Hilarious is my middle name

It's probably a little early in the season for this, but there keep being delays and problems with the project I've been working on, so as a short break I've added a bunch of Valentine fractals to the gallery. There were a few there already, but I've discovered that I had a surprising number from way back when. I think they were mostly made for an e-card site that a friend of mine ran for a couple of years. And then, in opening and rendering the parameter sets, of course I ended up messing with them and making a few more.

The standard Valentine heart is such an iconic shape that it's tricky to put into fractals. It doesn't take very much distortion before it turns into a liver or a spleen or something instead. And it's kind of inherently cheesy and mawkish, full of memories of grade-school Valentine parties with messily hand-glued paper doilies and those chalky, inedible conversation hearts. Or worse, the high-school version, where you might actually hope for chocolates-and-flowers romance, and of course that doesn't happen so you wear all black and spend the day being sullen and everyone makes fun of you. Ahh, nostalgia.

These days I find that I quite enjoy the campy exuberance of sticking fat red cartoony hearts into my pictures. I tell myself that it's out of character, but I think I'm probably mistaken.

This one didn't make it onto the main gallery, though, because it turned out to be a little too foil-wrapped and sticky. So it's going in the sketchbook instead.

Harlequin Valentine

A project for the new year

The Professor and I have been writing code for several days now, and have gotten most of a very rough version of my Exciting Fractal Project assembled. It's almost far enough along that it could be considered alpha-test, though beta is still some ways off.

Having gotten this far, I am now reaching the stage where I start to completely panic and second-guess myself. What if this is a completely stupid idea? I ask. What if no one wants to play with my internet toy? And the huge, glaringly obvious question of How do I prevent this from turning into a horrible snake pit bunch of tedious longwinded squabbling?

Because the whole point of this thing I'm building is that it should be pleasantly entertaining (or indeed quite silly), and should provide a small, steady dose of interesting pictures and a small amount of feedback on same. I don't want to build it and then have it turn into either a sad ghost town or a battlefield. Neither of those is the kind of fun I'm interested in, so I'm struggling with questions of how much participation is enough for people to be interested, and how much is too much, and allows loud shouty people to just take over. I worry that what I'm planning is the equivalent of going down to the bus stop and inviting all the hobos (and that dude who appears to smoke crack every day at lunchtime) to come visit me for tea.

But at least I'm working on it! Progress is being made. This is me reminding myself to dive in, and worry about hypothetical stinging jellyfish later.

Plunge

Running out of oughts

We've made it to the end of another year; time to fill the air with showers of confetti and sparks. The blue moon is already up there, quietly taking care of itself.

Blue New



It's amazing to think that's it's going to be 2010 tomorrow. When I was a kid, the idea of a year with a 2 at the beginning of it seemed impossibly far away, some kind of fantastic science-fictional future. Now that we've had ten of them, the future has become the present, and an awful lot of it is disappointingly ordinary. But then I have to remind myself that I can type things that appear on a magical glowing screen, and push a button, and then people on the other side of the world can see them more or less instantly. And if I want to, I can carry around a thing smaller than my hand, that lets me access the world's largest and most random reference library. That's pretty awesome.

Turn the crank

This is a small offshoot of a project I'm working on: a distraction which turned out to be quite nice on its own.

untitled [mecha-noir]

Silent night

It's been a beautiful clear day, not really cold enough to be icy, but with that perfect winter clarity of light. I love how quiet and deserted the city is on holidays: empty streets, empty parking lots, strange but restful stillness in every direction.

untitled [winterurban]



Merry Christmas to the internet, and to the internet a good night.

Happily, the snow is on the other coast

Oof, I seem to have abandoned fractals lately in favor of typesetting, furniture-moving, and hibernation. This is always my least-productive time of year. I'll be awfully happy once we get past the solstice and the light starts to increase again.

Here is a picture made during some weather that seemed especially dark and inexorable.

Event Horizon

Zoomable!

Finally, with some help from my able assistant (who knows how to talk to the terminal window) I've gotten the process working, and put a large zoomable fractal online. If this one seems to work out all right, and doesn't give my web host trouble, I'll do some more.

