Aw Diddums

Mood: Head spinning gently
Listening to: Ghostly music - 'Seasons in the Sun' as sung by Nana Mouskouri

I felt more aware than usual that it was Halloween today - especially when I woke up with cobwebs and a spider in my hair. It was gusty and blustery, and when I went out I wanted to go straight back inside. At night there were no guisers, so we have a huge bowl of sweets to get through, along with two shiny red apples.

The beef olives were wonderful, though. Just thought I would mention them - they're worth being blogged about, especially when bought from a butcher's wee shoppie and cooked in a casserole. At university my friends were inclined to go "oh gawd, it's beef olives today," but I always liked them.

I suspect the real reason for Halloween is to draw our attention away from the fact that it's November soon. It sneaks up on you... you turn and discover your fax machine has 'NOV' writ large in the display. Now that's true horror, especially when the fax machine is still an hour ahead of you. I had Halloween wallpapers coming out of my ears, but I promptly switched to a frosty, icy, somewhat Christmassy one just to keep my thoughts leaping cheerily ahead. It's one I didn't put on the wallpaper site because I knew most people would hate it - I wasn't sure I liked it myself. But I rather do like it, looking at it now.

I hate it when:

(1) I can't make up my mind whether I like it or not;
(2) Decide I hate it and only discover by accident ages later that I like it;
(3) Wonder if the way I look at it is increasingly coloured by the tastes of others;
(4) Realize that though I like it, not many others will.

Other people can be confusing too, which is something I discovered all over again today. You think you know what someone likes, and then discover you got it completely wrong. There was someone saying (though not to me) in very strong terms that he didn't like (such and such) in general - and I thought "he hates fractals." I went off and had a good sulk about it, then stumbled across his name again today. I had nothing else to do at that particular moment in time, so I thought I would look in his gallery to see what kind of images he DID like. As I thought: bright photographs of scenery and flowers and things. So then I looked at his gallery of favourites, and the very first one in the line-up was one of my fractals.

!!!!

It was a burst of colour - admittedly it did look like a landscape, and wasn't what you might call repeated spirals, a raw fractal or aimless chaos. And it wasn't alone - there were quite a few other abstracts there by various others. I realized I had taken his remark completely out of context - he wasn't saying "I hate fractals" - he was saying "I'm interested in abstracts but there are some I don't like. In particular, I don't like the ones that people generate straight from the computer without any extra work."

I have mixed feelings about that myself - it's like taking a photo of something then plopping it on the website without doing anything to it - that's supposed to be a virtue. But if you do that with a computer-generated picture, it's not considered acceptable. I think if it looks good, it doesn't matter. Tweak the photos and leave the fractals alone, or vice versa - just so long as it looks good and suits your style. And I suppose I'm like anyone else that way - there are some abstracts (and fractals) I like less than others. I said to Mum "I'm not so keen on the ones that sit on a black background," and she looked blankly at me as though to say "...are there any that aren't like that??"

It's a diverse world - not limited by numbers and values. Or...? I'm remembering something about the perfectly beautiful face always being in specific proportions. Pierce Brosnan was said to be someone with that kind of face - I remember it every time he pops up on the TV screen. Anyway, perhaps perfect beauty in an abstract (or other picture) could be measured in numbers and colour values in some way... Getting myself confused now.

Time to get some sleep - going shopping tomorrow. Best way to survive the first day of November.

Mood: Slightly on edge
Listening to: Mum's house muttering to itself

I don't know why, but my comma keeps eluding me today. I keep trying to include it in everything I type, and it just oozes away and says "not today, thanks, I have a headache." GET IN THERE. "Alright, alright, take it easy, can't you?" Maybe I'm just typing too fast, stabbing at the keys.

Earlier I said to Mum that younger people (myself included in those long-ago days! heh) tend to take things too seriously - sort of "this is all such a big deal!"

Mum said wisely, "do you know what my granny used to say?"

I waited breathlessly, as this great grandmother is such a shadowy figure to me - I've seen a photo of her in a long winter coat and a dark hat, looking away as though to check the door was locked. That's all I really know about her. What sort of things did she think?

"It will all be the same in a hundred years."

I rocked on my feet, thinking "but that's what I say! I had no idea it was my great-grandmother's expression." Why stop there? Maybe it was her expression because it was something HER great-grandmother used to say, day in and day out till folk were sick and tired of it. But it's true.

Moving on...

The other day I was looking through my wallpaper site and there was a message to say one of the other fractalists had died. It wasn't anybody I had spoken to, though I seem to remember getting a message from her in answer to one of mine, but maybe I'm getting her confused with someone else... sigh. How can I not know? These little things turn to mud in my mind after a matter of weeks, when in my teens or early twenties I would have been absolutely crystal clear on that point.

