I don't know if I mean disco or Dante's

There's not much excuse for this one, but I made it today and so up it goes. Isn't August over yet? I don't know how people survive the novel-writing thing in November.

Julia Inferno

Technical interlude

I accidentally made a useful discovery about this parametric-curves coloring method I've been working on. It's nearly done, and I've been working on writing a help file, but of course mostly I just spend time playing with it.

Originally, it made dotted shapes, like these.



Then just recently, I had some help, and got it to do joined lines, as well.



It turns out, if you type the wrong thing in certain parameters, it can also do things like this.



Click on the pictures for bigger versions, especially the last batch—they look really cool when you can see all the fine lines.

And then all these can be mapped onto fractals, exactly like any other orbit trap. Those last complicated ones become fairly slow to calculate, but no worse than some of the other coloring methods out there. I have a number of potential-images-in-progress using some of this stuff. They're fiddly to work with, because their geometry is extremely non-fractal, and so it's easy to end up with a kind of awful jarring mismatch of styles. But I think I'm starting to find ways of integrating them into compositions with reasonably good effect.

Pretzels and other loopy knots

I do this every summer. After a couple of weeks of post-school decompression, I drag out the couple of coloring algorithms I've been bashing at for the last several years, and get them a little closer to what I want. This year, the process is complicated (and also simplified) by the new object-oriented systems in UF5.

My biggest difficulty is that I am not in any sense a programmer; I've worked with fractal colorings enough to understand the logic in a sort of abstract way, and I know exactly what behaviors and effects I'd like to make possible, but there are huge categories of basic programming experience that I don't have, and so sometimes the answer to "Why isn't this doing what I think it should?" is "Because it doesn't work that way, you dope. This is where the semicolon goes!"

So I take apart bits of code that other people have written, and try to see what's going on inside them, and I also pester anyone around me who I even vaguely suspect of knowing how to write code, and I make slow progress. With a substantial amount of help from the Professor (my constant—though sometimes reluctant—ally), I was able to get a basic plug-in working in less than a day. Adding some of the more complicated bells and whistles turns out to be fiddly, and in the meantime I've also figured out some ways of improving the old-school non-object-oriented version. So now I have two different coloring methods that each do about seventy-five percent of what I want, but not the same seventy-five percent.

It's nice when there are brief glimmers of illumination.

Wire Lanterns





But mostly it just ties my brain in knots like little pretzels.

Pretzel Logic