Rusting Dragon



This was one of my contest entries. I like the metallic texture that becomes visible when the picture is magnified, and I also like the sort of hunched, brooding quality of the thing. It reminds me both of the shipping cranes down in the industrial end of town, and of my cat, when she's tensely coiled and watching pigeons. Motionless, but with the sense that it might do something if you turned your back and didn't watch it too closely. Or that it's only standing still because it's been there for an enormously long time, in all sorts of weather, and all its gears and pulleys have corroded and fused themselves into immobility.

Here we are again

Home again, to all my favorite domestic conveniences. Here is a picture in honor of our beloved Coffee Engine (although strictly speaking, it refers equally well to tea, chocolate, or even cola).

Dark Stimulant



I'm completely torn between Pittsburgh and Seattle lately. Pittsburgh is where I grew up; it has wonderful decaying-industrial architecture, rents seem ridiculously low, and many of my favorite people live there. Seattle, on the other hand, has a huge amount of delicious local food, a lovely temperate climate (only it's cold lately!), and plants that don't make me sneeze & itch for ten months out of the year. Now that I'm done with school, it's my big chance to decide where I want to end up establishing myself, and I can't decide where I want to be. Somewhere else entirely, perhaps.

Tinsellitis

All is madness and chaos. I'm slinging a couple of quick pictures onto the internet before I leave town. Man, I mostly can't stand holidays in their usual overwhelming & commercial form, but that doesn't stop me making pictures of them.

Evergreen Holiday

Aluminum Holiday

Fortunately, this upcoming trip isn't actually for the holiday. So I'll be able to get home and go back into hiding before the full onslaught hits.

No bulbs, just flat

Wow, I've finally finished reading Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great. By the end it was more like skimming than reading, and even more like picking through a sticky heap of chicken entrails in hopes of reading someone's fortune. An unpleasant bunch of prose, especially when taken in large continuous doses. I definitely have one more installment to write about the book, but I'm taking a break from it for now.

There seems to be all sorts of excitement lately about the Mandelbulb formula. Lots of interesting pictures to look at. I tried one of the formulas myself, but my computer is way too old and slow for me to do any reasonable exploring. The eighth-power bulb pictures did make me curious about what an eighth-power regular old-fashioned Mandelbrot would be like, and since I've never done much messing with higher-power Mandelbrots I thought I'd have a look.

They're less immediately satisfying to zoom into the the standard power-two image. They're so dense with little seven-lobed minibrots that there's practically no room for them to develop the intricate patterns that you usually see. But by zooming fairly deeply, some interesting forms do appear.

untitled [mandel^8]

Less grit, more dissolve

One more, the same flavor.

untitled [glowing phoenix]



And the contest results have been posted, so there's a big pile of new pictures to look at. Hooray!

I really do wish there were more fractal events. Not huge major contests, necessarily, but some kind of regular checking-in kind of thing. I'm not sure what format I would want it to have; the main thing is that I like when there are a whole bunch of new pictures to look at all at once, and I would be glad if it happened more often. Every so often I go look at the fractal section at DeviantArt, but it's not sorted out very well, and I get tired of wading through all the anime sketches on scanned notebook paper. And I hate the site's graphic design, so I don't go there very often in any case.

Hard gritty rainbows

I think a large part of the fascination with these grainy inside fractals is how difficult I find them. The Mandelbrot set, by now, is quite familiar: I've explored it very thoroughly, and learned a lot about how its patterns fit into each other. I know it well enough that I can fairly reliably navigate to any kind of pattern I decide to look for. With coloring methods, too, many of them have become familiar enough to be very precisely controlled, which is what allows me to make those literal, illustrative images that I still can't decide whether I like or not.

But these Nova insides are unknown territory, strange and foggy, and (at least so far) nearly impossible to get a grip on. Patterns stack up on top of each other, sliding in and out of focus as the maxiter changes. It's clear that they're following some kind of deeply-structured logic, but so far I haven't been able to understand it well enough to predict what it might do in any given spot.

So working with them is hard. And it turns out that I've been somehow craving something hard, something frustrating, something impossible to understand quickly. Maybe it's because I'm free of school. School was horrible in a whole bunch of ways, but it did at least give me a fair amount of hard stuff to bash at.

