I saw a documentary on Middle Eastern wells. A well is a big deal there. Everything happens because of water.

Some of them are quite old, even supposedly dating back to the days of Abraham. A well is so important that there are men who dive down into these narrow tunnels and remove debris when they’re plugged. It’s the ultimate claustrophobic experience.

Abraham named his children and he named his wells. Political deals were associated with wells. From the well flowed water, and from the water grew a city. Beersheba flowed out of a well.

In the desert, life is a plug and the well is the socket. Sheep, goats, men; they all orbit the well. Our eyes see the stars, and by them you can navigate the sea, but your feet travel from well to well, in the desert.

There were many tribes and clans, but they all drank water. If a well can be dug, and water can be found, then a well can be plugged, and the strangers move on.

In the Australian movie, Mad Max, they coveted the stockpiles of gasoline that ran their cars. In Abraham’s day they coveted the wells that watered their camels and livestock.

Inkblot Kaos parameter files

To find water, to dig a well that has water, is to re-write the land, to redraw the map. Water runs like a cable, deep below the ground. Every well is a node, a network in a world that ebbs and flows according to the water protocol.

You dial-up, there’s a handshake. When they connected, they washed their guests feet. No ID? Wrong password? Your sheep will not drink at this well.

Tim Hodkinson
 

We worked as a team. A huge team of scientists and builders like me.

No one had built a star before. We were going to be the first.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? We know now. We built very special pins and we saw things that no one had ever seen before. The scientists knew how to make these pins. They were needed to help build the star.

It took years of work. When it was finished we all crowded together to get a look. The most important scientist was there. He turned the switch. We had made the very first star.

We’re all retired now. We still like to talk about the old days when we built the star. Especially when our grandchildren visit. We wish they’d visit more often. We tell them how we built the star.

“The star that makes the electricity for our houses Grandpa? Did you make that star?”

“No, not that one. We made the other star. The star that kills.”

Inkblot Kaos parameter files

Tim Hodkinson
 

I read somewhere, or heard from someone, that study carrols were invented in monasteries. A study carrol (did I spell it wrong?) is a one-person table that is walled on all sides except the one you sit at. The prototypical cubicle.

No, it wasn’t the first. The first cubicle was the small cave preferred by sages. I saw a documentary about a place in northern India, an area that is rugged and remote and home to real old-fashioned sages along with smugglers and some very paranoid tribespeople.

I saw this guy sitting in his little cave, thinking, or something, and I thought: he works in a cubicle. He met with some tourists who were told not to wander around or disturb the locals, and he highly recommended that they not return home, but rather get themselves a cave like he has.

In my six short years of normal working I worked for 4 months in a cubicle; nicely padded; color-matched to the chair and carpet; nice, solid desk. You stand up, and all around you are busy people on the phone or frowning in front of a computer. Sit down, and you’re back to being Robinson Crusoe.

Dilbert makes it sound as if there’s something second-rate to cubicles or that they’re some cruel substitute for an office. To me it was a mini-castle. Until I got fired. It took a while to adjust to the working world after being in university for what boils down to about six, or seven and a half years. The fact that the cubicle was so appealing to me was perhaps a sign.

Original image from Inkblot Kaos before being processed with multi-crystal.8bf and some of Andrew’s filters and India Ink.

I went on to work in warehouses. Like the playwright, Arthur Miller. One time, during the Depression when Arthur Miller was working in an auto parts warehouse, he had to climb up to the top of a shelf (25+ ft) and from there marvelled at the panoramic view.

It was December, and I was working in a dollar store (cheap plastic junk) warehouse picking orders. Someone wanted water pistols and they were up on the top shelf because it was summer merchandise. The place being what it was, I just climbed up by stepping on boxes and pulling myself up when I could reach the next metal support.

I got to the top and naturally took a look around before looking for the water pistols (which were probably a mistake on the order). The heat in those high altitudes was surprising, and looking out at the tops of all those giant shelves, instead of the bottoms, was actually somewhat exhilirating. And I wondered, how come no one wants to work in a place like this?

Tim Hodkinson
 

The first Radio Satelite. 1957, or around then. Whatever happened to Sputnik?

No longer a celebrity, and not too shiny anymore, he slides through space, without destination or purpose. His simple senseless beeping, once the scherzo of a great Superpower symphony, is now just a sign he’s still alive.

Years pass, decades pass. Then one night, while orbitting, forgotten, worthless, abandoned, obsolete, junked… he hears a voice, a song in space.

“Glowing, glowing, my heart is glowing.” Sings the distant satelite.

Sputnik finds himself drawn to the soothing song and sets off in search of her.

Begone, crude space-can!

Not her father, it’s her guardian that confronts Sputnik. Jamming her signals and chasing off all suitors, the old guardian secretly plots to marry her himself.

Beset by a web of intrigue woven by her guardian and unable to approach, Sputnik despairs, but cannot forget her voice.

“Sputnik!” she cries. She appears, dressed in leopard skin and blushing rather profusely.

Her older brother, calling long distance on a cheap phone card, disapproves of Sputnik and his lack of current employment.

