Mary Holstege

Vibrantly coloured rogrammatic millipede squirming up from the bottom of the canvas.

Millipede

Fat little purple beetle with very long antennae.

Beetle

A randomly generated red ant with spindly legs and a rather oddly shaped abdomen.

#GenerativeArt interlude

Generative bugs

I'm not claiming this is entirely anatomically correct, mind you, but I think they're adorable

Ant

Available now at your favorite digital store! Atraxian Blue by Mary Holstege

Chapter 39 of Atraxian Blue (https://books2read.com/u/b6ElAx) is up at http://mathling.com/books/index.html

Renny tries to cook

In which Renny, who had "never even buttered his own toast" is confronted with a kitchen with predictable results

#scifi
#writing
#AtraxianBlue

Little tomato seedlings of several varieties are poking up in a bank of propagation trays. Soon, my pretties, soon...

#gardening update

Despite the unfortunate cat-squashing incident, the experimental tomato seedlings from the University of Florida are doing fine. I'm excited to try them out in my new raised bed.

Three monkeys sit clustered together in a dead branch high in a tree, facing the bright early morning sun. Seeing evil, hearing evil, speaking evil? Photographer: me Location: Zambezi National Park, Zimbabwe

#SilentSunday #Photography

Orange tabby squirms and rolls in pleasure in the space under a tube amp. She is having a grand old time. Photographer and lead guitar: Ian Ford-Holstege

Mikong rocks out old school

#Caturday #Photography

Promo logo for Smashwords read an ebook week http://www.smashwords.com/sale A woman with a bow and glasses looks at her phone while little hearts pour out of it.

Last two days!

My ebooks are all on sale:

Atraxian Blue & Palisade Green from the Belle Epoch series (space opera; quirky artist, somewhat broken characters)

The Keeper of Maps (epic fantasy, female protagonist)

https://www.smashwords.com/sale […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

The Cat Whisperer's genealogical hobby is coming in very handy: his cousins got their Irish citizenship with his help. Now he's walking me through what I need a propos the new Canadian citizenship law.

Thinking a non-US passport might be somewhat useful...

A dusty knot of green and gold throws off swirling tendrils, mostly along the cardinal axes, but with swoops and curls in other directions as well. It is perhaps the nebula collapsing, or the star casting off its outer layers. The colouring is of the savannah though, something vegetal and alive. Colophon: iterated functions here are hyperbolic(10%), spiral(30%), PDJ(10%), reflect(50%) composed with flowfield(90%) and perspective(10%)

Inside the space amoeba

A dusty dark brass circle of dust with circular bosses in the middle over a trio of rectangles. The outer boss points to the right, like a turned starfleet sigil, towards a mushroom protrusion on the outermost circle. A fainter point on the left pokes just past the outer circle. It looks like a heavily eroded trace of some piece of technology. Colophon: the iteration functions are sphere(10%), diamond(40%) , fisheye(20%), and juliaScope(30%) composed with crumple(30%), rectangle(10%), curl(30%), and sphere(30%)

#GenerativeArt interlude

Dusting off my old fractal flame code, with a larger set of functions and more efficient rendering

Kinda steampunky

#XQuery #SVG #CreativeCoding

#WordWeavers Mar 2: Do you write scenes out of order? If so, how do you decide their arrangement?

Yes. I write whichever scene is yammering in my head keeping me up at night. I know where they slot in to the scheme of things, so I'll put them in that part of the text file.

Available now at your favorite digital store! Atraxian Blue by Mary Holstege

Chapter 38 of Atraxian Blue (https://books2read.com/u/b6ElAx) is up at http://mathling.com/books/index.html

Painting with Pinkie

In which Renny soothes his cravings with art, and swaps some hard truths with Pinkie

#scifi
#writing
#AtraxianBlue

The Smashwords Read an Ebook Week starts today! You’ll find deals on my books and at Smashwords.com from March 1 through March 7.

The Keeper of Maps and books 1 and 2 of the Belle Epoch Series, here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=holstege

#ebookweek26 #Smashwords #indieauthors […]

Bleached elephant bones lie scattered in the dust, picked clean. They lie up against a small rise towards thorny scrub.

#SilentSunday #Photography

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Black and white cat rolls about in joy in the sunshine, her prey/toy lying dead behind her.

#Caturday #Photography

Happiness is sunshine and rodents

Pale blue dots twisting into what would be a good shape for a wig for that next historical drama, I swear: two loops down on each side, and a loopy bun up top.

The thing is, most sets of constants are BO-RING: clumped into very small rings or circles.

So I play the game of testing whether I'm getting sufficient spread and tweaking the most extreme of the constants to shift them until I get something more interesting.

