerds if we posted an update on Superdish Sunday? ... Yes? No? ... Anyone here? Heloooo..??
2/4 - Titles & Segmentation
Note the subtle difference between entitling frook 13 (officially 13./) "Writer's Bricks" vs "Writers' Bricks" (i.e. a singular possessive or multiple possessive apostrophe). The former grammatically implies "a writer's bricks" or "the writer's bricks". Assuming Skip is the writer in question, this would be equivalent to "Skip's bricks". The latter means the bricks of *multiple* writers, such as "Skip's and Toad's bricks" or "Skip's and his freer's bricks" or "The bricks of all the friters of Frangles". We've chosen to use the former simply only it looks more clear, even though we feel the latter is the more appropriate title. This isn't a *horrid* sacrifice for visual clarity, because you can still interpret "Writer's Bricks" as a plural in a sense, if we consider the phrases: *any* writer's bricks, or *each* writer's bricks. Still, it's kind of lonely and lacks the whole happy- collective- novelist- frat- party- feel we'd really rather convey. So, just keep in mind the very title of the frook you're reading isn't 100% appropriate (due only to an impossibility and not lack of diligence) =P.
On a related note, we *do* take delicate care when giving names to a given set of pages (literally billions of stories given enough bricks to combine). These are far too many to name (without a very advanced set of programmed algorithms for a program to generate titles for any given set), but we've recently become exited at the realization of how many of them can actually *have* titles and still be unique from one another (which is of course the first step toward developing those algorithms some day). For instance, we thought up possible titles for the following page orderings within frook 13/:
111 - 177: Skip Square One
111 - 143: A Topicless mush of !@#$
144 - 161: Friting the First Future Future Fiction Fage
144 - 177: Freers & Siffs & Square One Skips
151 (alone) : The First Future Fiction Fage
151 - 157: Future Fiction
151 - 177: Siffs & Square One Skips
161 (alone) : The First Future Future Fiction Fage
161 - 167: Future Future Fiction
1x3 (i.e."1(1>7)3"): Frank's Barstraunt
1x4 (i.e."1(1>7)4"): Office of a Dyslexic Secretary
1x6 (i.e."1(1>7)6"): The Developing Arts Council
111 - 777: Writer's Bricks (frook 13./)
[AxB is often short for inserting any/every brick "x" between A and B. For instance, 1x3 can mean the brick sequence/set: <113, 123, 133, 143, 153, 163, 173>, which in the case of Writer's Bricks is the story of Frank's bar (e.g. every 7 pages from 113 we find Skip in Frank's bar, so the story of Skip's Adventures in Frank's Bar would only include that dimension and leave out the pages in between), but it can also mean "unspecified" brick digit as in brainstorming when a friter knows the written brick is placed in Frank's Bar, but not sure which sour it should be. Here it's basically implied by context which we mean here, but it's clarified in parentheses to be clear. The notation used in the parentheses is explained below (earlier update), and could also be used to describe all the other brick flows listed above, for instance, bricks order 144 - 177 of Writer's Bricks is officially notated as 13.1(44-77)]
Bricks can be combined into so many structures because each brick is written to serve as just another page of the story you're reading (/147 is page /47 of nova 1 of WB, or some other novella if you're reading in some sort of other order), *or* the very first page of the story following that page to the end (/177), *or* the first page of an indefinitely long story, *or* the last page of some indefinitely long story, *or* a totally standalone work! (etc etc etc). Particularly with 13.144 through 13.177, we've given considerable effort into making it possible to start on any of those bricks and have a very coherent story from that brick to the end (we say effort, not success!=P). Of course there's only so many things you *can* give effort to when taking so many zillions of permutations into account, and this just happens to be a few of the nonstandard reading patterns we're taking into account. (Just imagine drawing an area of a fractal pixel by pixel trying to take into account every other pixel in your entire picture; it's very difficult, and the human mind is going to focus on a few similarities to other areas of the picture rather than every single other pixel at once).
You'll notice this particular ordering optimization involves a little re-introduction of characters at the start of each brick ("Frank the Bartender" rather than "Frank"). In Writer's Bricks this works 100% functionally well (non-contrived) because the *plot itself* involves Skip forgetting what happened before and needing to re-narrate or re-experience it. It's going to be more difficult to achieve this affect without the easy out of the plot directly *involving* that re-introduction, which is another reason it's great to start out with Writer's Bricks early on, to understand why such a thing might happen in the future.
Currently a high priority/goal we have is to have enough complete stories (brick/scene orderings that can function 100% as a standalone work that might have been written exactly as such by a sci-fi writer without any outside context) to offer a magazine for publication (such as Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, or Fantasy & Science Fiction for orderings which deal with sci-fi/fantasy themes, and/or any non-sci-fi/fantasy publications where Writer's Bricks material might fit in (a magazine *about* creative writing with stories and articles, or a publication for many various genres). The plan is to present a slightly longer submission than one would normally submit (i.e. the maximum requested length) and give the publisher the opportunity to select the appropriate story for their magazine. We feel this process will have many benefits:
1. Allowing the publisher many options of the material and length to be published.
2. Presenting Frangles' medium in full functionality rather than simply submitting one particular story and claiming "There's a whole bunch more where this came from!"
3. Creating (permanently) the option of many successive stories; i.e. a Frangles Such-And-Such Part I, Part II, Part III, where each "part" serves as a standalone work as *well* as a cliffhanger or piece of a larger story.
In general we think we've done a decent job to date progressing toward our short and long term goals of full modularity (re-arrangeable pieces), as no one's ever really *written* a modular work like this to our knowledge. But keep in mind that in proceeding toward that goal, that posted/published material will always always always be revised, tweaked, or even entirely re-written. Always remember that Frangles is--and perhaps always will be--a *draft*. What works or doesn't work about what you're reading could be completely revised in the future to do the opposite (not work and work, respectively, whichever your preference!) There's no other way to draft a nonlinear work in which every page relates to every other.
[* To say that Frangles may perhaps *never* be a final, polished work is not to say that a fractal nonlinear medium disallows completed frwoas, or frwoas seen as complete from the frangle of the writer who declares "This is my finished work of art and took me bloody 14 years so you damn well better appreciate it's total and utter finality!". I.e. a "finished" story of nine bricks--a 3 by 3 brick structure--can very well exist, just like a trilogy of films/books/poems can be officially published (or a series of 9 of them). This would be a 9-brick nonlinear frwoa that can be read in 9 factorial ways in full, or fewer ways for shorter readings (for instance, the partial frwoa 11, 12, 13). Each reading order/etc in this case would be completely polished to work perfectly the way the friter intends, and each brick would fit exactly with the others in whatever way the friter's designed this 3 by 3 structure to work. We could claim, "Skip Square One is exactly the way we intend it to be!", but this would be utter friter bull@#!, because right now it's basically a haphazard lump of vaguely-coherent nonlinear crud, and this shows through in its context. However, if we *genuinely* claimed that Skip Square One was entirely finished, you would have certain expectations as you would of any published novel you'd pick up at Barns & Noble. So saying Frangles may "never be a completed work" simply means that we're aiming high for the enormous brick structure we eventually want to accomplish (previously 7^6 bricks, and recently sevthed to 7^5), and the project could still take years or decades.]
