It's so beautiful...

Okay, nothing to do with gaming (although watch me try to link it in later) but I thought I'd share with you this marvellous animation of a zoom in on a Mandelbrot fractal.

The notes on the animation are quite mind-blowing, especially considering the scale of the thing. It's quite a large file so it may run better if you don't have too much open at the same time. YMMV.

It strikes me that the zooming, getting further and further in and yet finding that there seem to be never-ending layers of complexity is quite like the process of designing a world, except in reverse. You start out with a feature, give it some effects, stats, etc, and then pull back and realise that it's in a room, so you flesh that out, then the room needs an area, the area needs a level, the level is in a dungeon, the dungeon is in a country...you get the picture.

Of course, the Mandelbrot fractal could probably go on for far longer than any sane DM would like to extend the design process (although I'm no mathematician so if anyone knows different, they might wish to enlighten me). And physicists do point to the fractal as a display of how staggeringly beautiful complexity can arise as if from nowhere.

Whereas we DMs have to work damn hard to get ours looking as good!