Waves have their ups and downs; they come and go, come and go… And so, after a huge hiatus, my interest in fractal pictures has unexpectedly renewed for a second season —starting today, with a new angle on an old favorite: Estudio Detail 2.
A short narrative of what has happened lately
Twenty years this year (exact date is unknown), I started creating my first fractal pictures after hooking up to the Internet for the first time, and searching for this topic to satisfy a childhood curiosity. Around May 1998, I began sharing some 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 back then. A month later I designed the first version of what I called Fractal Division, a basic website initially hosted on Geocities (short-lived) and Tripod, where I posted some of the pictures that received good reviews from the abpf veterans.
Over the following months, the website kept growing as I added more content, including a few writings about fractals and art as I understood them. By 1999, the project had earned a 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 on time, and an impostor within the fractal art community seized the opportunity to register the TLD for his own use. My guess was that he intended to drive more visitors to his site, but when the ploy didn’t pay off, the con artist simply stopped renewing the domain. And so fractovia.org soon ended up in the hands of some domain speculator, by then rampant on the net. Me? I simply lost it forever, unable to pay the juicy ransom demanded to rescue it… to this day.
That event is partially to blame for my long-lost love of fractal image exploration in the years to come. I even tried to coin a new catchy name to start anew, but adult-life circumstances conspired against it, and eventually other affairs took the spot once reserved for fractal art.
The last update on old Fractovia registered on 2007 April 2; 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, giving me a chance to reconnect with 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…