2/1 - Competence Report
There are barrels and barrels of things to yet explain about the genius (*cough*.. monkeys- on- typewriter- gibberish) design of Frangles and all the unique concepts taken into account while friting, especially in the beginning when the concept is most fresh and alien to everyone used to freeing linear frwoas. Not just things that *will* be revealed about what all this is about, but that you're already reading and may not have noticed, like a poem you enjoy on one level while unaware of depths ingrained in it at the labor of the poet; depths that are foundational to why you might enjoy the poem (whether consciously noticed), as well as depths that you can learn to appreciate if you study them in detail. With Frangles, we try to get those explanations to you in a number of ways:
1) Explaining them gradually on this updates page as certain elements become more prevalent to what's going on currently.
2) Writing polished blurbs / analyzes / etc explaining these things whenever they necessary enough enough to justify prioritizing your migraines above our need to procrastinate.
3) Explaining things *in the prose itself* as the characters talk to one another *about* the styles and themes involved!
4) Giving you insight into the general concepts of Frangles by explaining them elsewhere (i.e. reading about plans for software we need to help do the job gives you insight into how we're going about doing things we need that software *for*).
5) Letting you figure everything out your damn self.
As a quick self evaluation of how we're progressing on these fronts, we give ourselves the following grade report*.
1) moderately tolerable
2) sorta-ish tolerable
3) barely tolerable
4) not tolerable
5) A+
(Please ignore the contrivance of this report for comedic purposes and any lack of accuracy necessary for its humorous nature. The freer may decide whether a fully accurate report would reflect better or worse on our abilities than the one displayed).
[*Frangles' main reading material as is could have been written intuitively without taking into account all the analyzes and complexities and depths we try to present to you (a pop singer might have written a song in five minutes vs taking into account structure principles of music theory--trochees and triplets and sharps, oh my!), though we just happen to be taking all those complexities into account when writing it, and present all that as part of the Frangles experience. (Of course, that could be a burden as well; perhaps analyzing every cold mathematical half-step deters from the intuitive ability to create via passion and not technical detail.)
One might even claim that *any* work of art has infinitely complex elements of structure and character and theme and so on, and the only thing that makes any them worthy of being called great or genius (or not so) is the amount of analysis and professional evaluation sucked out of it by people who have that kind of time. For all the professors and students know, a poem that's analyzed at the college level for decades may have been scribbled on a napkin in 30 seconds while drunk and stoned. So most of the extra complexities and themes and elements we talk about when *analyzing* Frangles rather than writing it are nonessential to its reading and writing, and could just as well not have been written now, or ever. (E.g. Frangles could be analyzed by a bored fractal nonlinear undergraduate some day with the time to actually analyze this random lump of !@#$, who might by chance say the same things we're saying about Frangles if we'd never presented our analysis at all).
Clearly no one can post a haiku and claim "This was my life's work" with any credibility sans proof of this (save your estimation of the honesty and credibility of the writer). The only thing that gives those infinite complexities and depths substance is either evaluating them ad nauseum, or presenting proof that they exist or were considered when constructing the final product. The reason we tell you things like, "We could write a 500-page analysis of the 14th sentence of 13.444, but we just haven't bothered, though be assured it's a damn good one!", is to try to get across some of the complexities we're taking into *account* when writing, rather than those that might exist unnoticed. I.e. our excitement for Frangles' complexities are how we *see* the project (even if we weren't writing it), and we would try to convey that excitement even if we weren't friters. [Translation: we're getting better all the time at contriving bull propaganda promoting Frangles' literary worth when really we can't believe you're actually buying all this].
*But*, as for *how* to relay that excitement and complexity we claim that we (by chance) *are* taking into account while writing, we can't do so without that proof, which we generally consider to be credibility based on delivery so far (e.g. an established software company can claim they're working on a really really great video game via their reputation and track record of doing so previously), and the general innocent- before- guilty principle, as as of yet no freers have hacked our lack of data and exposed our nonexistence. And--Where was this going? Orbo, pause that thing. *Orbo*, pause your dictation thingie and replay the past couple paragraphs....stuck? What do you mean it's stuck!?--...okay, okay, that may be, but I find it hard to believe you're *also* stuck in auto-post mode, and forgot to turn revision permissions off. Wait--are you drunk? You're drunk again, aren't you? Well FIND the !@#$ing screwdriver or the Frangles updates page is going to take up half the internet in a matter of seconds given you were drunk enough *last* week to initiate the exponential time accelerator and 50 years may go buy for us until you find that !@#$ing screwdriver! You just can't--GOF!! GET OFF THE PEAS!]
1/25 - Urgg Speech: Ggrurlgrum
You might like to know that Glorg's slur/dialect in 13.153 (Glorg a member of the urgg race from Blorkk which overlaps a little with Frangles) comes from a more fleshed out linguistics system than just picking letters at random. If you want to know more about it you can check out the Ggrurlgrum page on Blorkk.com.* Keep in mind Glorg's speech in Frangles 13.153 is very loosely written and must be polished at some point. Language that fully adheres to the established system takes a nontrivial amount of attention to detail, and of course, as you know, we're pretty lazy. ( Pbbklb=P ). While you're there, you might want to check out the rest of the Blorkk medium section as it's a totally different invented medium than Frangles (a line-to-line nonlinear skit-based reading format called skit-prose), but you don't need to know any of that to check out the Ggrurlgrum page.
[*Blorkk is Xangles saga #2, whereas Frangles is Xangles saga #1, where currently Frangles is the most active Xangles project.]
1/25 - Reading Material - 13.153
We've updated brick (scene/fage) 13.153, of which more will still be posted. This will be about 30 PLP long when fully posted. It's divided into readable segments for the single and sole purpose of finding your place if you don't read the brick in full the first time. The segments have nothing to do with nonlinearity or re-arrangeable fragments or anything like that. A brick (scene/fage) has and will remain the smallest divisible portion of the Frangles structure: a single continuous scene that in combination with others forms Frangles' nonlinear reading structure, which as stated will now contain 1/7 of the bricks announced initially, with a five-digit brick/scene number (12.456) instead of a six digit (123.456), though again this change has not yet been implemented anywhere except talking about the structure on this updates page. As with any kind of major change dealing with Frangles, we'll make every effort to carefully slide you into a change over time. Keep in mind we're talking about a long-term plan for a saga hundreds of standard reading novels long, all utilizing a totally unique and alien artistic medium ("fractal nonlinear fiction"). There will always be changes going on the more we write as we figure out what works and doesn't work about Frangles. Just consider any freer headaches along the way to be a necessary evil on the journey to not just Frangles particular reading material, but to a whole radical new fictional art form of which Frangles will be its first major example. Thank you for flying Frangles and may all your trips with us be as devoid of brain crashes as possible.
1/23 - Terms
The following two term definitions have been written and added to the Xangles Terms Index (which you can always access easily at xangles.com/i or frangles.com/i) at the significant labor of one our more linguistic friters. While this particular term was thought up intuitively without consciously factoring in all the phrases which phonetically resemble it during its coining, we do sometimes take the effort of examining the intrinsic parts of all the words and phrases we want the new term to resemble/convey, and carefully average all the involved syllables via a handful of methods. Hence any term that comes intuitively is a result of those methods as they're training to be able to do so naturally. (We did this careful work on "freer" to determine the absolute best word that sounded like what we wanted it to mean.) In other words, we spent significant time in how to convince you we actually spend time on this stupid !@#$. (But at least there's something we put hard work into, which is just about the same).
flupluple/ fluplupling/ fluplupled/ fluplupally/ (v/n/expl, v'/n, v-, adv) [fluhp LUPP uhl] [Origin 1. A phonetic fusing / condensation of the words and phrases: fly, flew, flap, ruffle, flutter, flop, leave, left, leap, leaped, flee, flip, hover, fled, plop, pester, landed, shuffle, leaf, leaves, rough, flower, florist, floral, foliage, park, food, fed, disrupt, bug, bugged, walk, rustle, fluster, flock, loop, loopy, little, play, pigeon, puddle, pond, trouble, double trouble, triple trouble, quadruple, quintuple, septuple, flirt, friendly, pester, bird, pet, farther, further, feather, feathery, flighty, gulp, trip, free, land, lucky, up, forgettable, forgetful, assemble, pigeon parking, look for pigeons, look for people, up to trouble, up to double trouble, up up and away, up and away, fly in place, people feed, DON'T FEED THE PEOPLE, pigeon feed, FEED THE PIGEONS, found a pigeon, found a person, find a place to feed, drug, drugged, tripping pigeon, trip on a pigeon, try tripping with the pigeons, trip the people, drug the pigeons up and trip on a leaf, tripping on pigeon feed, "Hello, fluffy fellow, drunk on pigeon feed this early already?", popcorn, bread crumbs, popcorn & bread crumbs, bread crumbs & popcorn, found a feather, fluff a pillow, stuff a pigeon, stuff a person, stuff people pull. Origin 2. The sound of flapping wings changing frequency while coming, going, accelerating, or decelerating, e.g. "flupluple" can be broken down into three similar syllables: FLUP . LUP . UL, suggesting a riff of the same repeated sound getting shorter or softer, such as wings flapping faster or getting more distant.] 1. To flap one's wings in an excited, scared, friendly, pestering, ambitious, daring, disgruntled, and/or ambivalent and day-to-day manner, often suddenly or in haste and usually in a small radius, such as when taking off, landing, or removing oneself several feet from danger until the chances for bread crumbs outweigh the risks of a potentially fatal scenario, or to flap one's wings simply to shift velocity, direction, or altitude in the air in a way that requires extra wing movement for a short time as opposed to that needed to maintain a basic course and speed over distance. 2. To do anything at all even vaguely relating to fluplupling, or to any thing or action which even vaguely phonetically resembles it. (See any of many similar sounding variations, each which has a slightly different meaning based on the subset of the phrases that phonetically comprise "flupluple" that most closely resembles that variation.)
flupple/ fluppling/ fluppled/ flupally/ (v/n, v'/n, v-, adv) [FLUHP uhl]: One of the many variations of "flupluple", each which has a slightly different meaning based on the subset of phrases comprising "flupluple" that most closely resembles the variation.
1/22-- Terms
Xangles/Frangles glossary updates/tweaks, incl: brick, fraga, frhaga, nova, Writer's Bricks. Remember you can look the majority of key Xangles terms quickly with the url xangles.com/i (and frangles.com/i until a separate Frangles terms page is up)
1/22-- Legal
- Please see the short first paragraph of the legal section entitled "GENERAL USAGE", stating that Frangles/etc material is for personal, nonprofit use and is not to be mass distributed whether for free or for profit.
- A 4ish PLP blurb has been appended to the legal section as well, the segment labeled "STEAL OUR STUFF FOR FREE", about our adventurous horrific ongiong journey into the guilt of not charging anything for Xangles/Frangles/etc stuff (prose, wallpapers, etc)
1/22-- Discrepancy Fix
We've fixed a discrepancy. Ed and Eagle got reversed up between 13.153 and 13.155. The one finally named Eagle (the slightly more friendly & innocent pigeon) was named 'Id' in 153, by the one finally named Ed (the slightly more bickery one), and then in 155 'Id' was Ed's name in the scene, as 'Ed' was a derivative of 'Id' because he didn't like the name (which he shouldn't even have had, since Eagle was named 'Id' previously.) The error has been fixed so that Ed is initially named 'Id' in 153 instead of Eagle, leaving 155 basically the same but tweaked to compensate for the change. You may want to re-read 13.153 & 13.155 to be clear.* FYI, If you didn't get the Freud joke, Ed starts reading Dr. Vifps's copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams while he's still named 'Id', as the 'id' is Freud's name for the unconscious mind, and Flutonia is a very dream-like realm (especially in a psychiatrist's office).
[*Remember 131.xyz is now called 13.xyz, though the titles of the pages don't yet reflect this change.]
1/21-- Grammar/Style
A small note on style not really worth noting: Whenever a number appears in Frangles prose, it will almost always be represented by a numerical digit or string ('8', '200', etc) rather than a spelled out word ("eight", "two hundred", etc). The reason for doing this is that Frangles often hinges on key numbers, or incorporates an interconnected numerical system or puzzle that mot be connected to plot, theme, (etc), and numerical digits are much easier to pick out when quickly skimming pages of text. Let's say a freer's trying to figure out a math puzzle small or large, they might remember roughly where a significant number was mentioned but not the exact place, making it much easier to find it if it's more noticeable. Granted, often numbers are just whipped out of our asses, but even then they fit into templates in which they could be significant otherwise, for instance in the future if we use posted ones as a foundation for a mathematical puzzle, or create a puzzle and then change the numbers around to fit it.
