Irreality ver. 9 interview with Triskele and Squink
Irreality ver. 9 interview with Triskele and Squink
It was almost two years ago when I first chipped my tooth on Irreality.net, which I saw at the time as something of a subversive community site for chaos magicians, before the that terminology apparently became passé. Irreality offered me a place to have dialogs I couldn't really find anywhere else on the internet, with individuals who I never seemed to run into on the forum-centric websites. Mostly, I grew tired of discussions and the usual internet bullshit, and really wanted a way to delve into the personalities behind codes and characters.
Who are these other individuals? What are their lives like? For someone who did not have any other magicians or occultists to talk to at the time in offline life, it offered a chance for a greater level of communication than I could afford in suburban hell. Knowing that there were real 'others' out there who were healthy and happy mutants, helped me take initiative to redirect my personal narrative. Irreality gave me a different context in which to interact with those that I would count as peers, and by that, I have seen much of what Irreality has been to my online life, grow into material reality.
Angelina Fabbro and Jonathan Blake, known online as Triskele and Squink, are the masterminds behind Irreality, and here I talk to them about community, just what the hell their site is about, and its latest incarnation, version 9, which will launch on xmas.
Screw Santa, Triskele and Squink are hooking us up this year, and we didn't even have to waste time being good!
- Danny Chaoflux
DC: What is Irreality? Could you explain what your site is to those of us who may not have heard of it?
Angelina (Triskele): Irreality is most well known for it's internet presence. In truth, Irreality is best described as a collaborative 'group mind' ideology geared towards our self-discovery as individuals and as a planet. The site became necessary when Squink and I realized we wanted to reach out and find others who would work with us towards similar goals. It features a lot of tools and resources for spiritual exploration and sub-cultural investigation.
Jonathan (Squink): A veritable hole inside internet space-time. Irreality could be considered a multi-faceted communications hub where users create, share and modify the informational supra-structure of consensual reality. In other words, it's a place where everybody knows your name....
DC: How does your site differ from other "occulture" sites out there on the internet today?
Angelina: Our mission statement makes it blatantly clear that we're not wrapped up in trying to be 'the next big thing', we're not attempting to become the foremost hub of social communication for the type of people these interests attract nor are we pretending we're going to incite a revolution. The main premise is that we are the revolution, always. The process. The revolution is already happening, and the more time we waste arguing about what the revolution is, the less time we spend living it. There are too many sites claiming to be the 'new' culture. Better culture. Sub culture, pop culture - who cares? Getting caught up in the status of a movement is tiring and misses the point entirely. The point is the movement itself. It's inherent in the word. Move-ment. The point is to get moving.
Jonathan: Occulture is inherently another sub culture, so it's a fairly limiting descriptor. Doesn't really suit our mission or describe us very well at that. Irreality is more focused on the application of an amalgamation of philosophy, magic and cutting edge science from the many corners of the planet, with a sprinkling of western pop esoterica.
The initial idea was to create some initial conditions that would allow the development of a complex adaptive system analogous to the third-order emergent properties found in the stock market, ant colonies and cloud formation. In this sense we have created a system that has mechanisms for rapidly adapting to the chaotic whimsy of meme-space; responding to the needs of the individual whilst simultaneously enacting the will of the hive mind.
Letting a culture develop around an intent is, to me, a much more sensible option for the long term survivability of a community than the concept of developing a community around a culture.
Angelina: A culture if defined too explicitly, is doomed. There's no room to grow or change.
DC: How long have you been in business? How did Irreality come about in the first place?
Angelina: I think the most 'real' incarnation of the site came into being in December 2001, which if I recall correctly was the first version Squink and I worked on together after we discovered we were on the same page.
Jonathan: It was definitely some time in 2001. I can't quite remember when though. December sounds like a fairly safe bet though. So we've been kickin' it for roughly 5 years now. That's a lot of coffee.