Mother is happy with anyone because she knows of the Guardian’s evil schemes. She calls Sputnik a Russian Prince.

The Guardian is incensed and argues violently that Sputnik is a theif and has fled Earth to avoid prison.

At last, they are married, and go to live on a mountain on Pluto broadcasting with joy.
 

Sasquatch, UFO’s, Bermuda Triangle, and now –Space Heads.

What am I talking about? Imagine that outer space is something like the ocean: mostly empty but “infected” with life. We don’t expect to find something. We don’t expect to get a cold. But we’re not surprised when it happens. Probability says, it’s going to happen, instinct says, not today.

Space Heads, the micro-plankton of the space: floating, primitive …collectible.

An extra z here, a cos instead of a tan over there. Change the + to a ^ and you’ve got a new Space Head. Or just some new space.

Tiera-zon 2.7 parameter files (.zar) “spaceheads.zip”

There’s fractals and then there’s the other stuff, hard to categorize or describe: Floating; unconnected but associated; head-like. Space Heads.

They are primitive because they are basic and close to the trunk of the tree, unlike ourselves, complex creatures, who form the distant tip of a limb. It’s no surprise to find them represented in the fossil record; ancient, the earliest of iterations, almost timeless, drifting in time.

Haven’t fractal generators changed the world? Before, there was the wilderness -the natural world, and there were the cities -the places of human design. But now there is a new place, half-natural, half-human, neither of those, transcending both.

On the frontier, few things are labelled and nothing is categorized. The question, “What is it?” has not yet occurred. We look, we wander, we forget what brought us here.
 

It’s never been my intention to talk about war and depressing stuff like that, but I like this image and all I can think of when I look at it is the B-29 fire-bombing campaign that took place over Japan in the spring of 1945.

I read the diary of an allied soldier who was a prisoner of the Japanese working in a coal mine in Japan during WW2. The entries were very routine and written every day without exception for the duration of the war from Dec. ’41 to Aug. ’45.

My Grandfather had been part of this group of 2,000 Canadian soldiers, just like the author of the diary had. They went to Hong Kong in November of ’41 and fought from Dec. 8th until Dec. 25th when the British colony surrendered.

Although my Grandfather’s been dead for almost 15 years, I joined a veteran’s organization whose purpose is to comemorate their memory as well as look after the interests of those surviving Canadian veterans who fought in the Battle of Hong Kong. I wanted to get some understanding of what the veterans went through so I could relate to them better, and I thought reading the diary’s exhaustive, day to day account would do that.

Can someone like me really understand these war experiences? Possibly not, or at the most, only in a limited way.

(With regards to the image above, this is the original image from Inkblot Kaos from which it was made, with the help of Illyich the Toad’s multi-crystal.8bf and Martijn W. van der Lee’s, Ink Rubber.8bf (“inkrubbr.8bf”) which tinted it.)

The guy who wrote the diary was very methodical and disciplined. He never missed a day, even if there was nothing really to write about. He soon fell into a routine of writing two sentences a day about his experiences as a POW working as slave labour in a Japanese coal mine. It became a ritual.

Until the spring of ’45 when the regular entries abruptly stopped.

I knew he hadn’t died. He survived and came back to Canada after the war like my Grandfather did. But camp life for the author was turned upside down and it seemed to have something to do with a sudden change of events in Japan associated with Allied bombing.

The war ended and the author left Japan in September of 45. While enroute by train to board an American ship homeward, he saw the ruins of Nagasaki, destroyed only a month previously by the second atomic bomb.

So what had happened that caused this man to stop writing in his diary for a whole month? What was going on that had such a profound effect on the behaviour of the prison camp guards that he thought they’d kill him for the slightest reason such as possessing a diary?

I found out by reading a book called Flames over Tokyo by E. Bartlett Kerr. The catastrophic events were the B-29 incendiary bombing campaign that literally burned up most of Japan’s major cities in spring of 1945. Most people know about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but few, including myself, know much about the fire-bombing campaign that went on all over Japan and was actually much more destructive, although less “glamourous” to write about than the atomic attacks.

To make a long blog posting short… back in the 40’s most of the buildings in Japanese cities (even large parts of the national capital, Tokyo) were made mostly of wood. European cities had much more brick and concrete construction which made the strategy of fire-bombing less appealing, but for Japan this was it’s achilles heel.

Add to all this the brand-new B-29 (“SuperFortress”) with increased bomb load and extended range of operation, and then the newly designed incendiary bombs, in clusters, made with “jellied” gasoline (napalm), designed and tested to puncture a roof and several floors of a wooden Japanese building and squirt on impact…

Once the fires got going, some of the flight crews in the next wave of bombers said they could actually smell the fires -and burning flesh. They weren’t flying at 30,000 feet like the new “pressurized” B-29 was capable of. They were flying at a few thousand feet, at night, to maximise accuracy and minimize losses. Less like flying, and more like driving, through Tokyo.

Well, so what? War is pretty awful and destructive all the time isn’t it? Yeah, but in these cases huge chunks of the city were obliterated (and the people in them). Not just a few isolated, industrial areas or strategic targets, but something like 40, 50 or 60 per cent of the whole city. In a few Japanese cities, upwards of 90% of the urban area was burnt to the ground after only two or three bombing missions.

