Oolong

user since
Sat Apr 14 2001 at 23:28:51 (7.4 years ago )
last seen
Fri Sep 5 2008 at 08:21:21 (5.3 minutes ago )
number of write-ups
247 - View Oolong's writeups (feed)
level / experience
7 (Artisan) / 10401
C!s spent
485
mission drive within everything
understanding
specialties
special teas
school/company
E2science
motto
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. - George Orwell
member of
gods, edev - My Endorsements
most recent writeup
Brazil

The picture above is from Climate Camp, 2007, if the image servers are working right. You should come this year, if there's one happening near you. It's later than you probably think.

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 Theme Nirvana, switching on 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... apologies if this list is out of date by the way, It's possible I may have missed some since I first compiled it.


Speaking of records which somebody really ought to node properly, why has nobody done these Tori Amos albums justice yet? For shame!

User Bookmarks: