Laser Fractal Space Wizard

It was definitely a middle-school thing for me, Fire Ze Missiles and All Your Base era. It ended around the time that kind of humor became a big thing for my younger sister. That was also around the time I got into Hitchhiker's Guide, which was goofy without "lol random" crutch.

"New Garden"
Flam3 fractal in jWildfire Swan

Swan is the fractal animation editor I've dreamed of since starting. I can bind parameters to curves with keyframes, and render on my GPU. That means I can do things like this popcorn effect, with a slow tense up then a quick pop and settle.

Vendor Applications for The Summoning Apply to be a vendor for The Summoning at the Linn County Expo Center in Salem on September 13th

Calling all our sisters, star gazers, hidden path travelers, third-eye beholders, and fantastical friends. We're summoning the strange ones to Albany for the last time this year, and we request your presence.

Vendor applications are now open!

www.marketforthestrange.com/vendor-appli...

If you want a weird but true fact to talk about:

Dexter Holland, lead singer of The Offspring, was instrumental in this. His doctorial thesis in molecular biology was sequencing mRNA in HIV. The paper was also heavily cited in creating the COVID-19 vaccine.

Get Outta My Swamp!
Salem Convention Center
11AM - 6PM
Tickets: www.marketforthestrange.com

This fractal render is vertically oriented. A small nest of buzzing orange ribbons make a cluster at the bottom of the image. Whipping out from there, most of the background is made up of tightly packed curved lines in big architectural arcs, splaying out in a kind of clover pattern. Two axis lines cut through the composition, one in a neat circle taking up the bottom half with the nest at the bottom. The other shoots up perpendicular, rocketing out of the nest and of to the upper right. The design feels technical and energetic.

"Tachyon"
Flam3 fractal

Do you think there's ever been a Starfleet Transporter Engineer who got caught up in the captain's speech and missed the cue?

Captain: "We might not make it, but we have to try. Energize!"
... ...
Captain: *Sigh* "Lieutenant.."

This fractal render is in vertical orientation, and depicts cloudy shapes of green and orange mixing together. Parts of each cloud shape look kinda like alien heads with telescoping eye stalks jutting out to either side. The composition feels calm, like watching the clouds on a summer evening, but with a tinge of surreal paranoia. Your mind feels like there's something more to what you're seeing, but you can't find it.

"Xenobotany"
Flam3 fractal

One of the unexpected drawbacks to switching to 4k? The increased precision means I accidentally do "click-and-drag" when I'm just trying to click something. I have to lift my fingers off my trackball to be sure I'm not slightly moving the cursor while I click.

YouTube video by etansivad Hello from the magic Tavern: I am Usidore the wizard! (As portrayed by Gandolph the gray).

Usidore example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu7C...

Walter example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIeD...

Cryptmaster example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw-w...

I want to practice a more wizardly voice, but I don't know how to describe that, so my search attempts haven't gone well. What is it about the voices of Usidore the Blue (Matt Young), Walter from Fringe (John Noble), and the Cryptmaster (Lee Williams) so full and characterful, technically speaking?

Every few months, I forget how bad streaming codecs are for fractal animations and post one. If you want to see fractal moving in high quality, I use a much nicer streaming solution on my website. www.complicatedreality.com/videos

"Fire Season"
Flam3 fractal animation

If you like fractals, @complicatedreality.com

This fractal design is a warped grid of flower shapes, most of which are purple and blue, hanging like a rippled curtain. But a bold line of large flowers cuts through the middle like a swooshing necklace, in vivid orange that dominates the composition. It evokes feelings of neon dancers, twilight fields, and warm lights on a summer beach at night.

"Midsummer"
Flam3 fractal

I always kinda felt like I didn't quite belong
In the days of Darkwing Duck and 2D Donkey Kong
I was waiting for the future, where I find myself today
looking back, I don't think I'd have it any other way.

Well dang, I spoke too soon. I did a quick double precision render for comparison, and the squiggles aren't what I thought they were! They're actually a high frequency wave coming from a different parameters that happens to look similar to a common low precision issue.

This design is very abstract. There are focal points on each side with orange centers that radiate a gradient through yellow to green. The focal point on the right has three way symmetry, and looks sort of like a flower with only three petals. The focal point on the left uses similar curves, but without the three way symmetry. Instead it looks sorta like an S curve. From each focal point, bands extend out to create a very distorted grid pattern. Along each band a is a line of hexagonal holes. Looking close, all the line work in the piece is actually small squiggly shapes tightly packed together, giving the composition a vibrating feel. Overall, it feels busy, colorful, and surreal, but doesn't really resemble any every day thing.

"Interchange"
Flam3 fractal

The thin squiggly bands in this design are an intentional use of imprecision. If I rendered it more precisely, they'd smooth out. They are resolution artifacts, but the rest of the math doesn't care, so they become a neat way to add texture.

