Squirrel Tao » Myth of Merula

What Do Mysterious Fractals Map To?

Jennifer Elrod — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:55:48 +0000

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.

This fractal made me write this note from the perspective of Blackbird. “I saw a nebulae. And I hurled into the heart of it. Again, the vision I saw was not something I believed a human on Earth would necessarily see were they able to photograph the inside of the nebula. I thought it was a visual representation of something else. What? But all that a photograph would be, would be external verisimilitude. Through a human’s eyes. With the spectrum of light that a human is able to see. From untold millions of light years ago. Would that necessarily be more real than the image I was seeing? Was I beginning to see differently?”

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

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.

Plans for Myth of Merula Story

Jennifer Elrod — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:27:37 +0000

I plan to return to telling the story of The Myth of Merula very soon. In addition to writing Alice Mountolive’s fictional blog, I will be getting to Blackbird’s story. Blackbird’s story will be released chapter by chapter, in Flash. Each chapter will have a game at the end of it. The first chapter will have an interactive fiction game at the end of it. My goal is to release this first chapter and game by the end of this year. I’m toying with the idea of, just for the fun of it, releasing the interactive fiction game on a CD, along with a comic and a “feelie”. This is the way that many IF games were packaged and released in the Infocom days from what I have read. A “feelie” is a toy that comes with the game. I think it would be fun to experiment with a different type of game or simulation at the end of each chapter of Blackbird’s story. The plot will actually lend itself to this way of organizing it, too.

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An Encyclopedia of Alien Philosophies

Jennifer Elrod — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:41:48 +0000

The Myth of Merula Philosophy Wiki has gone through many incarnations since I impulsively created it, but each time, it has never really gelled for me. Now I finally know what I will do with it. Its purpose in life is to be a work of community science fiction. It will be an encyclopedia of alien philosophies that Blackbird has encountered. That is, a bunch of people will have fun making up alien philosophies. Soon I will begin to put some content in place, as well as some guidelines for contributing.

Browse all the entries under Myth of Merula, Philosophy Wiki.

The Philosophy Wiki is Back

Jennifer Elrod — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 23:03:11 +0000

Today I took the plunge and made the philosophy wiki a fictional extension of The Myth of Merula. I will be writing in it as Alice Mountolive. This blog will be the only non-fictional part of the Dreamfishery.com Web Site. It’s very liberating. It’s not the first time I’ve considered doing this, but for some reason, something always held me back. Maybe it was only narrative conventions holding me back. I’m not sure what it was. I can think of no good reason not to make the whole Web Site fictional. But I can think of a lot of good reasons in favor of it. It’s more fun that way, it allows more freedom and possibility, and it enhances the story of The Myth of Merula. Anyway, being me is so dull and restricting sometimes.

I’m definitely not a confessional writer! Not much to confess these days, anyway, other than to say that I have only done prenatal yoga exercises twice during this whole Christmas break. Oh, and I told my husband to stop carrying our cat Marten to bed at night, because we need to wean him from our bed with a baby due to be here in few weeks. But then this morning, I carried Marten to bed. At times, I have considered somehow working pregnancy into the story, especially when I learned that a fetus goes through phases of development that resemble human evolution and that, when it is born, it essentially transitions from being an aquatic creature to living on land. It would just have been too weird, though. I didn’t want to mix up my feelings about my unborn child with my feelings about the story.

Browse all the entries under Myth of Merula, Philosophy Wiki.