I have conversations with the Professor sometimes, usually around exam time, when his students are complaining bitterly that things are too hard. And I sympathize, except that when I'm only doing easy things, it's as though I can feel my brain cells shriveling up. Doing something hard helps keep me in shape, so that I don't turn into a sad dull boring person, full of complaints about how hard everything is.

With these two images, I'm trying to see if some of my comfortable, familiar techniques (like the three-layer spectra) can be used on any of these infuriating sandy fractals.

Dragon & Phoenix Soup


Chain Reaction

Infinite exoskeletons

This is really a better Halloween image than yesterday's. It's all full of centipedes and crawly wriggly things.

Medusa



I'm still wandering around the extra-relaxed, exponentially-smoothed insides; this one's a PhoenixDoubleNova. They're so incredibly full of detail that framing an image becomes very difficult. There's stuff everywhere, and in a lot of areas the density is fairly uniform, so there's nothing to act as a focal point. Not very many coloring methods work well on the insides of sets, either, so there aren't too many options for getting variety in the layers. It becomes more a matter of changing the gradient density and the maximum iterations, and then just a lot of exploring to find good places.

I seem to remember reading once that astronauts wanting to take pictures from space ran into similar difficulties. When you're in orbit around the earth, it doesn't matter which direction you point a camera, because there's always something spectacular. Foreground, background, everywhere, all around. Sometimes working with fractals feels that way too.

All Hallows' Eve

Bonfire Sparks



Another Double Nova inside image. This one is mostly Pseudo Lyapunov instead of Exponential Smoothing.

Following Columbus in a rowboat

Aha! I think maybe I am starting to get the hang of this a bit.

Mysteries



And all I had to do was take a small wrench to the Exponential Smoothing. It's always pleasing when that works.

Lightbending

I've been working on uploading fractals from 2002 to my gallery, and finding many that are full of rainbows. That must have been when I first started experimenting with my three-layer technique. I remember being all interested in atmospheric optics around that time, so probably that was what inspired me to try making pictures with that kind of look.

And it also reminded me that I've been meaning to write a page about how to put spectra into fractals, and now I have. I hope somebody out there may find it useful.

Here's a new fractal that I made while I was messing with some of the tutorial images.

Glass Rings

Quantum effects

Today I came across an interesting page about aliasing artifacts, and it got me thinking about artifact patterns as applied to fractal art. Where does this op-art, moiré effect come from? Well, it's all because of quantum, you see. Writers of popular fiction like to use quantum as a sort of shorthand for stuff that's way too scientific and complicated for us to explain or you to understand, but it's actually quite simple when you remember that quantum has to do with quantity. A quantum is a small discrete unit of something. In physics, the something is physical matter or maybe energy, and the weirdness associated with the word comes from the fairly weird behavior of tiny discrete particles (or maybe waves) of energy (or maybe matter). Really, it's probably too scientific and complicated for me to explain.

But in thinking about on-screen digital images, the quantum is the perfectly familiar and understandable pixel, the small discrete dots of light that make up the picture. And the weirdness comes from the inability of computers to display any details smaller than will fit into one pixel. If the image has some black and white stripes that get smaller than one pixel wide, the computer will use various methods to guess whether any given pixel (which really contains part of a black stripe and part of a white stripe) should be all-black or all-white. This means that the patterns are completely scale-dependent: if you add more pixels, more detail will fit; the computer's guesses change, and the pattern changes also. Maybe it resolves into lots of parallel fine lines, or nested concentric circles. Whatever happens, the original effect is altered or lost.

The (im)practical result of all this is that if you've made some interesting image full of aliasing artifacts, you can't print it at any size larger than a postage stamp. Or can you? I started wondering how it might be possible.

First I made this picture:

Quantum 400x400


Then I rendered it as a 1600x1600 Photoshop document in layers, leaving out the one with the aliased pattern. The pattern layer I exported as a separate file, 400x400 pixels, which I then re-sized without resampling, so as not to let it get all blurred. I dropped that into the appropriate place in the layered document, did a bit of tweaking and tidying, and got this:

Quantum 1600x1600


That seemed to work well, so I tried it again at 2400x2400, big enough to print an 8" square at 300dpi.

