The Antagonist, Shapeshifter and Most Important Narrator

Jennifer Elrod — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:31:47 +0000

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:

It took a while to create something with some semblance of the ugliness of the thing I dreamed about, but a few fractals and a few dust mite legs helped along the way. I have photographed pond scum, spiders and other things trying to capture some texture or pattern that would convey the ugliness, but whenever I have looked at the photos later, I have found them to have beauty. The pond scum had fractalesque patterns. The spiders were symmetrical and athletic, with handsome patterns and textures. It wasn’t until I saw a magnified photo of a dust mite that I felt I had finally found repulsiveness captured in a photograph. It was the dust mite’s tendrils, more than anything else, that conveyed the feel I wanted.

Browse all the entries under Art, Computer Graphics, Myth of Merula.

Filter Forge Photoshop Plugin Allows You to Build Your Own Filters

Jennifer Elrod — Sat, 27 May 2006 16:23:25 +0000

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.

Browse all the entries under Computer Graphics, Open Source.

Squirrel Tao » Computer Graphics

The Antagonist, Shapeshifter and Most Important Narrator

Filter Forge Photoshop Plugin Allows You to Build Your Own Filters