New Background Looking Pretty Darn Good

Russell asked me to restyle my background to make the fine evolutionary structures and processes going on behind the scenes more evident. Since I "spaghetti coded" the final touches to it, I figured it'd be better to start from square one again, this time with a clearer goal in mind.

Currently, I've gone through 20 subversions of the new background, carefully working on a new aesthetic. This time, instead of basic blocks, the background is comprised of living, growing garden beds.

Each garden bed is made up of:

• One tree that grows and nourishes the garden. If the tree dies, the garden bed's other plants can't receive nourishment to grow.
• Several flowers that grow only if the garden bed's tree is alive. All flowers of a given garden bed are the same colour (the colours used were picked to match the colour scheme of my blog).
• Grass, which grows only while the garden bed's tree is alive. As the tree's main trunk grows in size, the grass spreads.

I'm now quickly working on two things:

• Replication and variation through successful garden beds (ones that've lived long enough) spreading their seeds to create new garden beds beside them. Seeds will spread randomly in four directions: up, down, left, and right, and will vary slightly in their attributes from the parent.
• Feeding trees to keep them alive by hovering the mouse over their garden bed.

An interesting aspect of this experiment is that it can be thought of as an analogy for the evolution of city blocks. The mapping would be:

• Garden beds to city blocks,
• Trees to activity nodes,
• Grass to the parasitic exposure smaller buildings receive from the presence of a successful activity node, and
• Energy to the "life & longevity" a city block's buildings gain from the keen inhabitance of people.