I blame the beetles.
It's a simple enough low-level Art & Music Test. Pick up some wild beetles. Make a beetle terrarium. Grow some cabbages to feed them. Breed some pretty patterns. Display the niftiest one by building its statue in a beetle garden and let the community vote for the ones they like best. If they like yours, you win, and repeat the above two more times to pass the Test.
Well, they have me locked in the grip of a near-obsession.
It's not a complete 100% obsession because it's by choice. I can 'pause' at any time by taking out all the beetles and holding 50 of them in a locker or as much as I can stand to carry in my inventory, whereupon they sit in stasis until I have time to tend them again.
Except I'm nearing 450+ beetles in my inventory with a clunky interface that was probably never meant to deal with so many. I also purposefully spent one or two days working on other Tests in an effort to partially complete them and gain 1 str and 1 dex permanent stat points, so that my inventory capacity expanded by 500 (space for 500 beetles without crippling my other operations, yay!)
I'm mostly stuck in the 'breed pretty patterns' phase.
Being a perfectionist, my beetles never seem to be as cool as the other guy's. I am also hopelessly fascinated by what is apparently some kind of fractal-based system for generating beetle art. The game Explorer in me is trapped by the allure of possibly understanding more about the exact process than most other people - though in ATITD, I'd have to admit there are way way scarier Explorer experts than me all around. And the biologist in me emits little fangirl squeals at the approximation of offspring beetles taking on the traits of their parent beetles, with a little random mutation added to spice up the mix, and the use of an interactive evolution strategy (human operator chooses those that will breed on via aesthetic factors).
Face it, I'll never really understand the math. Behind it or any other fractal. (Though it didn't stop me from making the attempt to read up on wikipedia and websites meant for kiddies about fracals and fractal art. Thought that counts, I guess.)
I can sort of kind of somewhat grasp the deep inherent awe behind the concept PURE MATH in all its glory can generate such beautiful, nature-like and symmetrically pleasing patterns and distill them down to a set of timeless equations. That's cool. I think it's awesome. I have no clue how it works, and my jaw goes slack when I attempt to read something in mathematical language that is as obtuse to me as Enigma code, but you'll pardon me if I just gawk and gape in wonder from somewhere over yonder.
Somewhere over yonder being a little further removed from the field of mathematics and computer science that is the foundation, and over in the applied emergence of biology (fractal-like patterns in nature, natural selection strategies) and art (lookit the pretty pictures...the world is just awesome).
I've learned that such things as flame fractal generators exist (Apophysis) and that the art can be glorious with a little help from Photoshop.
I'm amused (in a good way) by the concept of a shared computer dream of Electric Sheep as selected by a global community of users.
And I'm no closer to dealing with the plague of pretty beetles which threaten to spiral out of control since I have no established system for dealing with them.
It doesn't help that the one person who bothered to write a beetle breeding guide no longer plays, and his images of past beetles no longer exist. All I have are obtuse pattern names.
Some other guy in game was going to give a little lecture on beetle breeding tips, but it was set at 5.30am my time, and I have no clue which day it was supposed to be.
It mildly irritates me not to know what is considered a common pattern or a harder pattern to obtain - since the established veterans will end up voting according to some unvoiced criteria of 'effort spent.' I'd also like to know what is worth keeping and what is not, because otherwise, I'd end up where I am now, 450 beetles in my inventory, kept mostly because they fulfilled my only criteria of "gee, they look nice. I'd like to breed them and see what else appears."
I'd like to be a beetle expert. I'd like to understand, or at least come close to guessing at, how this process works. I'd like to have some sort of library of patterns to access, and a gallery of pretty beetles because they're so damn cool.
I need a naming system and a way of being able to record the look of beetles for posterity so that I don't have to carry them about forever and a way of easily accessing beetles I still want to breed. Not to mention understand enough about the process so that I have workable criteria of what to keep or not, who to breed one beetle with and so on.
I have a ton of work cut out for me. :/
1 comment:
....
*speechless*
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