Hexnet

Okay. A lot has happened since I last posted here. I got a degree in computer science, changed careers, become a full-time hexagonal artist. Society has obviously collapsed into a surreal hellscape that would've struck me as beyond parody nine years ago. So it goes. Suffice to say that although I've continued my hexagonal work, I've also clearly drifted away from the Hexnet brand identity, and for various reasons don't think I really want to use it going forward. I keep this site up because I get a lot of feedback from ppl who say they enjoy it, and because it remains, content-wise, my most substantive web presence. Nonetheless, this site sort of gelled at a point in my life and in my personal hexagonal process that I'm clearly never going back to, and is thus now more of an artifact than a living presence.

Good news everyone. The time has come, I believe, to announce the existence of this new and improved HEXNET site. The site has actually been up for several weeks now, and constitutes the third major iteration of Hexnet.org under the neohexagonal regime that began in 2010, replacing last year's tragically doomed Drupal 7 version.

First and foremost, as promised, I have finally moved OFF DRUPAL. Drupal is dead to me now, and shall forever remain so. Let us never discuss it again. Beyond that, the most obvious change, I think, is that the site now looks completely different. The main point I want to make about this is that the new layout is much closer than its predecessor to what I intended when I first started working on the Drupal 7 version last year. The ultimate result of that earlier redesign should be seen in retrospect as having been a tragic aberration. I became fixated with some very flawed ideas vis-a-vis how the UI should work, and pursued them long after it should have been clear that they weren't viable. Even after some much-needed fixes earlier this year, it remained, for me at least, practically unusable. It was a bad layout, I was wrong to make it, and I apologize for having done so. The new layout, conversely, should provide a pleasant and fully responsive experience on a wide variety of clients. I have tested it to my satisfaction on both iOS and Android browsers, and it is even marginally functional on IE 8 (for fuck's sake please stop using IE 8). There are definitely aspects of the design I consider sort of unfinished, and which I will continue working on in the coming weeks and months, but it meets my baseline requirement of presenting the site's content in a readable, navigable format that—hopefully—does not actively annoy the reader, and for this reason alone represents a vast improvement over its predecessor.

I want to take a moment to consider the conspicuous return recently of the so-called hexagon "trend." We first wrote about this phenomenon in a fairly forgettable post from 2010, but in the past year or so it seems to have resurfaced, more forcefully and more explicitly than ever, and we would be remiss in our obligations to the hexagonal community if we did not at least make note of it.

I don't really feel like carrying on with any sort of extended commentary on the matter this time—the trend speaks for itself, and its merits should be obvious to even the most casual adherent to hexagonal principles. It will suffice, therefore, to simply compile a list of recent articles on the subject, and let the reader draw what conclusions they will from them. Though it should be understood of course that we don't see this as a "trend" so much as a central—indeed, perhaps the central—turning point in the entire enterprise of human civilization. Our proverbial children and grandchildren, looking back on this era, will not be asking about the time hexagons were "trending," they will be asking about the time hexagons, as a concept, were finally rising above the clutter and minutiae of the collective human memescape to turn the very course of human civilization, putting us on our inevitable path towards a glorious and unimaginable hexagonal destiny.

We seem to have fallen a bit behind in terms of keeping this site updated with RELEVANT MATHEMATICAL INFORMATION about hexagons. This is a deficit we're looking to correct as soon as possible. First up, let us consider the permutohedra. We at HEXNET.ORG have been meaning to write something about permutohedra for a couple of years now, but have never really found a good opportunity to so. WE WILL NOT EXPEND GREAT EFFORT DOING SO NOW. It will suffice to merely describe the concept in conjunction with some helpful imagery, which will hopefully serve as a useful foundation for further geometrical observations and investigations in the near future.

Yes, I have returned from an AWKWARDLY LONG BREAK after my last blog post to once again announce HEXAGONAL AWARENESS MONTH. Since I do not, for the time being, want to be associated with this site at all, on any level, I have created a NEW SITE dedicated to this, the most glorious of all awareness months, mostly cobbled together from pieces of other sites I am currently developing. [Edit 2013-11: This is in reference to the previous, Drupal 7 version of this site, let us never speak of it again. The present incarnation is in fact mostly derived from the HAM site, which itself is no longer maintained and will be merged back in with the Hexnet site at some point. [Edit 2014-02: The HAM site has been slightly rehabilitated in anticipation of this year's festivities, and there are no immediate plans to eliminate it. Though it is still pretty lame.]]

It is fairly minimalistic, both like, in the good way, and in arguably the bad way. I am aware that the "forum" in particular, though keeping with the overall minimalism of the site, does not really come close to the baseline standards people expect from web fora in this day and age. Nonetheless it seemed preferable to confusing people with the "post index" terminology I have used here. I remain committed to my vision of content sites where there is no underlying difference between blog-style posts and forum-style posts, and look forward to more effectively implementing this scheme in the future. [Edit 2013-11: I no longer adhere to this paradigm at all, and have no intention of implementing it now or ever.]