At the least we can tell you that we definitely have spent time working out math issues--whether small or large or rough or polished--enough to place them in a way that mot now or later or never be part of such a crafted puzzle. For instance, that the duration of our known universe Okuaka is often mentioned to be around 88 billion years is part of a complex system we've at least brainstormed, and may even have thought out thoroughly (or have plans to). You of course only have our word on this, because the situations of us having developed an MIT-worthy field of mathematics based on 88 billion and owning a durable AD&D 1d100 to pick it out, are intrinsically isomorphic. Anyway, if you're an English major and think using "88 billion" or "1,000" rather than "eighty-eight billion" or "a thousand" is a tad improper/lazy, now you know why. (That the entirety of Frangles was invented simply as a method of justifying improper grammar and style is an entirely nother issue. Like the word 'nother'. and using apostrophes to quote " 'nother' ", and inserting spaces in between the apostrophes and quotes of " ' "nother" ' ", etcetcEtc eTC etsetterah.,.,,. Of course, often we are just lazy, but thanks to the two law student interns we know who can always argue those delinquencies away, you'll really never know.)
1/20-- NEW NOTATION
We've been working on a shorthand system for notating a series of Frangles bricks (roughly akin to "pages"): a reading order that all major sub stories of Frangles will be notated with. (A "sub story" being any lengthed story other than reading every single page of Frangles in order, such as reading a single frook or nova). It will be covered in full eventually in the structure area, but here are the basics. (We are presenting this to you now because we're approaching the time when it will be needed to understand where Frangles is going, whereas bringing the notation up from the start would have been unnecessary information). Note that this uses the new sevthed structure where bricks are now 5 digits instead of 6. So, the first series of novas that will be written (the first full frook), will be notated:
(1>7)(3<4).1/
This means the fraga goes up from 1 to 7 as the frook goes down from 3 to 4 (wrapping 7 back around to 1), where the first nova will remain 1, and the pages of that nova are read in order from first to last (pages 11 to 77), shorthanded by a slash for "all pages".* So the notation (1>7)(3<4).1/ now describes the following sequence of novas:
13.1/
22.1/ 31.1/ 47.1/
56.1/ 65.1/ 74.1/
Where each nova is read from the first to the last page (/11 to /77). E.g, the brick order 13.111 to 13.177 is the first nova in the list ("Skip Square One"), and the 2nd nova in the sequence is the first seventh of Kyle Kirby's story (22.111 to 22.177), etc. [This notation might also be able to be reduced to shorter notations in the future when we consider a full notation system, such as "(1>)(3<).1/" or "1^3v.1/", but for now this is the main, basic, most understandable notation for an ordering of Frangles pages]
*Officially*, this type of notation will be the numbering system for describing various stories or groupings of Frangles pages (such as one chapter, or a series of frooks), which will be casually referred to as we've been doing. So 13.111 is page 1 of Writer's Bricks (the story of Skip), 13.11/ is its first chapter, 13.1/ is its first nova ("Skip Square One"), and 13./ is the the whole book, which may or may not include the "." for clarity; i.e. "13./" and "13/" shall mean the same thing. (What would the notation for the next steps in this sequence be? Hint: there's no single obvious answer). Colloquially we'll often say things like "frook 13" to refer to the official Frangles page ordering "13./", etc.
[* The slash itself is official shorthand for the full page numbering. I.e. "22./" (Kyle Kirby's frook) would technically be "22.(111-777)", and its first nova would be "22.1(11-77)", though it's not important to dive into all the further complexities of the system while introducing you to its basics. Those depths will be covered eventually; which, by the way, are and will be very carefully thought out. Don't mistake convolution for complexity, or perplexity with power. Having a fleshed out, in-depth, nonlinear ordering notation system for Frangles & similar structures is like a powerful computer programming language which is carefully designed and standardized, which is only confusing if you try to skip ahead to fast before absorbing each step]
1/19-- MAJOR STRUCTURE CHANGE (please ignore)
For no further reason than to confuse the flying fuck out of you on a fleeting friter whim, the structure of Frangles will now be 1/7 the size previously announced. (Not the reading material, but the structure in which that material will line up, given the unexpectedly long Writer's Bricks pages seem to be working well, so there will now be more material per page. We call this type of magnitude alteration "sevthing".) Unfortunately for our entertainment, this sevthing will cause you extremely little suffering, as all posted material will remain more or less the same. The biggest consequence is that plot, story, and character development will be thicker than previously planned in the future to condense longer planned stories into shorter spaces. But, since the future hasn't arrived yet, this is of extremely little consequence to you (although some of nova 1 of Writer's Bricks might be re-written to incorporate more fast moving character depth / etc.) Anyway, The essential changes for you to note in general on structure & structure terminology are as follows:
1) A fage/scene/brick (a continuous indivisible scene) will now and forever be called a BRICK. [until we change our minds next Tuesday]
2) The terms "chapter", "nova", and "frook" will remain the same.
3) The story of each character will be told in 1 frook rather than 7, Skip's story being the frook "Writer's Bricks" which is about 10% completed. Kyle's will cover a year or so in high school life rather than all of high school & college. Plans for that 7-year character depth will not be lost, however, as it will be applied to other characters instead. (E.g. Jebb might study the morals of magic use in his later training rather than Kyle taking a philosophy course in college.)
4) A "frhaga" will now be called a "fraga".
5) 7 fragas is now the full content of Frangles, rather than 49.
6) The page numbering will be 5 digits rather than 6. The third digit from the left will be cut out. I.e. page "131.123" will now be "13.123". The first two digits represent the frook number and the last three the "bricks" of that frook (basically the "pages" of that frook, such as the pages of a printed novel).
7) Your terror at night that Frangles' structure may increase or decrease by a factor of 7 on any given day of the week will now be septupled. [Or at least if you're someone who can't sift our bullshit by now and haven't translated "fleeting friter's whim" to "conclusive decision following a half-year's worth of carefully planned migraines for the best over all system 'built with the freer in mind'", a phrase which itself of course even more extensive bullshit except presented as anti-bullshit to the previous bullshit just to throw you off, just like presenting our own flaws just now as mock self-satire--as well as presenting this presentation itself as mock mock self-satire (if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn't because I'm too drunk on Orbo's frwoa static field to think straight, or think gay even, was that an insertable gay joke? Oh well, whatever, I'm just an intern; if they fire me for homophobia I can always apply for a job at Blorkk or Xangles)--is, you know what, I can't even finish this tangent and my grolg's getting at my peas again so I'd better--GOF!! GET OFF THE PEAS!! BAD GROLF!!)