The war that had so far been foreign and far-away, all of a sudden came home.
 

Forest of Knives

I remember back during the last few years of the Vietnam war, in the early 70s, reading an article in the magazine that came with the weekend edition of the newspaper, about the various booby-traps the enemy was using against US soldiers.

I was 7 or 8 at the time and living on the edge of a small pulp and paper town up in Northwestern Ontario (sparsley inhabited wilderness). Me and my brothers spent most of our time out in the bush making forts and hiking around, so we were fascinated with the eleborate mechanisms the NVA and VC were making with sticks and other natural materials.

Sharpened bamboo covered with pig manure was a common ingredient in most constructions, as was the occasional venomous snake tied to a stick. It was all pretty exotic for someone growing up in a world of spruce trees. The only threat to my well-being was having my favorite TV show pre-empted by a football game.

The magazine article was part of a series, and the next week featured the high-tech booby-traps of the American forces. They weren’t quite as interesting; all of them were more or less variations on the theme of explosives blowing pieces of steel around. None of them were hand-crafted, and in the full-colored drawings they just looked like little plastic boxes. I gave them second-place in the creative design category.

What caught my attention, and still does to this day, was how to set up a series of claymore anti-personnel mines so the enemy soldiers would actually jump on them, or at least run towards them, just before they exploded. That made the little plastic boxes more interesting. I remember me and my brothers having quite a few arguements trying to second-guess the enemy’s response, and therefore where to place the second (third, fourth…) anti-personnel mine if our living room was ever infiltrated.

It’s like a well thought out chess manoever, but with different equipment. For instance, you hear a big bang, you turn away from it or move away. It’s human nature to minimize injuries. So the second one goes over where you would run to get away from the first. The third is placed in the same way.

Later on we applied this technique to kill houseflys. Imagine a housefly sitting on a table. You move forward and try to hit it by smacking your hand down on the table. It rarely works because the fly sees the hand coming and flys up and away.

So what you do is take your hands and clap them together above the fly, or above the place the fly is when your hands start to move. The fly jumps up when your hands start to move, and literally flys up into your hands. If he he’d just stayed where he was on the table, nothing would have happened to him.

The fly is faster, and you can’t compete with his speed and agility, but you’re smarter and you know where he’s going. The slow hand gets the fast fly.
 

Smashing with style

Digital Dynamite

Filter of Frenzy

Ripped-off beyond recognition and left for dead

“No, your Honour; I didn’t do anything. I just took the dog for a walk until it was dead.”

Together, me and the filter formed a third personality, which neither of us could talk any sense to.

Art grows out of the barrel of a photoshop filter.

The smaller they get, the more I see.

Every chop is different. And I try to choose the best one. But they all look good.

The author called it “Slice” which to me suggests something simple and restrained like the careful preparation of a sample for a microscope slide. Perhaps he never conceived of this “Feast of Knives” effect, or if he had, would have been unable to imagine anyone finding a use for something like that.

I keep thinking, just one more chop and we’ll turn the corner; one more chop and the effect will take a quantum leap and start forming new wonders. Deep down in it’s algorithmic DNA some gene, so far only weakly expressed, will become like a crystal, suddenly bringing order and magnificence to the supersaturated solution. But no. Like everything else, it moves onward to its logical conclusion, and returns to dust.
 

You know, post-processing can really mangle a decent, law-abiding fractal image and make it an almost unrecognizable, but strangely delightful, wreck. Some will never walk straight again.

But when you start with an image that is almost entirely a product of the program’s filtering effect, and not quite a “fractal” image to start with, the results strain the already stretched categories of visual taxonomy, sowing the seeds of an impending visual collision, or shall we say, “Collisual” – intriguing arrangement of debris.

These were all originally made in Tierazon 2.7. Here’s a clean one that hasn’t had anything done to it. In fact it’s the original image the above one was made from.

Download parameter file “shift06.zar”

Same one – Antialiased 4:1

They’re alive. I should explain that.

This is rather Twilight-zonish, although I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation: The images keep changing.

When you see something interesting and zoom in on it, it’s gone when you get there. I think it’s because the image is created by a moire effect and the resolution of the image changes the resulting pattern of circles.

In fact, I wanted to call this series of images, “Monsieur Moire and the hypno-dots from the Atom Ray”, but it just didn’t have the same zip as stepping off on Saturn.

Well, that’s just the beginning. The really freaky thing is when you antialias one of these things (as you can see above). The resulting algorithmicolated picture transforms into something quite different; the dots are in different places and the colors have changed too.

In an image viewer, when looking at the thumbnail, you see yet another variation of the image. What you see in fact, is a new image and you can’t go by the thumbnail to find what you’re looking for. In a strange and maybe existential way, the thumbnail is not the image and doesn’t even pretend to be.

I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s why I say they’re alive, growing, changing, mutating, plotting, scheming…

Perhaps they are “fractal” after all, as far as self similarity and endless resolution goes. What you see depends on how close you are to it and at what size you make it. Or maybe that has nothing to do with fractals.