She had very distinctive wallpapers, anyway, and I had some of them in my 'favourites' gallery. It took me by surprise how shocked I felt about it, especially as she was only a couple of years older than me.

Could this be my fate? You never know. Perhaps I'll be one of the early departed, and I'm not that sure it would be such a tragedy! You'll all be rushing to see what I said on my blog, and my every word will be worth its weight in gold.

Anyway, I don't mean to be flippant, as flippant wasn't how I was feeling. When I read about it, all of the sudden the silence seemed to stretch and become heavy, and I found myself leaping up to put my little hi-fi on. I needed some life around the place. I'd been going to have some fun making some fractals and there I was, surrounded by whispering shadows.

Later I went to her gallery to look through her wallpapers again, and got a few more - there were some lovely ones that I'm amazed I missed on previous visits. I chided myself for not paying more attention. And suddenly, as those wallpapers show up on my monitor, it feels as though she's not so far away. Tonight I posted something on the site I thought was pretty good. One of my regular visitors said "that's lovely!" and then it all fell quiet, so I felt rather flat. Then one of the other girl's wallpapers showed up on my monitor. I thought, "she would have known what that felt like, too," and felt completely comforted.

Mood: Happy - just found a half-eaten Mars Bar on my desk
Listening to: 'American Pie' by Don McLean

After visiting Planet Zog on business, I seem to go through a severe backlash, disappearing off to Planet Diddums to play. It was so quiet up here that Mum appeared in the doorway looking disgruntled, and said "I thought you'd died."

I was lost in my own little world, exploring fractals. I've already tried Tierazon, Fractality, Xaos, Chaoscope and Fractal Explorer with varying degrees of success. Now I'm sucked deep into the vortex of Apophysis v. 2.06. beta.

No wonder I feel giddy.


The thing starts up with 100 random fractals (randomly generated, not randomly chosen from a library). I didn't get the distinction at first; I thought they were samples of other people's artwork, though some seemed pretty spartan... I assumed they were there to display what different effects and shapes could be achieved. When I discovered from some tutorials that they were untouched by human hand, I was both awestruck and horrified. I feel it's my duty to go through each of those one hundred fractals to make sure I don't lose a beauty from the world. It also causes me to think, uneasily, that every minute not spent checking lists of random fractals is a minute wasted.

On the other hand, every one I save is a bonus - if I had never tried Apophysis, all those fractals squirrelled away into my hard drive might never have appeared to mortal eye. Is this why I was born??

Then I spent ages collecting, creating and organizing gradients. A long while ago I was delighted to discover that Paintshop Pro gradients could be used in Photoshop Elements, some of them based on favourite gradients I created in ClarisWorks, way, way back in the mists of time. I probably used the eyedropper tool to save those ancient shades - it's the best invention since sliced bread.

Now I find I can use all those gradients in Apophysis, though through a rather laborious process. In fact I can use photos and pictures to generate brand new gradients in Apop. This sounded such fun I trotted off and opened up lots of my pictures for Apop to chew over. My bears, fractals, books, even a screenshot of my blog... everything was grist for its mill.

This went on for a number of days, and then I made a discovery that stopped me in my tracks. ALL those gradients were automatically saved into a file called smooth.ugr - not just the ones I saved myself into a file of my own. So now I had one file full of hundreds of gradients, both wanted and unwanted, and another file containing many duplicates.

Most of you would think "fine, I've got the gradients I want" and delete one file or the other, but my brain doesn't work like that... I'm the one who feels obliged to rescue all the poor little fractals, and now I had these unique gradients clamouring for a good home. I couldn't recreate any of them - if I opened the same picture again to be processed, the results were somehow different - I accidentally overwrote a few nice gradients because I didn't realize that.

Then I realized something else - and a frisson of horror tingled down my spine. If I were to accidentally process a picture I'd already processed weeks or months before, I might be destroying a favourite gradient, possibly even affecting the saved parameters of completed fractals. I might be wrong about this, but anything seemed possible all of a sudden. The only way to be sure of avoiding that was to save them myself as I had been doing - with different names to a different file. While I was at it, they should be organized into separate files with names such as didsphotos.ugr, didsabstracts.ugr, didsscreenshots.ugr, didsPSPgradients.ugr etc. Just so I could search the gradients by source and not overstretch any one file. In other words, don't put all your colour schemes in one basket.

It sounds a quick and simple process; normally you drag and drop the files into organized folders, but Apop gradients do not work like that. As far as I know at this stage, the only way to get one gradient into another file is to save a copy into the new file and then delete the original gradient from the old one. Or maybe duplicate the files many times over and...

Anyway, that's why Mum thought I'd fallen off my perch. I was saving millions of computer pixels from eternal oblivion.

Mood: Slightly worried
Listening to: House murmuring very quietly

This blog post has been moved to my current WordPress blog and can be found here.