STRUCTURE IN SHORT, Frangles is currently a 16,807-brick saga with 2,401 chapters (7 bricks per chapter), 343 novas (7 chapters per nova), 49 frooks (7 novas per frook), and 7 fragas (7 frooks per fraga), where the terms {brick, chapter, nova, frook} are roughly akin to the familiar words {page, chapter, novella, book}, and where each of these groupings is represented by a single digit from 1 to 7 accumulated right to left respectively. (e.g. "12.345", meaning "frook 12, brick 345" or "nova 12.3, brick 45", etc!)
Nothing has yet been changed throughout Frangles.com regarding this structure change, as the original structure is integrated everywhere. Things will eventually be reformatted as time goes on. With any major changes to Frangles, we try our best to make them as gradual and easy as possible. Until then, simply subtract the third digit from the left from any page numbering mentioned and that should just about suffice.
1/18-- Fonts
Just a heads up, the tentative fonts that may be used for each separate age of Okuaka:
1 (Flutonia) - Comic Sans
2 (Earth) - MS Sans Serif
3 (Flurth) - Verdana
4 (Florbb) - Tahoma
5 (Kroffonia) - Trebuchet
6 (Generika) - Georgia
7 (Zeroa) - Times New Roman
These will probably be non-bold, 11-pt fonts, subject to further research and experimentation in what the best all-around average reading environment is. Note that these differ from most of the currently used fonts, mostly because the font structure as a whole was never really considered; we just picked some fonts at random that sort of looked OK.
Please please please please please tell us what you think about the readability of Frangles; this is the most important feedback anyone can give us, as we know our stories kick ass. Are the boxes too wide? Narrow? The fonts too big? Small? We don't get much feedback and even a single email can be vastly helpful as it tells us what other people might think too. (I.e. the ones who read Frangles and don't feel obligated to donate a comment or two... wait, that's like all of you, dammit. Write us now and save a tree, and help knock your ISP off our naughty list of people who won't earn free Frangles action figures and Xangles stealth jets once they're available.)
1/17-- Grammar/Formatting
We ran into a problem when designing the prose scroll box grids when pasting material with long strings that exceed the designated width of the box, making it so you have to scroll across left and right to read some of its contained prose. (Obviously impractical since you can't scroll left and right as you're reading lines horizontally). And since half the point of those grids is to be able to glance at prose structure at once with tiny writing (as well as larger), we have to be careful to not to insert any words or stretches of characters that are exceptionally long.
For instance, if a scroll box fit lines lengthed as follows:
| It was the beginning of the beginning of the very end of this nicely contrived tiny scroll box, wheeeee. |
Then an extended string like "Godaammonkeysh#@%6sunnuva$#@$!!" utilizing a lack of spaces to create a certain feel would overrun the text box, and a horizontal scroll bar will appear at the bottom of it forcing you to slide it left and right as well as up and down. Also, even on a reading page that's a normal length wide and can fit the phrase (like the standard reading pages), this creates an awkward break visually, as there's a long blank space if the phrase occurs at the end of a line of text, such as:
| In the beginning of the beginning of the like whatever I don't have time to think creatively since this is only an example prose box, all the non-kino/non-tolcofane/non-Dr.Who-shaped bot orbs from Centauri-Pluto-Romulus-Vulcan Prime could register copyrighted material. Now that time has passed, and... |
Slashes and dashes are especially an annoyance since it's common grammatical usage to join two or three words together. ("The frilly shirt/dress/gown Alice was wearing unfortunately fell off right as she accidentally and humiliatingly stumbled into the wedding of her friend/co-worker/ex-lover Marie to a bot orb from the previous example.") When those two or three words are already long words ("the Christopher-Christina-Christian best friend threesome"), you get the above problems. For these reasons you may notice a little awkward grammar here or there, such as spaces between hyphenated words ("The frilly shirt / dress / gown Alice was wearing fell off again the second time the event was mentioned on the Frangles page, ticking the living Godaammonkey sh#@%6 sunnuva $#@$! out of the Christopher- Christina- Christian best friend threesome currently reading it.") Also the index is a problem as slashes are often used, such in a definition of "freer" which can mean a fractal/Frangles reader/seer/user (i.e. "fractal reader" or "fractal seer" or "Frangles reader" or "Frangles seer", etc), and when the Frangles/Xangles/Blorkk/Squish7 foursome is referred to as a connected thing.
For all these reasons, just be aware that these slightly awkward grammar techniques will be used quite often in the future. Hopefully a bit of your past grammatical/formatting/spelling/etc/etc confusion/annoyance/frustration to date has been cleared up as well, hopefully as thoroughly as a 24-hour coughing-aching-friting-freeing best-single-Nyquil-joke-you-ever-got-on-an-html-page cold syrup/satire prose line would.
1/16
We should have a nice heart-shaped Valentine's Day fractal wallpaper up by then. So check back if you want your computer to look as Val-day hip as possible.
1/15
Fage 131.153 is (unbelievably) still being worked on. We're not stuck on it or anything, it's just this tiny little problem of it becoming 25 @#$ing reading pages (PLP) long. It's all excellent quality reading material--being revised as you'd revise any 25 work of that length into a final draft--it's just deterring even more from the original plan of having every fage (scene) being one PLP (reading page) long. This doesn't affect the structure of Frangles whatsoever, it simply affects the flow of reading a very short passage then a very long one, such as a one-paged chapter in a paperback novel then a 25-page one. In such a novel, that might flow perfectly well, or perhaps not. You really don't know just from the numbers. Likewise, a 25-PLP fage may work out just fine, but then, it may throw the flow of reading the nova from start to finish. (Currently we're working with the idea of the beginning of the nova having short fages, and the middle long pages, and relatively short ones by itself, which itself is a dynamic progression of the structure of the story just as the structure itself follows dynamic characters and events about similar things: the art of writing!). It is closed to finished, though, and will be akin to publishing a decent sized chapter of a normal novel. (We can give you near-total certainty that no other fage of the rest of nova 1 of Writer's Bricks will be this long.)
FYI, this is a type of problem our nonlinear medium will encounter now and then as time goes on: how to squeeze such and such a sized story into such and such a sized space. A single paragraph might have to be lengthened and expanded on to fill up a dozen PLP, or a storage bin of brainstorming material might have to be condensed into a one-liner punchline. At its worst, the problem can occur on much larger scales; if ten whole frooks of Generika stories are written a certain way (i.e. to parody generic fantasy writing which can be extra long) and ten frooks of Jumper the Mutant Orion Frog turned out to be a big lump of itty bitty haikus, then the problem of how to fuse one in harmony with the other is a very serious one. A little further, let's say that that all freers catch a deadly virus and are all going to perish in a few years. Then the whole planned structure might be "sevthed" (i.e. cut to a seventh of its planned length), with massive issues on how to condense huge areas of material to fit smaller areas, and to expand on smaller areas that have to fit larger.