They started off in Tierazon. Then they met me. And my machine. But their fractal identity can still be traced through their dental records.

Maybe all this is in my head.
 

Would you expect this from someone named “Ilyich the Toad”?

Once again, I’ve dug up a new and amazing Photoshop filter and I want to share the wonder…

But it’s got a dirty name.

I tried renaming it, but you can’t do that with Photoshop filters. Or at least I don’t know how. But everytime I go to use it, which is like 200 times a day, I click on Ilyich’s favorite nic name for this filter.

At first it seemed evil. The Toad connection didn’t help either. Now I’m just curious to know why he gave it such a name.

It’s one of those chop-up/multi-lens distortion effects. It doesn’t alter the color and has only two sliders, but it can be extremely creative.

After using it for a couple hours, you will have trouble readjusting to the non-chopped, real world. Unless you’re a house fly. I think this is what the world looks like to a house fly.

The Missiles of Shangri-La

That’s what I thought of the moment I made this… Can I still call it a fractal? Maybe I’ve gone too far. I’m the first to admit it.

“Kurtz got off the boat. He quit the whole scene.”

Maybe I’ll just refer to it as “Crystal.8bf”. Couldn’t he have called it “Betty’s Crystal”?

While I’m on the topic of unique labelling for menus and parameters, I ought to mention another interesting set of filters I’ve found by someone called “Kangaroo”. One filter has four sliders for adjustment, labelled: “does something” “not sure” “can’t say” and “I forgot”. Another has three sliders named: “don’t know” “don’t care” and “leave me alone”.

Sometimes when it’s late and I’ve been on the computer too long, I start to give senseless names to images when I’m saving them, like “Fuludoo” or “Fugunoofoo”. So maybe Ilyich and Kangaroo just ran out of names.

Using the sliders allows one to fragment and repeat the image in interesting ways. Instead of creating a single distorted image, you can create a series of images that are clear but have a distorted arrangement.

Go ahead, pet the fractal, he won’t bite

Honey, where are the kids? Didn’t you tell them they could go swimming?

“His mind is rational, but his soul is insane”

What started off as a cheap and gimmicky effect began to become a powerful artistic tool once I began to see what it did best and began to combine it with the India Ink filter by Flaming Pear. On its own, the crystal filter looks too fake like a cheap digital trick. But treated with the patterns of India Ink, it jumps into a whole new category of creative effects.

I think that’s one of the secrets to digital creativity: synergy -digital recombination -frankensteining. Or to put it another way: harmonizing -taking hydrogen and oxygen and making water.
 

What is art?

There’s an old black and white movie that spends two hours depicting a jury sitting around a table in a room, deliberating the verdict of a murder trial.

Now I could also be wrong about this too, but I think it all starts when Jimmy Stewart, who’s the only one of the twelve jurors who hasn’t quite made up his mind to sentence the young man on trial to death, decides he wants to go over things… one more time.

In doing so, everyone realizes that they’re not looking at the facts of the case at all, but rather have made up their minds to punish the accused for no other reason than they’re all just really angry at someone else in their personal lives who they can’t punish.

With the question, “Can I just go through it one more time?” the neatly rolled up guilty verdict (and resulting death sentence) starts to unravel until it finally comes completely undone, and the whole jury agrees the man is innocent and they themselves are just “12 Angry Men.”

And so it is, sometimes, with these apparently simple and obvious things like art.

Another allegory or analogy: Einstein (remember, don’t take my word for all this) would apparently spend days working on a solution to some deep, fundamental physics problem that he wasn’t satisfied with and then throw all his calculations and papers away and start over again.

You can do that with physics because everything is derived from first principles (laws, or something) and any physics problem can be solved (if you know how) by applying the handful of first principles to the complexities of any situation.

Einstein would start all over because he thought he would stumble on the answer if he could start from the beginning and go over it… one more time.

So, like Einstein at his desk, and Jimmy Stewart in the jury room, I don’t feel quite satisfied with my current understanding of things, and although I can’t really see an obvious mistake in any of it, I just want to go over it again, one more time.

So, one more time…

What is art?
 

Life is not for the rich and famous
for the successful applicant and the olympic few
Life is in the eye and the mind and the hand
It needs no permission,
or conditions
to be.

We can all be like Sindbad
and set off on voyages with nothing but today
We do not need to own the ocean
it is enough that we are here
 

Back twenty years ago in high school English class I read or studied, or something, Julius Caesar by George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw, as he is called by those who are familiar with him, was something new for us high school students. We were quite familiar with Shakespeare as the school curriculum included one of his plays every year, like some sort of literary vitamin pill.

There are a lot of great literary things to be found in Shakespeare. Like dill pickles, it’s an aquired taste, and five plays in five years wasn’t enough for me. I came to view Shakespeare’s lofty reputation as an exaggeration, the “official playright” of an imperial nation wanting to present themselves as the possessors of an old and well established, and uniquely English, culture of arts and letters.