Quantum, printed


There doesn't seem to be any particular reason that the technique wouldn't work at even bigger sizes, although with any large file you do eventually run into the limits of your computer's memory. And there's the difficulty of merge modes. Ultra Fractal has some merges available that Photoshop doesn't, so some effects can't be duplicated precisely. For some kinds of images, it would be easier to render a single layer and simply scale it up. The large pixelation would lend itself well to some interesting non-computer interpretations, too: I can imagine amazing woodcuts, or intricate careful drawings on graph paper, or brilliant neo-pointillist gouaches. The thing I like about today's experiments, though, is that it combines the blocky old-school computerized look with the infinite fractal detail available. The gradients around the disc are smooth, the line of wavy blobs has its proper intricate edge, and there's some subtle texture in the inside region that shows up on the print.

Old Favorites

The new fractal gallery is up and running, in a small way. If everything is working right, it won't look too enormously different than the old version, but the navigation and inner workings are substantially changed. Right now, what's in it are pictures from the first year and a half (or so) that I was making fractals. I have one or two small things to smooth out still, and then I'll be adding more pictures. So far I'm very pleased about how it's working; it's very easy to add new stuff. (And the stylesheets don't render properly in Internet Explorer 6! Of course! Bah phooey. No one should be using IE6 anymore anyway. This means you, Mom.)

It's been a little strange, going through all my archives of ancient fractals. I'm a little taken aback by the simplicity of color, the frequent clumsiness, the obvious lack of knowledge about the program. But at the same time, they have a kind of raw direct energy that seems good. And in some cases, I've been interested to see the beginnings of ideas that I now have spent many years developing in all sorts of directions. It's a sort of cross between archaeology and navel-gazing, and probably of no interest to anyone but myself.

This picture was made after I'd been using Ultra Fractal for less than a month, I think.

Chebyshev Avocado



Before UF, I'd spent a couple of months messing with Fractint, and the sharp-edged areas of bold color give the UF image a similar style.

So now I just have another eight years' worth of parameters to sort through, and decide what else to include. And a small amount of code still to tweak. I will probably need to make more tea.

How to shuffle the pictures

And then there's my poor neglected website, which I've been feeling guilty about since before I started my senior year at Cornish. All summer I've been telling myself I need to add some new stuff to it, and I keep putting it off and not doing it.

Eventually I realized that I'm not updating it because it's a complete drag to update: I have to gather together some small collection of maybe-related images, arrange them in some suitable order, write a new HTML page (or at least dump them into the template), update links, etc. I practically always post things on this weblog instead, because it's much simpler and requires less thought.

I started thinking, "What I need is a gallery that works more like the rest of the internet. It can be more interactive, more content-driven, it can have an interface that's more responsive to the user." And then I said "Ew, you're thinking like a horrible graphic-designer marketing wonk. Stop that."

What it really needs to be is fun to play with. If it's fun to play with, I'll play with it, and so will my prospective audience. I can scrape off the clinging shreds of my graphic-design training, stop thinking like a damned artist, and just make internet time-waster toys instead.

So I've been turning my fractal gallery into a thing you can play with. It's nearly done. Tonight it had a brief round of beta-testing I sent the test-link to my mom and she said it was wonderful. So it will probably go officially live pretty soon.

Hooray!

Flame on

Following the example of a couple of people on the UF mailing list, I wanted to try using an Apophysis-generated flame as an imported image. Flames, being of course fractal, tuck themselves rather neatly into the overall composition, and function more or less as texture. It seems like a good way to add a certain depth and complexity of color without piling up an unwieldy number of layers or adding a lot of slow-rendering distortion algorithms to the basic trap.

Gosh, this means I'm going to have to open up Apophysis again, and try to remember which bits I'd worked out how to use, and make some stuff to use as components. That would solve one of my ongoing difficulties with flame fractals, actually, which is that I'm never able to decide how they should be cropped, or how much of the edges should be visible. As a finished image, a flame often looks a little isolated and weird when the entire form is surrounded by an area of solid color. But zooming them is problematic, and I'm always sad to lose the overall shape of the thing; they have a kind of satisfying completeness when you can see how all the parts fit together into a coherent entity. As a plugged-in image trap, that wholeness would be an advantage.

untitled [flame trap test]


The flame I used in this one was almost perfectly circular, so it's not actually all that useful a test. But I didn't have one with a more irregular shape handy, because all my existing renders are too carefully cropped and zoomed. That'll teach me to try and frame things artistically.