Anyway, this the first example of this sort of problem we're starting to face. Of course, it's of very minor consequence to you since /153 is a very readable, enjoyable chapter, and if it doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the nova, then it all works out perfectly because none of the other fages fit in with it either (which is a very coherent and unified structure indeed.)
1/14
After months of massive headaches that will for the moment eschew any witty description of them given they've worn us down too much to bother, we've penned in the first six novas that will be written. (And by penned, we mean the erasable pen kind that sorta looks permanent until you realize it was erasable ink and someone had sneaked in an eraser past the nightclub bouncer.) They will be novas: 1311, 2221, 3131, 4741, 5651, 6561, & 7471.* This is adding one to the first digit (the age of Okuaka) and the third digit (the first year we follow the character being followed), and subtracting one from the second (that numbered character out of seven for that age of Okuaka), while leaving the last the same (the first nova of the frook in question.) Together these will give you a good cross-section of Frangles' characters, settings and story structures, and will help introduce you to what Frangles is all about. Each will give a sample of one of the seven ages of Okuaka and of one character in that age, and each is the beginning of that particular story line, so you will see how frooks (Frangles books) can parallel each other as well as flow in different directions.
If it sounds annoyingly random at all, keep in mind this is your first exposure to the initialization of what we call a fractal nonlinear saga. Imagine if you'd read nonlinear material your whole life, and then were exposed to the art of linear writing (i.e. beginning to end material). You'd be confused as hell. You'd ask, "WhuwuWAIT.. why is this author starting the story on page 1?", or "I tried reading from the last page backward but the story line didn't make any sense!", or "Do you *really* mean to say that Lord of the Sword is going to be published from book 1 to 7? Can't he at least write the seventh page of each book? How am I supposed to know what's coming?"
Giving a saga a nonlinear page numbering system is extremely simple in and of itself, and is only a bizarre and alien concept if you've never been through it. If you'd followed the progress of the writing of dozens of other nonlinear prose sagas like Frangles--or had a habit of writing in such structures yourself--you would say "Ah, Okay, those are the novellas that Frangles is beginning with" with a mild shrug, just as a Star Wars fan would say "Ah, episode II will be the fifth movie shot, and it's name is going to be... ah here it is: 'Attack of the Clones'. Wait... 'Attack of the Clones'?! That's the lamest !@#$ing title I've ever--@#$fD.." (Not a perfect example.) But George Lucas' nine-book plan (incidentally) is definitely a small microcosm example of Frangles' nonlinear structure: writing stories 4, 5, 6, then 1, 2, 3, then deciding to go a different direction from your overall planned structure and not write 7, 8, 9. This nine-film plan could also be labeled as a 3x3 set of films; three sets of three movies: a trilogy of trilogies. Numbered this way (as Frangles numbers things), this would go: 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, where 11 is Episode 1, 21 is the first Star Wars movie filmed (A New Hope), etc!
So, our announcement of the first seven novas to be written is exactly this, except with more sets of books. Instead of a 3x3 film saga, Frangles is a 7x7x7 book saga (with each book a set of 7x7x7 pages). Hence the announcement "The first Frangles short books [novas] will be 1311, 2221, 3131, 4741, 5651, 6561, & 7471" is just a tiny math leap away from the announcement "The first three of the 3x3-film Star Wars saga will be shot in the order 21, 22, and 23, and after that, 11, 12, and 13 will be produced" Once you're used to that, then with every other nonlinear saga you ever read (if any), such an announcement as this will become easier. And of course, as Frangles itself continues announcing such things, you'll be more used to this sort of thing, too.
Now, diving into a full explanation of what this ordering means, how it came about, how it will function as a unified frwoa (etc etc etc etc etc), firstly, is and always will be TOTALLY UNNECESSARY TO READ THEM (yay), and secondly, way too long to dive into at the moment (yay#2), though you can get into all that eventually if you want to. Otherwise just ignore all that stuff Just as a graduate thesis paper analyzing the infinite symbolism and moral themes of Blue's Clues is unnecessary to watch Blue's Clues, so is it unnecessary to study the complex structure of Frangles in order to read it. Realize this, that someone might have written any given sub-story in Frangles without having planned any of this nonlinear bull!@# hype.
J.R.R. Tolkien said that Lord of the Rings was "just a story!" when faced with the higher-level analyzes of his work. He planned little of the complexities that other people saw in it; to him, it was a story. Not a college textbook. All these types of complexities of any type of story--linear or nonlinear--will be picked up at some subconscious level of the reader, and were written with some subconscious knowledge of them in mind. (That is, when they weren't outright consciously planned.) We say this over and over, because Frangles complexity can be scary. It's simplicity can be scary. And yet, both can be narcoleptically boring if they're understood. That's the versatility of a fractal image, which can look "nifty" or "pretty" or "!@#$ing cool!" at a first glance (or even for a lifetime at looking at them) without having--or ever having to get--a knowledge of all that nerd fractal math and chaos theory: the stuff that can (literally) be studied up to the highest professional mathematics level. To a mathematician, a fractal desktop wallpaper might be a lot more pretty or !@#$ing cool than a non-geek one, but then again, a geek's PC is more for functionality than looking at pretty things (otherwise he'd have a Mac), so perhaps not.
Anyway, what these nova numbers mean, how they'll work out, what it'll mean for you to read them... will all be revealed in time as we progress. For the moment, just start vaguely keeping the numbers in mind (unless you have a Mac, which is totally okay with us, too).
[* - The first 4 digits of a 6-digit fage number is the designation for a particular nova, and the last 2 are the pages of that nova. I.e. The nova being worked on now (the nova called "Skip Square One") is the first seventh of Writer's Bricks, so we add an extra digit. Writer's Bricks is Frangles book #131 (or "frook" #131), and so Skip Square One is Writer's Bricks nova #1 (of 7), which is also Frangles nova #1311. We usually leave out the dot separating the first three digits of a 6-digit fage number with the last (i.e. we would otherwise call Skip Square One "131.1") because it's a little excessive for a 4-digit number, just in the way the number 723,400 needs a comma while "2400" doesn't necessarily need one.]
1/9 - New Frangles wallpaper: "Fluffonia Park"
1/8 - New Xangles wallpaper: "Flame Web"
1/6 - OK so to all you freers who've been biting your nails for the next finished WB fage (131.153), all we can say is,The End of 131.153 is worth the wait. (It has to be, because it's approaching 15-20 PLP long.) Trust us, it's gonna be good (half is posted now.)
