Waves have their ups and downs; sometimes they come and go, come and go… And so, after a huge hiatus, my interest for fractal pictures has unexpectedly self-renewed for a second season, starting today with a new angle from an old favorite: Estudio Detail 2.
A short narrative of what has happened lately
Twenty years as of this year (exact date is unknown) I started to create my first fractal pictures after hooking up to the Internet for the first time and searching for this topic to satiate a childhood curiosity. Circa May 1998, I began to share a few of those early explorations into the Mandelbrot realm in the alt.binaries.pictures.fractals (abpf) newsgroup, the best… actually the only source of fractal pictures I knew of back then. A month later I created the first version of what I called Fractal Division, a basic website initially hosted in Geocities (short lived) and Tripod, where I placed some of the pictures that got good reviews from the abpf veterans.
For the following months, the website kept growing as I added more content, including a few writings about fractals and fractal art as I understood them. By 1999, the project got its own, more original, name —third apex to fractovia, or Fractovia for short–, a host with no ads, and even its own domain name! Oh, the golden years! But alas…
A few years later, while traveling abroad in the summer of 2004, I failed to renew the domain in due time, and an impostor within the fractal art community seized the opportunity to register the TLD for his own use. My guess was he intended to drive more visitors to his fractal-related site, but when the ploy didn’t pay off, the con artist simply stopped renewing the domain, and so fractovia.org soon landed in the possession of some domain speculator, by then rampant on the net. Me? I simply lost it forever since I couldn’t pay the juicy “ransom” requested to rescue it… to this day.
That event is partially to blame for my long lost love for fractal image exploration in the years to come. I even tried to coin a new catchy name, to start anew, but some adult-life circumstances plotted against it, and eventually other affairs filled the spot once reserved for fractal art. The last update on old Fractovia registered on 2 April 2007; the website went dormant since then. Not a single change: virtually rotting, information getting old, contacts lost in time… Until my current ISP recently collapsed in its own way, opening a chance for me to reconnect to the curiosity that once gave life to this passion.
And so here I am. I still have to come up with a new name, though…