The first 'real' irreality was developed as a one page portal site, in an effort to make something like a yellow pages of the less fluffy magic sites around. That was called 'reality:check'. Somewhere in version 2 and 3 I added news, and a private 'Hive' area where people could sign up and post messages to the graffiti wall in a members section. Angelina noticed what I was up to around then, and we were a team for Irreality 4, the first version vaguely resembling the current incarnation. This version introduced 'The Magic Cactus', 'columns' (now biologs), reviews and the Reality Meter (which will be making a comeback in version 9, sooner or later).
DC: Is Irreality a site primarily for occultists? Describe your audience?
Angelina: It used to be. That's what we were originally most popular for - our vast database of links and information on alternative spirituality. We've since fleshed out to fringe and pseudo-science, political theory, and some lesser know gems of literature. Our audience is anyone who comes to the site and feels the needs to be involved in a proactive community. Because we are so open-ended in our approach to spiritual and cultural development, people can bring a host of skills and ideas to the plate.
Jonathan: Irreality has an open door policy. That is to say, anyone can come and use the site as they wish. Most of them just happen to be involved in either the occult, science, or both. It's a coincidence, I swear. Our audience is a little like the telephone box in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. That's probably the best way to describe them. Since Irreality has now been delisted on all the usual search engines, any new users are through the virtue of word of mouth.
DC: I see that in what may be all of your site builds you tend to have everything named in interesting ways, what's the reason behind this? Why the choice of terms like Hive and Drone? What does your logo represent?
Angelina: The naming schemes of site components reflect a sort of 'cosmology of information' that Squink and I devised while making each incarnation of the site. Version 9 owes most of this credit to Squink as the content management system is an extremely significant product of his spiritual work over the last nine months, and technology. We should have some screenshots and explanations of the mythology implicit in Irreality by the time of the release.
Jonathan: The irreality 'logo' tends to go by many different names depending on who you ask, such as 'hex sigil', 'hexacomb', or just simply the 'irreality hex'. None of these are right, but none of them are really wrong either. Like the rest of irreality, it's something that started off as a simple idea before developing it's own diverse set of contextual meanings. By this I'm essentially implying that whilst the symbol does have a set of core meanings, the more important facet is that which is representative of the viewer of said logo.
For me - and as I said, this is completely subjective - the Irreality hex represents the underlying patterns that create our realities. This being the case, everything in existence can be mapped, one way or another, onto this elegant little combination of shapes. In essence, it's a little bit like the tao.
I like to think that if symbols had a place to live, you'd probably find the hex mingling with a couple of smoking hot asian programmer girls with a round of martinis laid out on the bar. And that's something we all can aspire to.
Angelina: I'll agree with that, but I think Buddha would be there too. For me, the hex does symbolize the patterns in nature but emphasizes the connectedness. We're all a part of the same hive. The queen bee is the group mind.
DC: Do you feel its important to foster a fringe culture/magical community online, and if in doing so, how do you feel you alter it?
Jonathan: The internet is to communities as the automobile was to horse-pulled carts. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the using the internet, which I think is probably one of the larger reasons many people shun the idea of an online community as being a legitimate society. I like to think that the internet has, at the very least, developed a sort of secondary plain of existence. Using the internet puts most people into something of an altered state (there's a whole essay on this just waiting to be written), that may allow them to tap into this secondary 'field' of being. Of course, everyone is doing this - in effect connecting to each other directly, in my opinion - so the knock-on effect of this is that many people end up with 'internet friends' who they value and know as much, if not more than their 'real life' affiliations. It's just as genuine.
I'm rambling. This is one possible explanation for some of the bizarre and mysterious things that happen on the internet. Er..
Angelina: *laughs*
Jonathan: I'd feel justified in saying that through irreality we have connected a community of people that probably wouldn't have come together otherwise. As lofty and ambitious as it may sound - what's the point in living if you don't make a continuous effort to change the world and bring together the people who do? Instant messaging: It's the closest thing we have to telepathy.