Wuthering heights hair

Swirls of bright red dots, shading into bright yellow along some edges, forming a roughly Darth-vader-helmet shape, with a glowing round funnel about where one eye would be. Black background.

I'm using random constants in the -3.0 to 3.0 range.

You can get quite a variety of forms.

Lord Vader?

Rendering of a deJong attractor: a twisting smoky flood of green dots over an off-white background. There are several twists and loops, with well-defined edges.

#GenerativeArt interlude

deJong attractors

(x[n+1],y[n+1]) = (sin(a y[n]) - cos(b x[n]), sin(c x[n]) - cos(d y[n])) for constants a,b,c,d

Mapping frequency-at-point to colours (log)

#XQuery #SVG #CreativeCoding

In related news, for this #MarkupMonday

I giving a wee talk about the role iXML plays in my various self-publishing workflows and world-building for the iXML symposium

https://invisiblexml.org/events/symposium2026/

Available now at your favorite digital store! Atraxian Blue by Mary Holstege

Chapter 37 of Atraxian Blue (https://books2read.com/u/b6ElAx) is up at http://mathling.com/books/index.html

Belle Epoch: Sex

In which Tass' instruction is not nearly as fun as he had hoped

#scifi
#writing
#AtraxianBlue

A close up of a dense thicket of wicked thorns. Photographer: me Location: Zambezi National Park, Zimbabwe

#SilentSunday #Photography #mood

Grey cat peers down at us with a distant and somewhat disdainful expression. The light is dim and shadowed, the background plain. (Just some shutters and a blank wall.) He is thinking deep thoughts, is Loki. Photographer: Ian Ford-Holstege

#Caturday #Photography

I am Batman

A silver curve loops around and around upon itself. Inside it, a maze of thin green and tan branches squished and stretched into place.

The mapping from canvas to polygon is by distance and angle from the centers.

Two variants: one, just use same angle and relative distance to intersection along ray; two, use the angle of the same fraction along the bounds.

A maze of green and purple showing multiple circles of branching, all crumpled up into a folded roughly circular area over a black canvas.

#GenerativeArt interlude

Poisson disk sampling starting at a few seeds, with some bias in the search angles.

Connect parent and child points with graded colouring and size.

Then map the whole thing into a polygon (here a flattened knot) creating folds and stretches.

#XQuery #SVG #CreativeCoding

Giant redwood branch, with its broken end away from us, lies hooked in the foliage of a columnar cypress. Three feet to the left and its smashing into the solar panels. Three feet to the right and its smashing into my greenhouse down below.

1. Much as I hate that cypress, it did me a solid here protecting the greenhouse below.

2. I don't understand the geometry here: the parent tree is behind us, so I guess the branch pivoted. No evidence though.

3. The balance here is so fine that a touch […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Book cover, largely black. We see the silhouette of a man falling, caught in a beam of silvery light. We are looking up into a darkened sky, with dark cliffs on either side, and little flecks of silver also falling. "Dourian Black" proclaims the title, by Mary Holstege. The font is leans forward, with slashing gaps in places (Smack-Laideth-Down-2024 for the record). Our little series of the tales of a socially awkward artist and scion of one of the great Houses is indeed taking a dark turn.

#PennedPossibilities 934 — Do you have a book cover for your WIP?

Yes, and now I have to finish the book because I want to use it.

I do my own covers, for better or worse.

Available now at your favorite digital store! Atraxian Blue by Mary Holstege

Chapter 36 of Atraxian Blue (https://books2read.com/u/b6ElAx) is up at http://mathling.com/books/index.html

We can just walks on through

In which Pinkie admires Renny's mural and Renny and makes promises to her he may not be able to keep

#scifi
#writing
#AtraxianBlue

Looking across a harbor from a slightly raised vantage point. The sky is a little dark, the water is a marvelous collection of light and dark blues. Immediately below us is a stone walkway with irregular stones, which also form a low wall hard by the water and a few square bollards/seats. The walkway runs steeply down to a colourful fishing boats and some folded up umbrellas and tables for a cafe. Whitewashed one and two-story buildings line the harbour. A couple of other boats are visible at anchor. Photographer: me Location: Myconos, where we were trapped (oh, the horror) for an extra day by the stormy weather

#SilentSunday #Photography

Black and white cat lies on her back, paws all askew, in a reusable grocery bag which is now sitting in the trash bin. Her yellow-green eyes look towards us in some confusion, squinting a bit from her left eye. Plus blep.

#Caturday #Photography

Luna

It's all fun and games until the grocery bag slides off into the trash bin...