Many fractals excite my sense of wonder. The reason is this. I wonder what they really represent. I see every fractal as a visual mapping of something that exists in reality, just as surely as a bar chart in an Excel spreadsheet maps to business metrics. Some fractals that are very mysterious, beautiful and suggestive get me wondering what they map to. Maybe they are mapping to something that is unknown to anybody at this point in time. It could be anything. It could be the brainwave patterns of an alien. It could be the emanations of some form of matter even more obscure than dark matter.

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I dreamed about it one night. It was dark and shaped like a cone. It had tentacle-like legs that were somehow extremely repulsive. But it was a shapeshifter. As soon as it sensed how repulsive it appeared to me, it immediately transformed its appearance into that of a small, cute robot. I quickly got over my initial feelings of repulsion, and I communed with the thing. It had a beautiful mind. It could telepathically give me vicarious experiences that were unmatched by art, film, games or books. I became seduced by these experiences. It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized it was slowly digesting my mind. It was as if it was to my mind what a spider is to its prey. A spider slowly digests its prey outside of its own stomach, before finishing it off by sucking it dry of its juices. When I awoke, I realized this thing was just what I needed for The Myth of Merula. It is the perfect narrator, although it is not directly the narrator. As the story unfolds, and the soul-eating shapeshifter enters the act, it will become clear why and how it is indirectly the most important narrator. This is what the thing in my “beautiful nightmare” looked like:

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This morning, I downloaded the beta version of Filter Forge, which is a Photoshop plugin that allows you to build your own filters. I’m getting excited about it! (It doesn’t take much, sometimes.) It’s free, and anyone can submit filters that they create to the Filter Forge online library. I could spend weeks of my life on this thing! For now, I will try to restrict myself to a couple of hours over this week-end. I learned of it via the Quasiomondo blog.

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