Angelina: I think that people appreciate our no-bullshit approach. We're not here to sell you on anything other than your own potential, that's about it. I think fostering community both online and in person is important. Just this past year I have set up a number of online hubs for the Vancouver area and fenris23 and I have tried to have regular social activities. Even if we never get to talking about this strange stuff that draws us together, we get to know one another and that is just as if not more so important long term.
DC: Irreality has at times been accused of taking design over functionality, others have seen it as somewhat of a "meta-puzzle", how do you respond to that? Some people I have spoken to have been alienated by earlier builds due to their complexity, while others have been drawn in by it, is this an intentional filter?
Angelina: Only in the most recent version have we actually bothered to consider this as our number one priority. Our past versions were a product of putting into manifestation a representation of our informational cosmology, and our navigation was compromised in the last version as a result. I'm fairly certain that this will not be a problem in the new version. I had a blast, really.
Jonathan: I did it deliberately because I like confusing people.
Ok, that's not the entire story. Up until version 9, one of the idea's we were working with was the idea that some people would imprint their brains with our devious menu systems and find it easy to use. This turned out not to be the case, and I'd be sorry, except it had a side effect of keeping a lot of noise off the site whilst it was developing - quite like you said, a filter. Version 9 has been designed to promote a better signal:noise ration as well as being easy to use. I think you'll like it.
DC: Has Irreality affected you magically or in any uncanny ways? Is Irreality in itself imbued with occultic intent? Has the changes in Irreality's versions over the years reflected been any kind of self change in either of you, or vice versa?
Angelina: Yes. To all those questions except for one. The Irreality entity, as we call it, is not imbued with any intentional 'occultic' energy, though one cannot deny it is imbued by intention by virtue of the number of people working with it. The occult happens to be one way that people interact with the entity. I've never, ever used an occult approach to work with Irreality. It might come as a surprise, but I have only ever offered prayer and meditation. That's just my way of approaching this particular consciousness.
As for the other questions: I can't even begin to explain how working on this project has changed my life - the people that have made an impact on my life and encouraged my commitment to the heart of it all are innumerable.
Jonathan: I'd say the single most significant phenomena caused by Irreality is the manifestation of some kind of parallel field between the real world and a kind of 'astral' world that even our most frequent users began emailing us about independent of our own discovery. We've been there, and it's a strange, irreal place. Half way between the real and the unreal. Secondary to this is the evolution of a kinship shared by many of the core users. I think that's a really important part of Irreality, and it's nice to see people getting along so well. Most people see Irreality as a kind of spiritual sanctuary, and I think that probably plays a major part in all of the above.
As for the other questions? What Angelina said. If it hadn't changed my life, I wouldn't still be doing it.
DC: What took so long for version 9? The last site was version 7, so what ever happened to version 8? What new things can we expect? Is it "Web 2.0"?
Angelina: One person had to write it all. I'm not an experienced enough programmer to be let loose into the code at this time, but I'm still hoping one day I can contribute to that as well. My specialization in my degrees is artificial intelligence, and I hope to apply some ideas from that to some tools I would like to develop.
I remember the look on Jonathan's face the moment we both realized that an abbreviation of Irreality 8 would be IR8, which could be pronounced as 'irate'. The reason we went straight to version nine should be explicitly obvious….
Jonathan: The development time seems to grow exponentially for each version. Version 10, if there ever is one, will probably take 4 years to finish.
If I had to narrow it down, it probably took so long for a few core reasons; redesigning the site from scratch, not taking any shortcuts in coding, and implementing all the things we wanted from the previous versions but never had - as well as all of the old features. Working full time didn't help either. The other reason is that inside the code is an entire mythology and magical system, promoting the development of the kinds of things I mentioned for your last question - balance, information, community.
For a month I had a memory leak in some of the persistence code that blew up the server every few days. I have some stories that would give most people nightmares.