The year before Shaw’s Julius Caesar, we had been chained to our desks and deprived of the necessities of life until we finished reading, or pretending to read, Anthony and Cleopatra by that great playright, “the Bard.”

In introducing Shaw’s play, the teacher kept repeating (you have to do that a lot in high school English classes) how this play by Shaw presents some of the historical events found in Anthony and Cleopatra in a more historically accurate context.

Oh yes. I opened the book and saw the many scholarly primary sources that Shaw had exhaustively studied in order to begin writing his definitive play about Julius Caesar. It was shameless name dropping of classical historians. I didn’t like this guy any more than Shakespeare.

Jumping to the back of the book, where the publishers add in all sorts of extra stuff, like commentary and analysis of the play by eminent authorities, I began to see the old bearded Shaw in shockingly different light.

“Better Than Shakespeare?” was the title of an essay about Shaw’s play written by the Shaw himself! Wasn’t it blasphemy to consider someone else greater than Shakespeare? And then to say it about yourself, that was even worse, assuming of course there was even space below such already depraved behaviour to sink even further.

All of a sudden I liked Shaw. He’s Irish (the teacher repeated that a lot too) and apparently back then, maybe even now too, he was something of an outsider and not supposed to knock revered English writers off their marble pedestals.

To some of the English it was an embarrasment to have the historical absurdities of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra pointed out, and particulary by an Irishman. But then Shaw went one painful step further and corrected Shakespeare’s mistakes by writing his own revised version of the events in his own play, Julius Caesar. Perhaps Shaw was thinking we could now throw Shakespeare’s old play away and use his new and improved one in it’s place?

I really didn’t like Shaw’s play much. Too “didactic” or teachy. You’d think it was intentionally written for a high school English class to study. But I liked his irreverent sense of humour. He should of stuck to making fun of the establishment instead of trying to become one of them.
 

Although most labels in the art world have a number of interpretations, I define algorithmic art as artwork made with algorithms. An algorithm is a series of instructions.

Usually these instructions are computer commands and algorithmic art is made with computers. But it’s the “mechanical” component that makes algorithmic art special and the machine doesn’t necesarily have to be a computer.

Fractal art is a type of algorithimic art. The algorithms are primarily the fractal formulas but also the other programming components which contribute to appearance of the generated image.

Although purists would say true algorithmic art has no human modifications to it or any other human contibution (except creating the algorithm or operating the machine, of course), such a strict approach rarely works.

A small amount of human guidance yields enormous profits in the creation of algorithmic art. In fractal art this guidance comes in the form of adjusting coloring effects or choosing what part of the image to display, or adding layers, or any other arbitrary decisions that interrupt or alter the process of image generation.

Although randomly chosen parameter settings could theoretically reproduce all the adjustments made by a skilled fractal artist, I have never seen any examples of such mechanically made fractal art (ie. having a skilled appearance).

So algorithmic art (if you accept my non-purist definition) is primarily a collaboration between artists and machines. The more decisions the artist makes, the less mechanical the artwork is. The less involved the artist is with the process, then the more mechanical it is.

The machine becomes just another tool when complex layering and coloring are involved, similar to a brush in the hand of a painter… Digital brush, Digital canvas –Digital da Vinci.

But when the machine is elevated to the lofty status of “Giver of Art”, “Oh, Silicon One”… It’s every graphic utterance received with rejoicing and exultation… The artist reduced to a selfless slave, a lever pulling worm toiling in the shadow of The Great Mechanical Meta-Marvelous Master of Algorithmic Awe-Wonder…

Well, that’s different.

I need to clean out my browser bookmarks. I accidently clicked on some old thing anonymously titled Main Menu, Algorithmic Art.

Richard Nixon once said that the reason people go to hear politicians speak is not to find out what they’re going to do if they get elected, but to find out, “What makes this guy tick?” We’re all curious about people and why they do what they do.

Honestly, I could never figure out what this guy saw in his own work. Why the excitement?

He’s got a pen or marker attached to a drafting plotter that draws the results of some algorithm. It’s nowhere near as interesting as even a simple mandelbrot formula would be. Has he never heard of fractals?

This second visit to his website, after a space of about a year, left me with a different impression. I think I know what makes this guy tick, now.

Look at the presentation of his, uh, simple images: Artwork framed alongside -and giving equal space to- the binary code of the algorithm that made them. The 0’s and 1’s starting and ending with a short strip of gold leaf!

I was touched by his reverence for the machine and I felt ashamed of the insulting things I had once thought about his work.

He’s not ashamed of the mechanical roots of his artwork. In fact, he seems to see it as something to be admired, as if binary code could almost be beautiful all on it’s own. Just like some architects who allow a building’s stuctural components, like iron girders and concrete pillars, to be exposed as elements of style, having their own massive and mechanical, primitive charm.
 

Download parameter file “bug05.ink”

I’ve found a new toy.

It makes everything look like it was ripped out of an old book, so to speak.

Costs money. $15 US. Fully functional demo download.

Just like uscomic.8bf, it often takes uninteresting images and transforms them, lifting them to higher quanta.

People like me need all the help they can get.

I mostly use the Bayer pattern, but the bubbles can be pretty good too.

