Good news everyone!
Finding myself stuck at home on Sunday with a particularly intransigent MUSHROOM HANGOVER, I availed myself of the free time to throw together a new HEXAGON FORUM. It shall be known as Hexagonforum, and is perhaps my greatest accomplishment. EVAR.
I am announcing this first on Tumblr, for a variety of reasons. Partly, because, quite frankly, Tumblr has the most vibrant hexagonal community I know of at present, and it seems I can probably reach a more receptive audience here than I could anywhere else. (Though I plan to formally announce it on Hexnet.org soon as well.) DO NOT DISAPPOINT ME TUMBLR HEXAGON SCENE: I know you are reading this. You must join this forum and participate in it.
You will see there is not much there. I really would appreciate it if people would like, I don’t know, post crap there or something. I am really bad at generating content, particularly in a forum-type environment. All I can think of to post is like “topic suggestion” type posts, where I’m like “what does the forum community think of such-and-such,” but frankly, when I’m the only one there it seems like this would come off as a bit desperate and lame. I’d rather have the forum fill up with organic content in the due course of time. If that fails, however, I’ll start creating sockpuppets and do it that way. BUT I DON’T WANT TO DO THAT. Because it’s tedious, and I’d probably lose interest pretty quickly. I want this to become a center of hexagonal discourse on the internet, and I need your help to do it. The forum allows posting of images and embedding Youtube and Vimeo videos (other formats will be added according to demand), and there is a dedicated forum for “images and media” or some such thing, so feel free to just post whatever you are already posting to Tumblr there. That would be I think itself a good start. But there is also room for a wide variety of topical discussions on all manner of hexagonal subjects, from math to philosophy to what have you, et cetera.
The categories may change a bit in the future, particularly as long as they remain empty, but once people start posting I will try to work around that as best as possible. For instance, it seems to me that “art & culture” should be one category, but so should “art & consciousness” (this is a favorite coupling of mine I suppose, but not one that the world at large has really embraced). But also “society & culture.” I can’t have a standalone society category and then put culture with art, that just seems silly. Or maybe I should, I don’t know (edit: this is in fact what I ended up doing for now). Also, the division between ontology and mathematics seems sort of trivial to me, as well as the division between philosophy and religion - yet clearly philosophy and ontology must go together! But putting religion and math together - while, again, it sort of appeals to me - is not something I think the world is quite ready for at this time. So it is all a terrible quandary really, and I would welcome any constructive advice people may have on how the topics should be structured.
Anyway: Over the past two years, as I have really ramped up my hexagonal presence on the intertubes, I have become more and more aware of the diverse and multitudinous hexagonal community that’s out there these days. (Which contrasts sharply with my experience in the mid-90s, when as far as I know was the first and only person on the internet to be promoting hexagons. Or any polygon really.) And I think it is goddamn unfortunate that we still, at this late date, have no neutral space in which to congregate and organize our movement, disparate and divided though it may be. Thus, I offer this simple phpBB forum as a potential solution to ALL OUR PROBLEMS IN LIFE. Here we may all gather as equals, and discuss the hexagonal issues of our age in equanimity and peace.
Some background: When I launched Hexnet.org nigh two years ago, it had a forum. It was a Drupal 6 forum so it sucked. After about six months or a year or so I got rid of it during a broader restructuring of content on the site, so that there was like a forum-ish node view that basically integrated forum functionality into the regular blog-like content structure of the site. My vision was that there would be neither “blogs” nor “fora,” but one unified content type that could be displayed in either context. I still think this is a good idea, and I would like to explore it in more depth at some point in the future. But frankly that site has neither the traffic nor the content depth to justify this arrangement at present. So all I was left with was a site without a forum, that everyone recognized as a site without a forum, and which nobody really probes more deeply than that. Basically even though the site is open to ANONYMOUS CONTENT AND MEDIA POSTING by any visitors, nobody ever actually *does* this, and even though Hexnet.org has the potential to be a truly vibrant and comprehensive hexagonal community, it has never become one, not least I think because it simply doesn’t “look like” a conventional web forum. Which is all the more reason why, at long last, it simply seemed prudent to create something that both looks like and *is* a conventional, straightforward, flat-threaded web forum.
In the long run, I actually want to write my own forum program. I think that would be a useful exercise in honing my web programming skills, etc. And I believe I could incorporate some useful HEXAGONAL PRINCIPLES into the design of such a system. But to be honest this goal has probably held me back from just making a shitty web forum like this in the past, which I really should’ve done a long time ago, and this weekend, being immobilized and somewhat mentally incapacitated with a terrible headache, etc., it seemed a good opportunity to just fucking do this at long last by setting up a relatively straightforward phpBB site. And I think it worked out nicely! And I mean, maybe in the future I will port this site to a more grandiose, custom content system, or something, I don’t know, but for now it is certainly good enough and stable enough in this incarnation to serve as a useful and functional resource for the hexagonal community. Quite frankly, blog-type sites like Tumblr just don’t offer the versatility that a proper forum does - particularly with its lack of a meaningful comment system - and even though I haven’t really participated in any web fora in recent years, as I suppose most people haven’t, I do still look back fondly on the golden age of this sort of community, nigh maybe twelve or fifteen years ago or so, and I can’t help but feel there is perhaps still a place for this sort of structure in the hexagonal community. I MAY BE WRONG THOUGH. I DON’T KNOW. But I think it’s worth trying.
One more thing - I have as some of you may or may not know a lot of hexagonal “franchises” on the internet - Hexnet.org, the Hexagons page on Facebook, Hexagons on Google+, the Hexagons subreddit, et cetera. It is my strategic plan at this point to just keep these entirely separate. I have neither the intention nor the ambition to integrate these into any sort of monolithic institution, or to attempt to leverage my dominance to co-opt other facets of the global hexagonal movement. I do interlink between these various sites and presences as much as possible of course, and I do interpromote them, but I will never bring them under any sort of unifying organizational umbrella beyond the simple mandate of UNIVERSAL HEXAGONAL AWARENESS. Indeed, I sort of enjoy giving them all their own unique styling, logos, etc - it gives the illusion of a larger community than actually exists (though again Tumblr has if nothing else taught me that there is, indeed, a hexagonal community apart from myself). Though I do not rule out the possibility that I may someday make a bid for WORLD DOMINATION through hexagonal methods and principles, such an undertaking ought to and indeed must take place entirely outside the framework of my extant hexagonal projects.
Anyway so yes in conclusion please join the forum and spread word far and wide of it. Thank you and good day. FTVW.
It has come to my attention that SOME OF YOU MAY NOT HAVE JOINED HEXAGONFORUM YET. No doubt a simple oversight, but one that I would humbly submit ought to be addressed as soon as may be practical.