As for expectations... a massive toolkit, an even larger library, and generally better usability. We have a new take on the profiles, too. Oh, and the site is just.. completely different. That too.
DC: What are some of your favorite personal features in this latest build? What features have stuck it out since the start?
Angelina: Tagged e-books. Makes finding topics a lot easier. Full credit for the original suggestion of this goes to our friend fenris23. Also, The design is much more intuitive and clean. No more graffiti wall is probably my most favorite, which is going to make me less a favorite amongst our regular users. WE wanted to remove it to encourage more activity in the forum and the rest of the site.
Jonathan: I'm really excited to see if the Market takes off, but that's something we'll really have to wait and see. I don't think I could pin down anything in particular that I like especially - and I think that's going to change as I start interacting with other users on the site other than myself anyway (it's been a long year, really). The communications system has been completely renovated. The new commenting and forum threading system I developed is something of a unique creation, and I'm looking forward to seeing that play out.
And I've not found a page that takes more than 1 second to load. That's nice too. I think we can all appreciate that one.
DC: What advice would you give to someone who just started out on your site?
Angelina: Contribute . Ask questions, submit essays, enhance plexus with your discoveries. The only thing we ask is that you proofread often and employ some degree of critical thinking. Other than that, work on projects, meet friends, and have fun. Do something that allows you or another individual to connect to this consciousness in a meaningful way. Say hello to Jonathan and I, we love to hear form you guys.
Jonathan: Interact with the other users. Treat everyone else as you'd like to be treated. Don't be afraid to ask other people to edit your work or help you develop ideas - we have a lot of intelligent friendly people on the site who have the utmost respect for 'common sense'. Irreality wouldn't be Irreality without it's users - that's you. If someone tries to sell you a unicorn, or an armor-plated war mammoth, they're probably toying with you. But that's a whole other story for another day. As Angelina said, we've only ever been trying to sell you on your self-potential.
Angelina: Unless it's me. Regarding the unicorn, or armor-plated mammoth. I wouldn't be toying. I'd be serious. Serious business.
Jonathan: There are some exceptions.
It was almost two years ago when I first chipped my tooth on Irreality.net, which I saw at the time as something of a subversive community site for chaos magicians, before the that terminology apparently became passé. Irreality offered me a place to have dialogs I couldn't really find anywhere else on the internet, with individuals who I never seemed to run into on the forum-centric websites. Mostly, I grew tired of discussions and the usual internet bullshit, and really wanted a way to delve into the personalities behind codes and characters.
Who are these other individuals? What are their lives like? For someone who did not have any other magicians or occultists to talk to at the time in offline life, it offered a chance for a greater level of communication than I could afford in suburban hell. Knowing that there were real 'others' out there who were healthy and happy mutants, helped me take initiative to redirect my personal narrative. Irreality gave me a different context in which to interact with those that I would count as peers, and by that, I have seen much of what Irreality has been to my online life, grow into material reality.
Angelina Fabbro and Jonathan Blake, known online as Triskele and Squink, are the masterminds behind Irreality, and here I talk to them about community, just what the hell their site is about, and its latest incarnation, version 9, which will launch on xmas.
Screw Santa, Triskele and Squink are hooking us up this year, and we didn't even have to waste time being good!
- Danny Chaoflux
DC: What is Irreality? Could you explain what your site is to those of us who may not have heard of it?
Angelina (Triskele): Irreality is most well known for it's internet presence. In truth, Irreality is best described as a collaborative 'group mind' ideology geared towards our self-discovery as individuals and as a planet. The site became necessary when Squink and I realized we wanted to reach out and find others who would work with us towards similar goals. It features a lot of tools and resources for spiritual exploration and sub-cultural investigation.
Jonathan (Squink): A veritable hole inside internet space-time. Irreality could be considered a multi-faceted communications hub where users create, share and modify the informational supra-structure of consensual reality. In other words, it's a place where everybody knows your name....
DC: How does your site differ from other "occulture" sites out there on the internet today?