I use queen (or burn), softlight, or procedural+. Overlay has worked once or twice. Some of them seem to do the same thing.

I think you’ve got 2 weeks to buy it before it stops working, but maybe you can rip them off for longer.

Download parameter file “bug17.ink”

It’s one of the cheapest filters made by Flaming Pear, but it’s also their best. I tried out a bunch of the other more expensive ones, but I didn’t find them useful. I don’t think freaks like me are their target market.

I think it just adds a patterned layer and merges it with a preset method, but the Bayer method is a little more sophisticated. I’m just guessing.

One of the best rationalizations for not paying for shareware is: I’m not finished checking it out yet, I need another year. The next one is: I’m not a rich professional like they are, so I don’t need to pay. Next: If they want people to buy it, then why are they giving it away for free? After that: Pretty soon I’m going to be so sick of using this thing I won’t want it anymore, and why should I pay for something I don’t want? Finally: Stealing is a victimless crime, like throwing a rock into a crowd.

When used with the GIMP it’s really slow. Which is too bad since the GIMP has tear off menus which makes it a lot more convenient to access frequently used filters. XnView is much faster, but it’s hard getting used to having only one level of undo.

Download parameter file “beetle05b.ink”

What does it do? It dithers the image using a variety of patterns. Not really, but that’s the general effect. Dithering is much like a texture layer, but it can also re-draw the image, creating something that is categorically different.

Dithering or half-tone patterns can be very creative, altering the color and appearance of the image in intriguing ways. But not always.

Saving as a jpg makes for smooth gradients, but to keep the colors from changing (for the worse) you’ll have to up the quality to the point the file size is ridiculously big. I save them as 256 color pngs, indexed in Irfanview which has a good dithering algorithm that preserves gradients adequately.

When something works out well, ask yourself why and try to reproduce those conditions. Digital skill is all about becoming part of the algorithm.

Download parameter file “crown09q.ink”

Filters are tools, they don’t do anything on their own. That just about describes me too. Computers make everything so easy. That’s why we’ve accomplished so much.

This filter really works well with the Inkblot Kaos fractal program. I only use the first “stalks” setting, but that one makes such awesome stuff I wouldn’t have time for any others. The formula parser allows you to dream up enough creative variations to keep you busy for ages.

I think of the two programs as a team: Inkblot is the pottery wheel which forms the clay, India Ink is the kiln that fires it and adds the glaze.
 

Who would have thought this humble pest would someday take a seat beside the likes of David Copperfield or Martin Chuzzlewit, as The King of the Microbes.

One of the most startling events for fans of Charles Dickens this past year has been the recent discovery of an unpublished manuscript, The King of the Microbes. It’s authorship is still controversial, due to it’s peculiar subject matter, but some scholars say it’s nothing new, and argue that Dickens made numerous references to it in his diaries and letters although, until now, everyone assumed it never became more than just an idea.

Published for the first time after being written over a hundred years ago, Charles Dickens’ strangest work has become an instant cult classic.

A noted scholar on Dickens’ work has responded with total disbelief, “Charles Dickens never wrote anything remotely like this sort of science fiction novel. They didn’t even know about microbes when he was alive. It’s ridiculous, not even one of his contemporaries could have written it.”

Tracing the life of Jim, a microbe, the novel describes his impoverished beginnings and subsequent separation from his family at the tender age of 8, when he’s sent to a large industrial center to earn money to help support his family back home.

Exploited by the factory owners and earning nothing but a meager ration of gruel each day for his work, Jim uses his organizational talents and sincere charm to lead a labour revolt that eventually grows into something of a revolution ending with him being crowned as their king.

Standard Oliver Twistian fare, excusing the revolutionary theme, but this all takes place on the microscopic level and there’s none of the happy, plump and playfully named humans which the readers of other works by Charles Dickens would expect. In fact, there aren’t any people at all, and his best friend is named “Zorax.”

Download parameter file “crown09b.ink”

The prestigious Royal Institute for Victorian Literature said, “It’s obviously Dickens’ work. While he never actually quotes from it, he mentions a work, Microbe Town profusely in his diaries and letters, a few of which are to his publisher, who for some reason seems uninterested in it. Perhaps it wasn’t finished, although most of Dickens’ works were originally published as a continuous series of magazine installments. I rather suspect Dickens was uncomfortable with it and died before he could make up his mind to have it published.”

Still only available in hard cover, and elaborately illustrated, The King of the Microbes has completely sold out it’s first, and rather short, printing run. Copyright issues have blocked publication in the United States as the estate of Charles Dickens has said that since the manuscript was never published, it’s not in the public domain yet, unlike the rest of Dickens’ work, and therefore they still hold the copyright.

Borderbooks, a U.S. publishing house in New York, says it intends to publish the work since they say they have an exclusive contract with someone they claim to be the real, and currently “living” author. The real “Charles Dickens” who wrote the book they say is an american who uses “Charles Dickens” as a pen name and was something of a drifter who previously worked as a microbiologist and has been an avid fan of the original victorian writer all his life.

