A review of Issue 0 of E2SENCE: The Magazine of E2, written at the request of Heisenberg

(Disclaimer: A writeup by this reviewer appeared in this issue of E2SENCE.)

E2SENCE, as you can read above, is a small magazine put together and published by Heisenberg for the purpose of spotlighting and promoting the Everything2.com website.

Physically, the magazine is attractive but thin -- just over a dozen pages. It's all printed in black, white, and gray. Artwork consists of several photographs and a simple piece of abstract penwork -- all are very nice, but none appear to illustrate any of the writeups.

I'm not a good judge of graphic design -- my own artistic skills are limited to amateur cartooning. But one graphic element that I particularly enjoyed was the background of many pages. Filling up the backgrounds of many of the pages are the actual softlinks associated with the writeups -- they are printed in very light gray text and do not interfere with the readability of the article text. It was fun to try to pick out the hidden node titles in the background.

Like it or not, a project like this will always be perceived by the general public as a literary magazine -- a collection of well-written poetry and essays on a wide selection of subjects is considered the exclusive domain of the literary magazine.

In that sense, E2SENCE would surely be the most shockingly daft literary magazine in existence. Sure, the magazine lures readers in with typically literary fare, including poetry and reflective essays, but literary types are likely to violently plotz when they run into Professor Pi's winking factual examination of the Infinite monkeys theorem or the pure in-joke of This is a node that was solely created to fill the PQ criteria. Klaproth Ahoy! by kthejoker, much less the divine lunacy of fondue's Monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, William Shatner. Honestly, I consider these additions to be a good thing -- literary magazines are usually dry as dust, and a nice dose of anarchy is good for everyone.

Of course, it's not all iconoclastic fun -- etouffee's You, born of the water, could you ever live far from the sea, Lovejoyman's January 22, 2004, and doyle's How do you know the fishes are enjoying themselves? all help remind readers that E2 has a high concentration of genuinely beautiful writing.

However, the project is far from perfect. The most notable sour note in the magazine is the absence of the entire second half of Scout Finch's God slipped away quietly, during third period physics class. While the casual reader might not notice, the omission is simply shocking for readers familiar with E2 and the heartbreaking power of Finch's complete writeup.

Seeing E2 writeups in a printed magazine is a good way to point up the differences between online and printed media. On the one hand, you can take E2SENCE on the bus with you, to the beach, to the bathroom, which is a great deal tougher with the computer. You can drop off a copy of the magazine in your local library or coffee shop to try to spread the Everything2 gospel. You can show it to your friends and say, "See, I am too a writer." It's on paper, it's print, it's real. But on the other hand, E2 writeups without softlinks do seem to lose something in the translation to traditional printed media. And of course, pipelinks are lost forever in print. Browsing is limited to turning the page, instead of clicking on a dozen different links.

That isn't to say it's bad, because it isn't. It is, for the most part, very good. But reading it in a magazine is a very different experience than reading it on the 'Net.

Will E2SENCE attract readers and/or writers? In the current format, probably not. There aren't enough copies to ensure anything beyond token distribution. But of course, this first issue isn't really intended to convert the world to Everything2ism. It's simultaneously a test of Heisenberg's ability to produce an E2 magazine -- and I'd grade it a solid "B," woulda been higher except for the big mistake on Scout Finch's writeup -- and a gift to E2's current members.

In almost every respect, a success. I look forward to seeing more.