Angelina: Our mission statement makes it blatantly clear that we're not wrapped up in trying to be 'the next big thing', we're not attempting to become the foremost hub of social communication for the type of people these interests attract nor are we pretending we're going to incite a revolution. The main premise is that we are the revolution, always. The process. The revolution is already happening, and the more time we waste arguing about what the revolution is, the less time we spend living it. There are too many sites claiming to be the 'new' culture. Better culture. Sub culture, pop culture - who cares? Getting caught up in the status of a movement is tiring and misses the point entirely. The point is the movement itself. It's inherent in the word. Move-ment. The point is to get moving.
Jonathan: Occulture is inherently another sub culture, so it's a fairly limiting descriptor. Doesn't really suit our mission or describe us very well at that. Irreality is more focused on the application of an amalgamation of philosophy, magic and cutting edge science from the many corners of the planet, with a sprinkling of western pop esoterica.
The initial idea was to create some initial conditions that would allow the development of a complex adaptive system analogous to the third-order emergent properties found in the stock market, ant colonies and cloud formation. In this sense we have created a system that has mechanisms for rapidly adapting to the chaotic whimsy of meme-space; responding to the needs of the individual whilst simultaneously enacting the will of the hive mind.
Letting a culture develop around an intent is, to me, a much more sensible option for the long term survivability of a community than the concept of developing a community around a culture.
Angelina: A culture if defined too explicitly, is doomed. There's no room to grow or change.
DC: How long have you been in business? How did Irreality come about in the first place?
Angelina: I think the most 'real' incarnation of the site came into being in December 2001, which if I recall correctly was the first version Squink and I worked on together after we discovered we were on the same page.
Jonathan: It was definitely some time in 2001. I can't quite remember when though. December sounds like a fairly safe bet though. So we've been kickin' it for roughly 5 years now. That's a lot of coffee.
The first 'real' irreality was developed as a one page portal site, in an effort to make something like a yellow pages of the less fluffy magic sites around. That was called 'reality:check'. Somewhere in version 2 and 3 I added news, and a private 'Hive' area where people could sign up and post messages to the graffiti wall in a members section. Angelina noticed what I was up to around then, and we were a team for Irreality 4, the first version vaguely resembling the current incarnation. This version introduced 'The Magic Cactus', 'columns' (now biologs), reviews and the Reality Meter (which will be making a comeback in version 9, sooner or later).
DC: Is Irreality a site primarily for occultists? Describe your audience?
Angelina: It used to be. That's what we were originally most popular for - our vast database of links and information on alternative spirituality. We've since fleshed out to fringe and pseudo-science, political theory, and some lesser know gems of literature. Our audience is anyone who comes to the site and feels the needs to be involved in a proactive community. Because we are so open-ended in our approach to spiritual and cultural development, people can bring a host of skills and ideas to the plate.
Jonathan: Irreality has an open door policy. That is to say, anyone can come and use the site as they wish. Most of them just happen to be involved in either the occult, science, or both. It's a coincidence, I swear. Our audience is a little like the telephone box in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. That's probably the best way to describe them. Since Irreality has now been delisted on all the usual search engines, any new users are through the virtue of word of mouth.
DC: I see that in what may be all of your site builds you tend to have everything named in interesting ways, what's the reason behind this? Why the choice of terms like Hive and Drone? What does your logo represent?
Angelina: The naming schemes of site components reflect a sort of 'cosmology of information' that Squink and I devised while making each incarnation of the site. Version 9 owes most of this credit to Squink as the content management system is an extremely significant product of his spiritual work over the last nine months, and technology. We should have some screenshots and explanations of the mythology implicit in Irreality by the time of the release.
Jonathan: The irreality 'logo' tends to go by many different names depending on who you ask, such as 'hex sigil', 'hexacomb', or just simply the 'irreality hex'. None of these are right, but none of them are really wrong either. Like the rest of irreality, it's something that started off as a simple idea before developing it's own diverse set of contextual meanings. By this I'm essentially implying that whilst the symbol does have a set of core meanings, the more important facet is that which is representative of the viewer of said logo.