1/3 - DID YOU FROW? :: From most browsers, if you click inside on any basic website scroll box, you can then use your keyboard arrows to go up/down and left/right, and the "Page Up" and "Page Down" to go whole screens, and can usually navigate with the scroll wheel on your mouse as well. Note that different methods of scrolling screen by screen can yield different results: a "Page Down" might scroll a half box while a mouse wheel scrolls a full screen, or visa versa, etc.
1/3 - FYI we're aware these updates blurbs are getting a little too long and much for the updates page; we'll re-arrange things eventually, but as with everything else it's a tricky headache as there are so many formats of news / explanations, etc, and dozens of places to put them or re-arrange them (for instance, "Frangles updates" vs "Writer's Bricks updates" vs "About Writer's Bricks" vs "Skip Square One" updates vs "Saga of Skip" etc etc etc). For now it's nice to have a quick page where you know you're getting most of the news/etc. (It won't last forever) =P
1/3
We've put up two rough "prose grids" with the entire 49 fages of Novella 1 of Writer's Bricks ("Skip Square One"), with the unwritten ones blank of course (about 33 are there). Now you can read the entire Nova on one html page. The first one (prose grid 1) has medium print, whose purpose is to be able to see as much at once as possible and still be readable. I.e, if you squeeze 49 scroll boxes onto one monitor you can only read a couple lines of each page without scrolling, or, you'd have to read extremely tiny print, (which is partly the point of prose grid 2). Obviously, squeezing a whole text into a small space is great for understanding structure, but not for reading. But of course, reading one page at a time doesn't give you any visual sense of structure; of course, if you're reading page by page, you understand a lot of the structure by memory, especially if you're supplementing with diagram or map of the pages like on the main Writer's Bricks page. (For reference, we'll call a "grid" a page that contains prose, and a "map" one that simply lists the pages in any sort of chart or diagram, like a site map.)
The more important point of the tiny print of prose grid 2 is that you can enlarge the whole page until each scroll box is a normal, comfortable reading size. Try this: go to grid 2, and hit enlarge or magnify on your browser until the prose is a normal, comfortable reading font like that of the main posted pages that are linked to from the main Writer's Bricks page. Now there's not much difference between reading each page in the scroll box, and reading it alone on the normal pages you've been reading!! (like 131.111). You could actually read all Frangles material pretty comfortably this way. Then with a simple drag you can scroll up or down to get to the next page you want to read. Granted it's not as stylish, but it's more functional and gives you a better sense of structure, and a better method of exploring and understanding that structure.
There are even a couple other benefits. Firstly, the main reading pages currently don't have scroll boxes or fixed backgrounds; this is perhaps a little worse for eyes because things are moving around more and your eyes have to adjust a little. Squish--who is extremely sensitive to such things--finds that reading material on a solid, mid-colored background with a small scroll box in the middle (like the reading boxes on the main page) is easiest on his eyes, and reading with bright complex backgrounds moving around a lot (or reading from the very top of the monitor to the very bottom instead of keeping his eyes in a fixed spot) are more troublesome. We can only assume this goes for most people on a less noticeable level. (Think of Squish's eye problems as a great measuring tool for what's good or bad for other people; it's inadvertently an incredible benefit to have that as it helps us create the easiest, healthiest reading environment possible. (Always be aware of eye health when reading any online material.).
The other (temporary) benefit to prose grid 2 is that the main reading pages don't yet have controls to move any other direction than one page forward or back. You currently have to hit back on your browser and click each page you want to read if you want to read in an unorthodox nonlinear order (the whole point of nonlinear prose!) This is in the works, but for now the grids give you a great way of navigating pages. I.e. to read every seventh minute (an important reading order), you simply need read across on a prose map rather than down.
NOTE THAT THE HORIZONTAL/VERTICAL RELATION IS SWITCHED ON THE PROSE MAPS. To read normally you now read the pages down instead of across. This is our bad; this is all rough and it'll take awhile to get everything perfect, if it can even ever be perfect. Note there are limitations to always being able to read in horizontal/vertical order of your preference. For instance, since monitors are more widescreen nowadays, you'd probably want to have a navigation bar to the side when reading prose rather than above or below. But then whatever page maps you wanted to view in that rectangle might have to be organized differently. We can get the interfaces as understandable as possible, but as with any program, there are simply limits in the positions and formats of multiple windows you move around and change.
Remember these are rough first attempts. The tabs need to be much wider on over half the boxes, and the sizing of the boxes might need work (i.e. to be a little bit longer rather than horizontal; but then that might take away from it's navigationalibility [what a cool word!]). But, as soon as all the formatting is worked out properly, these types of grids will be equally preferable as a main method of reading Frangles as the main 1-fage-per-html-page fages you've been reading. Each will have its pluses and minus, and each needs a lot of work. (We're still working on site management software to standardize these reading formats so all that needs to be done is write Frangles in a text file and then insert them into these templates automatically.)
So, check out 1311 grid 1 & 2 (be sure to try shrinking/enlarging the pages!!) and check back here for progress as always.
1/2/10
Ugh. Okay so we put these new menu bars in on the main page (nutshell, frupdates, software, etc)... pain in the butt, but definitely an improvement (some browsers didn't even format our other text bars right that used the html option not to wrap text so you could get a clickable full bar rather than empty space to the right, but this didn't always get read right). It's not that making the menu bars was a pain per se, but dealing with the style of frangles as a whole can be nightmarish sometimes, just like altering the colors of a fractal in just one place would ruin the uniformity of the entire fractal. I.e. fractals integrate on all levels of Frangles, even the formatting which can be (in some ways) a lot harder than other sites (in others, perhaps easier; but we haven't bumped into those yet!).
Anyway, we're changing these little bars (or one of us, anyway), and we figure why not change a bunch of other things; for instance, this puke-monotonous yellow smiley-face background. In fact we've had a plan since the beginning to change around the colors here sometimes, but the yellow just kept sticking for the whole year. Now, after a year, maybe it could be changed, right? It just takes a second to color cycle the background with Gimp or Adobe and upload the new file, right? Ughgh.
In trying this we realized that yellow is the brightest hue (so this black text is very readable), and with any other color the background is too dark for the text to stand out. But we can't make those colors lighter or darker because that violates the bright color scheme (the pure primary and secondary colors you can select in an art program, for instance, pure red is "255 0 0" RGB). So if you think about it, there's something intrinsically unique about this particular "bright pure-color" scheme that is lost without yellow as the main background color. (Any colored font--whether black or white or gray--isn't going to stand out in front of a pure primary/secondary color because those colors are in the middle of the light/dark spectrum). So, if you get sick in the months to come of our puke-yellow/orange background color, now you know why!