This american microbiologist apparently was intrigued by the references the original Dickens made to the unknown work, Microbe Town, and set out to write the novel that he thought the real Dickens would have made.

The mysterious writer has so far been unavailable for comment and, according to his publisher, was last seen “dressed up like the Ghost of Christmas Past on a motorcycle he bought with his advance money, seriously drunk, and intending to head out to California, with a surf board tied to the back rest of his motorcycle and promising to write a sequel along the way that he’d drop in the mail when he got there…”

Alright. That’s too much. I should have stopped before I got to the motorcycle, or the drifter.

Anyhow, I thought these processed Inkblot Kaos images would fit in just perfectly with such a novel, The King of the Microbes. Should it ever be written. Or discovered. Or whatever.
 

He played the Balalaika… then ate it!

I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I clapped.

He wasn’t finished yet.

Everyone in the alien dinner theater scowled at me while he started again, from the beginning.

I couldn’t see why this guy was such a big celebrity on this planet.

Until he started to sing. It was the most amazing performance I’d ever heard.

But the local aliens at my table weren’t too impressed. “Anyone with two heads can sing harmony like that,” they muttered.
 

Periodically, blog housekeeping issues arise that need to be clarified.

Orbit Trap is not an online community. We’re a blog. In a very real sense, we are like a publishing house. We reserve the right to choose what we will and will not publish. We do not exclude public opinion. Comments are welcome, and we do not shy away from controversy, but we do expect all remarks to be civil and respectful. We will not tolerate trolls or hand our blog over to them for use as their private platform. Trolls, of course, have the freedom to set up their own blogs and rail away at us 24-7 if they wish.

It’s been ages now since ants took over the Earth, but they still enjoy reliving the old battles.

“One small step for an ant, one giant leap for all insects.” Conquering the humans was the defining moment in the civilization of the ants.

When they read what we wrote about them in textbooks, they weren’t insulted. “Look how the mighty have fallen!” they roared with joy.

Every year on Veteran’s Day (for ants) they re-enact the great battles and tell their children and grandchildren about the Revolution.

“Son, the history books will tell you that the 214th Leaf Cutter Division captured Washington. But by the time they got there it was just me and few other guys. Beat but not beaten.”

“Just me, a few guys and our Electro Sine Trap Tentacles of Terror!“

“Boy, tell your children and your grandchildren, if the humans ever come back from their holes in the ground, just let ’em have it with the Electro Sine Trap Tentacles of Terror. Those babies will fry ’em where they stand!”
 

Hey, how about it? Is this the Campbell Soup Cans of fractals or what?

Anyhow, Andy told me, and no one else knows this, that he’s taken all his talent and everything he’s ever learned about art and put it into a single photoshop filter.

And he gave it to me, on a diskette.

I’d post it for download, but I promised I wouldn’t, or else I’d lose all my super-powers.

A long time ago when I was in university I wanted to learn Spanish because I was going to go to Mexico for two months in the summer. Being exceptionally lazy when it comes to learning languages, or anything else mathematical, I checked out, started to study, and gave up on, a number of Spanish grammars.

I was in the public library looking for a different kind of Spanish textbook when I found a hardcover one with no dust jacket from the 1950’s illustrated with small line art drawings. Each little ink sketch was signed, “A. Warhola.”

I laughed. It had to be Andy Warhol. In fact, I figured he was a little embarassed with putting his real name on these trivial illustrations so he contemptously wrote his last name “Warhola.”

Years later, when I began to read about things, I was surprised to find out that Warhola was actually his real name from the beginning, and he dropped the “a” off the end later on so it wouldn’t sound so…

I never finished reading the book about Andy Warhol. I don’t know what the reason was. A lot of people have altered their names to make them sound more or less of something. I’ll bet there’s even been someone with the last name Warhol who’s added an “a” and changed it to Warhola.

Here’s the original before “warholization” occurred, made in Inkblot Kaos.

Download parameter file “fan23.ink”

Which is better? The Warhol or the Warhola?

Actually, the effect is just the uscomic.8bf thing with the darkness slider moved to the lighter end of the range, the image inverted and the hue moved about half way around the spectrum. But maybe that’s all Andy Warhol ever did when he made his famous stuff.

Of course he would have had to do it the hard, old-fashioned way.
 

I’ve been spending alot of time in my garbage can lately.

Never before has it been such a delight to retieve stuff I thought was worthless, even the things stuck to the bottom of the can. I feed them into the uscomic.8bf machine and out comes instant Strange Tales and Journey into Mystery 1960’s vintage comic book imagery.

Not only that, part of the process reduces the image to only 8 colors which makes for bright and solid indexed pngs with file sizes as small as the prices on old comic books. (They used to sell for 10 or 12 cents in the early 60s.)

Of course it’s not art or anything like that. Are comic books literature?

In keeping with my cheap, economical ways, I’ve been using a program called XnView. It’s just one of those free image viewers that allows you to browse directories of images by creating a bunch of thumbnails.

It also had a few “effects” with it. Nothing special, just versions of common things like oil painting and the shakey shifty smudgy ones. Also a funky dithering thing that makes images look like they’re full of cross hatching and dots like they used to use in the old days to fake colors that were too expensive to print separately.