For me - and as I said, this is completely subjective - the Irreality hex represents the underlying patterns that create our realities. This being the case, everything in existence can be mapped, one way or another, onto this elegant little combination of shapes. In essence, it's a little bit like the tao.
I like to think that if symbols had a place to live, you'd probably find the hex mingling with a couple of smoking hot asian programmer girls with a round of martinis laid out on the bar. And that's something we all can aspire to.
Angelina: I'll agree with that, but I think Buddha would be there too. For me, the hex does symbolize the patterns in nature but emphasizes the connectedness. We're all a part of the same hive. The queen bee is the group mind.
DC: Do you feel its important to foster a fringe culture/magical community online, and if in doing so, how do you feel you alter it?
Jonathan: The internet is to communities as the automobile was to horse-pulled carts. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the using the internet, which I think is probably one of the larger reasons many people shun the idea of an online community as being a legitimate society. I like to think that the internet has, at the very least, developed a sort of secondary plain of existence. Using the internet puts most people into something of an altered state (there's a whole essay on this just waiting to be written), that may allow them to tap into this secondary 'field' of being. Of course, everyone is doing this - in effect connecting to each other directly, in my opinion - so the knock-on effect of this is that many people end up with 'internet friends' who they value and know as much, if not more than their 'real life' affiliations. It's just as genuine.
I'm rambling. This is one possible explanation for some of the bizarre and mysterious things that happen on the internet. Er..
Angelina: *laughs*
Jonathan: I'd feel justified in saying that through irreality we have connected a community of people that probably wouldn't have come together otherwise. As lofty and ambitious as it may sound - what's the point in living if you don't make a continuous effort to change the world and bring together the people who do? Instant messaging: It's the closest thing we have to telepathy.
Angelina: I think that people appreciate our no-bullshit approach. We're not here to sell you on anything other than your own potential, that's about it. I think fostering community both online and in person is important. Just this past year I have set up a number of online hubs for the Vancouver area and fenris23 and I have tried to have regular social activities. Even if we never get to talking about this strange stuff that draws us together, we get to know one another and that is just as if not more so important long term.
DC: Irreality has at times been accused of taking design over functionality, others have seen it as somewhat of a "meta-puzzle", how do you respond to that? Some people I have spoken to have been alienated by earlier builds due to their complexity, while others have been drawn in by it, is this an intentional filter?
Angelina: Only in the most recent version have we actually bothered to consider this as our number one priority. Our past versions were a product of putting into manifestation a representation of our informational cosmology, and our navigation was compromised in the last version as a result. I'm fairly certain that this will not be a problem in the new version. I had a blast, really.
Jonathan: I did it deliberately because I like confusing people.
Ok, that's not the entire story. Up until version 9, one of the idea's we were working with was the idea that some people would imprint their brains with our devious menu systems and find it easy to use. This turned out not to be the case, and I'd be sorry, except it had a side effect of keeping a lot of noise off the site whilst it was developing - quite like you said, a filter. Version 9 has been designed to promote a better signal:noise ration as well as being easy to use. I think you'll like it.
DC: Has Irreality affected you magically or in any uncanny ways? Is Irreality in itself imbued with occultic intent? Has the changes in Irreality's versions over the years reflected been any kind of self change in either of you, or vice versa?
Angelina: Yes. To all those questions except for one. The Irreality entity, as we call it, is not imbued with any intentional 'occultic' energy, though one cannot deny it is imbued by intention by virtue of the number of people working with it. The occult happens to be one way that people interact with the entity. I've never, ever used an occult approach to work with Irreality. It might come as a surprise, but I have only ever offered prayer and meditation. That's just my way of approaching this particular consciousness.
