Out of character, out of time, out of cheese error

Wow, I can't believe it's the end of August already. That means I've survived NaArMaMo! I did manage to make something nearly every day, and I posted something every day, even if the thing I posted wasn't necessarily the thing I made. I will therefore confer upon myself the Award of Reasonable Successfulness.

As a final end-of-August outburst, I'm posting another limerick and its accompanying fractal. I have to say, the picture really never worked quite right until I added the neon stars.

When out on the town acting girly,
Fair Julia sometimes grows surly,
And I strongly suppose
The chief cause of her woe's
That her beaux always bail out too early.

Party Girl



On the principle that all art is to a certain extent self-portraiture, I begin to worry a bit about my character, morals, habits, and color sense. Maybe I'm just feeling over-exuberant because I'm done with my enforced month of art.

Now I think I'm probably going to give myself a short break from art-making. But I'm actually quite happy to have had a reason to get back into the habit of writing regularly; I don't think I've been such a dedicated blogger in years. I should try to keep it up, if I can.

Manifestos are for schmucks

What is your main message in 'Life, the Universe, and Everything'?

No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book.
— Douglas Adams

A depressing meeting with the department chair today, about my independent study project. I wish I'd taken different things for him to look at, and I also wish I'd been able to explain to him that the short illustrated book which he dismissed as "whimsical" is also an observation about what it's like to have your life come apart in painful unexpected ways, and then to have your so-called friends refuse to acknowledge it.

In any case, I'm not convinced that whimsical is a bad thing.

The art world seems overly concerned with concept, and schools seem especially interested in how good you are at coming up with the concept ahead of time and then manufacturing some object or artwork to convey it to the public. Probably this is a good working system for some kinds of people, but in my experience it leads to stiff, forced, awkward pieces. I seem to be more successful if I encourage my brain to turn into warm mush while I'm actually making things, and worry about concept later. But it's no good trying to convince administrators that.

Revenge of the Tokyo Bubblegum Princess



This one is bubbly, giddy, cartoonish, and cute. But it's from a time in my life when I was very angry at someone who thought he didn't need to take me seriously as a human being, and so it's intended to have some undertones of radioactive menace, such that if you patronize it with baby-talk, it will smash your city.

Serial molecules

One of the well-known properties of the Mandelbrot set is that it's full of smaller, distorted copies of itself. I've just found out that Mandelbrot himself refers to these as "molecules," which I think is a wonderful name for them.

Over the last week or so, I've been doing a lot of systematic exploring of the Mandelbrot, trying to get a better feel for the patterns around the molecules, and how those patterns are affected when you zoom into different sub-regions of them. It's fascinating; they distort in all sorts of ways, and I'm getting better at predicting and working with the distortion to find the shapes I want.

I must confess, though, that so far the results have been embarrassingly silly. This week I plan to post a series of single-layer Mandelbrot zooms, the reaction to which will probably be the same hollow groan that follows a really bad pun. To begin with, the image that started me on this exploring binge in the first place.

Pink Hearts



The magnification is 2.3422469x10²⁰. I've surrounded them with thorns, because it seemed suitably poetic, or symbolic, or something.