A really bad inkjet printer does the same thing. It looks great.

Anyhow, XnView has this menu option that says “Adobe Photoshop Plugin.” Now that sounds professional and stuffed with money to me. But no, you can get them for free too.

Whoever figured out how to get Photoshop plugins to work with other programs for free deserves some kind of special award. (That is, as long as it doesn’t cost anything.)

So among three or four hundred other plugins I downloaded one evening, was this uscomic.8bf. Filters or plugins or whatever, are either very cool or absolutely stupid. I got about 398 stupid ones and two cool ones. The other one produces a black and white (2 color) pen and ink image.

What was I thinking when I saved this? (57k)

Oh yeah! Cosmic Creatures and the Invasion from Space! (18k)

The comic filter fixes up lousy color too. Or rather it makes it look like an old comic book; which might not always be what you want.

Of course, the real excitement comes when you start to combine filters and develop sequences or “algorithms” that, more often than not, produce good effects.

For instance, inverting the output of uscomic looks pretty interesting sometimes. It looks silkscreened and rather artsy; not comic bookish at all. But I guess that’s what you’d expect the opposite of a comic book to be.

I could have anti-aliased this, but it would still be a mess (46k)

Aaaaaaa!!! Who left the door open to the 4th Dimension! (16k)

As a somewhat humorous postscript, I accidently discovered the underlying simplicity to much of the uscomic filter. I clicked on the adjust “brightness/contrast/gamma/balance” tool to prepare my raw image for the filter and saw the image go comic book all on it’s own.

It seems the last settings for the tool (which it automatically restored when I went to use it again) were +77 for brightness (range is -127 to +127) and +127 for contrast. This produces almost exactly the same results as the uscomic filter –even the color reduction to 8 colors. Bright images will need to be inverted to complete the effect.

The graphics program is like a guitar. Look at all incredible music that can be made with a guitar. And it’s only got six strings.
 

It sits there, quietly. Unused but waiting.

Sometimes while working on the fractal machine, I look over at it. Our eyes meet. I say nothing and return to the fractal machine.

Before I discovered fractals my hobby was making seamless background tiles and web graphics in my graphics progam.

I made thousands, maybe ten thousand tiles. It was a lot of fun taking any kind of image and working it over with filters and effects then hitting the “make seamless” filter.

I used the GIMP because it’s the most graphics program you can get for free. Photoshop probably has more capabilities but I couldn’t justify paying that much for something that was just a hobby.

I’m not trying to boast or anything, but when you make ten thousand unique background tiles over the course of three years, working for a couple of hours every evening, you aquire some familiarity with your graphics machine. If I had practiced the piano or guitar that much, I’d be a reasonably good musician. Anyone would be.

But then I discovered fractals and the effect of the seamless filter didn’t “become” them. I made one seamless fractal tile early on, and despite many hours of subsequent work, couldn’t make another that looked appealing.

So with the arrival of my fractal machine…. dust settled on my graphics machine.

Occasionally I sparked it up to make some web graphics to accompany my new (and ever-expanding) fractal gallery. Sometimes I would embark on a weeklong binge of “tinting” old photos I got off the internet (public domain).

I never fed one of my pristine fractals into the titanium teeth of my graphics machine, ever. Never. ( Stop it! Stop looking at her like that! You filthy graphics program!!! )

It wasn’t for any ideological reason, like I was against “post-processing” or anything like that. It was just that the fractal programs I was using, Sterlingware and Xaos, produced such wonderful images on their own that I didn’t see any use in adding a second machine to the process.

Also, the process of creating fractals was a very complicated one and meant that you needed to see the results of any parameter adjustments right away and then make changes to the basic image (zoom in or out). All I could do in a graphics program would be to add graphical effects to a single image. If it didn’t produce anything worthwhile, all I could do is go back to the fractal machine and start over again.

Xaos actually incorporates two styles of edge-detection within the program, and good, random palette generation. But what could my coal-burning graphics factory add to the refined imagery made on a fractal Stradivarius like Sterlingware?

Nothing but crude effects and spray-can graffitti.

But things change. I changed. My fractals changed. I went from making super-crisp photorealistic images in Sterlingware to making flatter, more abstract, silk-screen like images.

My fractals started to look more like the “tinted” or post-processed photographs that I liked to make. I was getting closer to producing the same type of imagery with two different machines.

Maybe I could process a fractal image the same way I processed a photographic one? If I could turn an old National Wildlife Service photo of the desert into a glowing green moonscape, maybe I could put a fractal “photo” into a similar orbit?

A dull, ho-hum, recycle-bin grade fractal
Should have been anti-aliased, but who cares?

Whoa! Beam me up Scotty!
It’s the..
Alien Portal to the 4th Dimension!

I resized it up to 400×200; reduced the palette to 8 colors with a dithering thing; applied the “oil painting” filter; and then took the rest of the week off.

Some times it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, it’s like turning straw into gold. And if that happens often enough, it’s worth the extra time jolting, zapping and irradiating a fractal …in the other machine.