This art is in response to 's Christmas Ornaments Contest, which you can find HERE!
This ball is dedicated and given to , my favorite Hive front-end, and the one that gave me my life back!
When Hive first started, the world was plunging into the pandemic, and I was increasing my activity and Hive stack all I could, knowing that it would be the last redoubt if things REALLY went south. That got up to 12 hours a day on the computer between that and other projects -- that's a lot. It wore out my old computer, to say nothing of what it was doing to me.
The front end that we started Hive with worked very much like the main front-end of Hive's predecessor ... that, too, was depressing me. That whole end sequence on the predecessor -- PAINFUL, because, on principle, there could be no middle ground, and while the people whose opinion I respected the most came over to Hive, that didn't mean I didn't have to leave friends and projects behind. Every day, the first front-end reminded me of the conflict and the loss...
Enter -- a fresh start with two details that make it the ultimate place for me:
Scheduling: PeakD lets you schedule your posts in advance, meaning that my days of sitting at the computer for 12 hours trying to do everything and get is posted in the middle of everything else came to an end -- over the course of a day, and a week, all I had to do was put in some focused creation time, and then schedule the results out over the course of a day, a week, a month. This brought my stress level way, way down.
Collections -- it took me a little longer to discover this, and I haven't yet gotten all the use of it that I can, but, this is a why for me to further organize. I am prolific -- in 17 days in July 2019, I wrote enough to become THIS:
... but the thing is, even though I have also written enough for several sequels, you can't just put a book out every month. There's marketing and beta readers and other necessities to consider. One has to figure that out in fiat world in a different way. Meanwhile, the ability to create and schedule in PeakD allowed me to create several storylines and mini-epics within two big story universes: the Lofton County Universe and the M.A. Kirk Family Universe. I've written enough so that it is getting kind of hard for me to find things when I want to refer back to them -- BUT, in PeakD, one can make collections of posts so that related things can stay together and people can read a mini-tale within the never-ending stories. These are especially useful when collaborating with others -- a way to create a collection that both parties can point back to as a big section of their work!
Thank you, ... and of course, I'm writing this to you at least a week in advance!
How this was made ... as ever, I used 's ball form, which you'll find in her original contest post ...
But then, things got interesting in Apophysis 2.09 -- I didn't mean to make that, but, it was what showed up one fine day some time sgo.
I saw trees in the foreground, a peak in the back -- and, in fact, if you look carefully, you'll see something you can observe in pictures of really high mountains: the potential of bands of exposed rock because of areas in which the wind blows too strongly over a steep section to allow snow to gather. The best known mountain in the world, Mt. Everest, has two such bands that have to be climbed over! On the other hand: the suggestion of the reflection made me think of a mountain on an island on a still day at sea ... if a very high mountain can cast its shadow almost to the horizon, then it makes sense that maybe it might see its reflection in water even well back from the coast!
So, sometime ago, I did this with the original fractal:
The problem there became that the transparency of the original fractal was lost, and then there came the issue of how to get a rectangular peg into a round ball while maintaining the symmetry ... a little island sitting in a sea of round tranquility ... almost a snow globe ... lots of issues, trying to make that work, but, the results are worth the effort!