As for the other questions: I can't even begin to explain how working on this project has changed my life - the people that have made an impact on my life and encouraged my commitment to the heart of it all are innumerable.
Jonathan: I'd say the single most significant phenomena caused by Irreality is the manifestation of some kind of parallel field between the real world and a kind of 'astral' world that even our most frequent users began emailing us about independent of our own discovery. We've been there, and it's a strange, irreal place. Half way between the real and the unreal. Secondary to this is the evolution of a kinship shared by many of the core users. I think that's a really important part of Irreality, and it's nice to see people getting along so well. Most people see Irreality as a kind of spiritual sanctuary, and I think that probably plays a major part in all of the above.
As for the other questions? What Angelina said. If it hadn't changed my life, I wouldn't still be doing it.
DC: What took so long for version 9? The last site was version 7, so what ever happened to version 8? What new things can we expect? Is it "Web 2.0"?
Angelina: One person had to write it all. I'm not an experienced enough programmer to be let loose into the code at this time, but I'm still hoping one day I can contribute to that as well. My specialization in my degrees is artificial intelligence, and I hope to apply some ideas from that to some tools I would like to develop.
I remember the look on Jonathan's face the moment we both realized that an abbreviation of Irreality 8 would be IR8, which could be pronounced as 'irate'. The reason we went straight to version nine should be explicitly obvious….
Jonathan: The development time seems to grow exponentially for each version. Version 10, if there ever is one, will probably take 4 years to finish.
If I had to narrow it down, it probably took so long for a few core reasons; redesigning the site from scratch, not taking any shortcuts in coding, and implementing all the things we wanted from the previous versions but never had - as well as all of the old features. Working full time didn't help either. The other reason is that inside the code is an entire mythology and magical system, promoting the development of the kinds of things I mentioned for your last question - balance, information, community.
For a month I had a memory leak in some of the persistence code that blew up the server every few days. I have some stories that would give most people nightmares.
As for expectations... a massive toolkit, an even larger library, and generally better usability. We have a new take on the profiles, too. Oh, and the site is just.. completely different. That too.
DC: What are some of your favorite personal features in this latest build? What features have stuck it out since the start?
Angelina: Tagged e-books. Makes finding topics a lot easier. Full credit for the original suggestion of this goes to our friend fenris23. Also, The design is much more intuitive and clean. No more graffiti wall is probably my most favorite, which is going to make me less a favorite amongst our regular users. WE wanted to remove it to encourage more activity in the forum and the rest of the site.
Jonathan: I'm really excited to see if the Market takes off, but that's something we'll really have to wait and see. I don't think I could pin down anything in particular that I like especially - and I think that's going to change as I start interacting with other users on the site other than myself anyway (it's been a long year, really). The communications system has been completely renovated. The new commenting and forum threading system I developed is something of a unique creation, and I'm looking forward to seeing that play out.
And I've not found a page that takes more than 1 second to load. That's nice too. I think we can all appreciate that one.
DC: What advice would you give to someone who just started out on your site?
Angelina: Contribute . Ask questions, submit essays, enhance plexus with your discoveries. The only thing we ask is that you proofread often and employ some degree of critical thinking. Other than that, work on projects, meet friends, and have fun. Do something that allows you or another individual to connect to this consciousness in a meaningful way. Say hello to Jonathan and I, we love to hear form you guys.
Jonathan: Interact with the other users. Treat everyone else as you'd like to be treated. Don't be afraid to ask other people to edit your work or help you develop ideas - we have a lot of intelligent friendly people on the site who have the utmost respect for 'common sense'. Irreality wouldn't be Irreality without it's users - that's you. If someone tries to sell you a unicorn, or an armor-plated war mammoth, they're probably toying with you. But that's a whole other story for another day. As Angelina said, we've only ever been trying to sell you on your self-potential.
Angelina: Unless it's me. Regarding the unicorn, or armor-plated mammoth. I wouldn't be toying. I'd be serious. Serious business.
Jonathan: There are some exceptions.