This fractal design has a bright, glowing focal point up and to the right of center. There, many tightly packed ribbons of yellow, purple, and blue make a chaotic knot. Extending out from that in gentle waves is an orange, cloudy background, as though catching sight of the sun through a tunnel of clouds. Along the waves of the clouds, small hexagons race along squiggly paths towards the "sun", leaving glowing trails behind them in the same colors as the sun's ribbons. The design evokes the feeling of flying through the clouds, but in a slow, sunbaked way.

"Sun Seekers"
Flam3 fractal

Meet Steve, level seven thief, street level menace.
Picks pocks so fast people called him Table Tennis.
Everything was going right until the day it went wrong,
he was trounced and he bounced, so we call him Ping Pong.

John Roderick, a musician and podcaster, told a story about laughing at his daughter struggling to open a can of beans with a manual can opener. Twitter erupted to shame him for being a terrible father, earning him the nickname "beandad". He wasn't actually awful, just framed the story poorly.

A flyer with the text "I'm published in Issue 03: Wild" and a photo of the cover of issue 3 of Changeling mini mag. The cover art features a forest with many hidden eyes, by Elena V Miller, and credits the editor Emmy Clarke. At the bottom of the flyer is text that reads "Preorder on Etsy!"

I'm proud to share that some of my poetry will appear in Changeling's third mini-mag. This indie mag exclusively features neurodivergent creators, and the creator Emmy is one of the most supportive people I've ever had the pleasure to work with. Pre-order a copy today.
emmy-writes.com/changeling/

This fractal design features a lumpy, spiral shape. The border of the spiral is a repeating pattern of blue curves stacked in large arches that stick out of the shape like bumps. The bumps are filled in with a neon assortment of blue, pink and purple, but as the spiral tightens in towards the center it takes on an electric green. At various angles, triangle shapes appear to be flung out by the spiral, leaving streaks behind them. The design feels like the light show at a dance party.

"Party Star"
Flam3 fractal

"Party Star, really? It's like 100 degrees out, the airwaves are toxic and the streets are iced and you want to be known as Party Star?"

"If I changed my own name for those reasons, wouldn't it be worse?"

Introducing Party Star, a design that doesn't read the room.

Missing alt text: This busy fractal design shows a series of 6 synapses, focal points with bright yellow centers, connected by an electric blue line of energy ricocheting through the image. On two opposed corners, symmetrical frays of orange ribbon add a soft glow to the scene.

"Synaptic"
Flam3 fractal

Why does it seem like the most common side effect of ranking things by popularity is abuse? Every time we find a new way to package that system up, it turns into something awful for society.

This meme was my life for a decade. My awareness of the problem made the problem worse, and I developed really unhealthy baggage around sleep. Doxepin changed my life. Don't rush to take meds about sleep stuff, but it's good to know there's options.

YouTube video by Plump DJs - Topic Rocket Soul

This is becoming the song of the summer for me. www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbuK...

Mikey was my childhood icon, but as I grew older, I became more of a Donatello.

YouTube video by Numberphile Hitomezashi Stitch Patterns - Numberphile

Note: I used a 5-digit binary encoding for 26 letters, instead of the 8 digit ASCII code, because the design was already plenty dense. This great Numberphile video explains Hitomezashi patterns better than I can here with short posts. youtu.be/JbfhzlMk2eY

This is very different from my usual work, but pretty neat! These are both the same Hitomezashi pattern, wrapped around a circle. If you read the outermost ring as a binary pattern of stiches and spaces, it says "Yamen" seven times. The leftmost column after the gap reads "Wizardly" vertically.

This fractal design features a spiraling chain of flower shapes made of pale green petals and a simmering orange fringe. It evokes the appearance of succulents in the moonlight.

"Meaning"
Flam3 fractal

Fractals are prettier than fireworks, and significantly less likely to start any fires.

This fractal design features a spiral of abstract flower shapes, like christmas lights on a strand. The flowers are outlined with a zing of bright pink, fiery energy, but the res of the composition is shades of gray. It evokes the feeling of lanterns on a summer night, or cherry blossoms blowing in the wind.

"Windswept"
Flam3 fractal.

The only way out is through..

This fractal is mostly shades of grey, carving out smooth flowing shapes in a butterfly pattern. But a vivid orange races around the flower shape, dancing along the edges of the petals like curls of smoke. The stark contrast and almost fisheye perspective give the composition a feeling of speed and motion.

"Zing"
Flam3 fractal

When I say that I'm not ready to have a metal little son
don't blame the sci-fi movies, blame the more upsetting ones.
The ones about some kids that grew up against some odds
stacked higher than the egos of these poser cyber gods.

A New Form of Verification on Bluesky - Bluesky We’re introducing a new layer of verification — a user-friendly, easily recognizable badge. Additionally, independent organizations can verify accounts directly through our Trusted Verifiers feature.

There's a link to the form in the post, but it's only for "notable" people, or people verified through a "trusted verifier" like a news organization. Us non-notables can only use the domain verification method.

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