Of course we've tried thinking about other formats Frangles could have; like take a really nice bright fractal and make the main page all fractally and stuff, but we ran into trouble with this too. We glanced through all our wallpapers and quickly realized that using any of them would loose the contrast between solid/bold/basic of the main page, and complex/detailed/fractals of all the ages of Okuaka (the actual reading material to your left). Having this page use solid, bright colors makes it stand out from all the complex and detailed fractals elsewhere. We took some time to divide our fractal art into seven general groupings that each look the best for the seven ages of Okuaka, giving all seven common ground (they're all our art and have a style in common, as any artist(s)' works do) yet separating them enough to be separate genres. Any attempt at dividing that fractal artwork into 7 balanced groups plus an extra one that has to stand completely apart from the others is not just hard, but impossible (to a certain extent). Its sort of like trying to take the six mixing wheel colors (red orange yellow green blue purple) and selecting one to stand apart from the others and still have the remaining five a balanced set.
Anyway, bottom line, there are many difficulties to "fractal nonlinear prose" web design that little else faces, just like writing nonlinear prose is a whooole different ballpark than writing any standard novel. (We could continue to bitch about all sorts of other pain in the butt problems but hey, this is supposed to be a happy place! You have enough confusion to worry about around here without the added loss of innocence that we're usually 7x7 times as !@#/*&* confused and frustrated as you! We just figure it helps once in awhile to demonstrate we're not bullshitting you when we whine all the time that "this stuff is reeeally hardd, wwahhh! I want my bottle")
1/1/10 - New blurb on how to read writer's bricks
1/1/10
A note on the size & format of frangles.com: we're quite aware it needs a lot of work, but just know this is on our todo list. For instance, half the site is crammed into the upper left of your screen. This is to make Frangles easier to read on smaller monitors, but of course the space of a larger monitor is wasted. We'll eventually work on formatting the site (and prose) to be as uniform and easy to read on as many different environments as possible, but this is a scary task given how many there are. Also throw in that formatting is much more important for sites you read for extended periods of time than other sites, and it's a huge project to make sure Frangles is easy, accessible, surfable, readable, etc, from anywhere. To boot we're also concerned about long-term effect on the eyes of reading extensively on a monitor. Squish--who has some eye problems--finds that the uniform yellow and small scroll box of this page is very easy to read (for whatever reason), so who knows exactly what the perfect reading formats are, but we're working on figuring it out. (E.g. one thought we have is that colors could be cycled as you're reading somehow to avoid staring at the same pigments for too long).
We also starting to work out long-term plans for adapting Frangles for cell phone browsing, and easy browsing for smaller devices like netbooks. Our main concern is whether to actually re-write the material itself above and beyond arranging it for an easy-to-read format. E.g. Perhaps fage 131-111 could be reduced to ten to twenty sentences to get the basics down in a microcosm on a cell phone, for which you'd want to click around and surf various pages faster on the go. (This would also yield an interesting "lite" version of Frangles where the freer can surf its structure and get the main ideas down without reading every page in detail.)
Of course, it's not even possible in a single html file to optimize for all reading environments (you can just get a sorta-good average that won't look perfect on any of them.) A text box might need to be 300x300 rather than 50x50, or 80% of a table rather than 20%. Therefore, part of this long-term formatting goal is to create different reading environments and interfaces. For instance, this page as it is now looks good on a small to mid-sized monitor, but on a larger one, all the extra space to the right and below could be used to view extra things. Comments, or bonus diagrams, or multiple prose pages side by side (or in grids) rather than just one. That's part of our long-term plan for frangles.com, as well as a prime goal for our future fractal/nonlinear reading/editing software.
1/1/10
Quick note: You might start noticing a lot of words that use *asterisks* instead of slicker looking html italics throughout frangles.com, as well a few more spelling or punctuation errors than before. This is because (firstly) we're copying / cutting / pasting more and more between various miscellaneous text files and html files, and haven't developed a solid writing/editing process with uniform formats for all Frangles prose & articles (fonts, italics, spaces/tabs, page numbers, file names, etc).
For instance, it's best to have all Frangles prose saved in simple, standard text files, so we can throw that into various other reading interfaces as needed (like the web, or a word processor, or the software we'll eventually write, etc). But of course that involves standardizing the formatting of those text files (tabs, spaces, italicized words, fonts etc), and then transposing that formatting into the other formats like html, which makes inserting tabs tricky. Even in html we have multiple formats we're experimenting with, like the new 1311 prose grid, not to mention our html itself which is kind of sloppy and nonstandard; we're using the free html editor Kompozer which doesn't format exactly how we'd like. In particular, we want to make our html as easy and O/S-uniform as possible.
Eventually we should have these things down better (or automated), but we're just too lazy to make sure every file and format is perfectly spell checked and formatted short-term, as this will all be re-done eventually as a whole soon enough.
1/1/10
Here is our first attempt at a functional 7x7 prose grid of nova 131.1 This contains all the posted "Skip Square One" material (The first nova of Writers Bricks) in 49 little scroll boxes (one fage per box). You can actually read the entire 200 PLPs of posted Writers Bricks material on this one html page, though it would be tedious in a standard view as the boxes are very tiny to fit them in. Although, it's semi-readable for long passages if you enlarge the page (not just the text); Google Chrome is the only browser we know of that can do this. (We highly recommend Chrome for reading and surfing and resizing frangles.com). Note that even though the text and the boxes enlarge, still, there's no more text per box as the page increases. Obviously a fully comfortable reader that allows you to surf and read Frangles pages with ease is something that will take time to develop. [See /software for our progress on the development of better reading/editing software and interfaces]
Of course, while not super for reading long passages, it's still invaluable as a reading and editing tool. The ability to read/edit a huge structure of frangles pages on a single screen allows much more insight into that page structure than reading each page separately. Note this chart is flipped from horizontal/vertical from the vertical/horizontal structure of the page maps on the main Writers Bricks page. That means that on this grid you read downward to read the book normally like a regular book (progressing right as you finish a column), and across to skip every 7th page, moving downward at the end of each row. (another way of reading the 49 pages). (Rather than visa versa for the regular page).
1/1/10 - New section: Software
1/1/10 - Welcome to the new year. That is, if you're a living in 21st century 188th billennia Earth. Everyone else, welcome to the end of this sentence. (And a new updates page.) You can read last year's Updates by clicking '2009' at the top of the page any time you want to return to Kansas. Our new year's resolution?? Uh, we'll let you know in about 364 days.
(GO TO 2009)