Self-organising feature maps. Spot the subliminal message!
Welcome.
If you are new to Everything2, welcome
to a great big database of writing about people, places, things and ideas; a sprawling
collection of facts and stories from the heads of a couple of thousand
different people, all connected by the magic of the soft link. Soft
links are the links collected at the bottom of each node (subject
heading); they are created at whim by users using the search box and
following hard links, the links within writeups - some of
which hide further meaning,
revealed to those who hover their mouse over them (or whatever might be your chosen equivalent for navigating links). The relevance of
soft links varies widely - they are often created absent-mindedly; but
mostly they're not, and the way they make it so easy for anyone to make
a public link between two ideas is one of the strokes of genius behind
Everything2. I am an editor here (and an admin-coder),
and I am willing to answer any questions you have about the site, and
to give feedback on writing you might like to submit.
If you're thinking of writing something here, I strongly
recommend you read E2 Quick Start and have a look over Everything2 Help
to see what else there is; if you're just wanting to read stuff,
there are several ways of seeking out good writing besides just looking
things up using the searchbox, or clicking random links. First off,
look in the Cool Archive (user picks) and the Page of Cool (editor selections); anything there that
sounds like it might be interesting probably is. If you find something
you like, go to the home node of the author by clicking on their name
at the top of the writeup, and then click 'View Username's Writeups'. If you're interested in a
particular area, it is worth looking at the following indexes of
various topics. With half a million writeups on almost every topic
imaginable, and no built-in indexing system, Everything2 is not the
most orderly of databases; categorising content by hand is a big
task, and these indexes achieve varying levels of completeness and
up-to-dateness. With that in mind, here are some of the big
'metanode' projects...
See also Everything Quests and the 'news archives'
(particularly the Science archive, which mostly isn't news at all) for
other sorts of lists of writeups on particular topics.
Each 'metanode' usually has one person in overall control of
it, but in many cases the burden of maintaining them is shared by a
usergroup so that they don't stop being updated if their original
creator doesn't have time to look after them. The extensive Cookery
catalogue is controlled by the recipe group, with individual
maintainers assigned to most of its sections, for instance; the control
of Everything Religion is currently being delegated via the
e2religion group. The Scientists nodes and Physics and
Astronomy are looked after by E2science, the site's science writing
group, of which I am the official leader; any suggestions for the
latter two should be addressed to me.
Besides working on indexes of the site's science coverage,
the group exists to encourage the writing of readable science here; see
the E2 Science node for more on what it's about, or E2_science for
the short version; see E2science for science writeups selected to
appear there by members, and a list of those members. Let me know if
you want to join.
As you may have noticed, E2's default formatting is kind of ugly, hard to read and dated-looking. I highly recommend going to your User Settings, switching to the Zen theme, and trying out these themes:
It is currently worth signing up for an account here just so you can customise how the site looks.
Web Pages of Mine Which I'd Like People to Look At
and preferably tell me if they do
Here is a song I wrote a while ago... perhaps I'll node it
here one of these days, I don't know.
Maybe He's A Christian
Maybe he's a Christian in his mind
And deep down he believes in being kind
Yeah, it could even be that he
Believes in love and peace
And he really thinks he'll further these through his
wars...
It seems like war and faith go hand in
hand
And I've been trying, but I just can't understand
How anyone can justify
This to their gods, when so many die
But maybe I just need to keep on trying...
Does he think he'll go to heaven when he dies,
And eternal light and joy will be his prize
For winning the war-games that he plays?
Does God speak to him when he prays?
Does He really say to keep on killing?
In speeches he will
preach about love
But then he'll send fiery death
down from above
He says he fights for liberty
And for the world's
security
But does he know his enemy to fight it?
I've been looking around and it's dawned on me that in
spite of the presence the occasional great work like dannye on
Blonde on Blonde and riverrun on Love and Theft, and Freddo's
body of very solid album writeups, the proportion of Dylan's albums
which have been noded properly is scandalously small. (but not as small
as it was when I first wrote that. Thank you.)
People! Get to it! This here list of inadequately noded
Dylan albums is a potential cool-mine:
I have included the ones from his Christian Rock period,
although I have yet to meet anyone who likes many of the songs on them.
Albums with a question mark probably have about one paragraph of actual
content on them. I expect I'll get to some more eventually myself...
Speaking of records which somebody really ought to node
properly, why has nobody done these Tori Amos albums justice yet? For
shame!
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