Magellan's Log: Beautiful Dreamer Introduction

Beautiful Dreamer

As any denizen of Las Vegas or any quantum physicist can tell you, randomness is not always what it's cracked up to be. Still, it's all we've got in this reality when it comes to plain old unpredictability. Accidents do happen to the best laid plans of mice, men, and imperial presidents, don't they?

For reasons that will probably never be clear, we at Magellan's Log are right fond of so-called randomness.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed, for example, that we've gone to a lot of trouble to enable random access to every one of the 4,000 or so pages that make up this publication. If you look at the bottom of the front page of each issue, somewhere down there you'll find a "random page" link.

In four years of publication we have gathered as a resource now on our hard drives some 7,000 images, many of which we've used, many more of which we haven't.

One afternoon not long ago, Joey Ancaster, our graphics guy, amused himself--and the rest of us--by copying ALL of those images into one directory, then setting a graphics display program to do a random slide show on a 3 x 3 grid.

Given the range of our interests around here, the result was, to say the least, stimulating, with unexpected juxtapositions of images ranging from funny to surreal to highly suggestive.

We don't have the bandwidth to reproduce the effect exactly, but we can approximate it.

Which we have now done.

We started the graphics display program and each time the 3x3 grid was filled, we did a screen print. Fascinated, we finally forced ourselves to stop after gathering 21 screenfuls. Art, history, architecture, cars, tasteless cartoons, skin, titles... everything came flashing onto the monitor.

Exercising remarkable restraint, we kept our editing fingers from fiddling with (read: "improving") this sampling of Magellan's Log imagery.

Call our restraint "obeisance to the gods of chance," O.K.?

On the next page you'll find the 21 screens (189 images) presented as a slideshow, with a little Stephen F. Foster background music.

If, by chance, you enjoy it, be sure to let us know. ;-)

Oh, and please be patient if you have a slow connection. You'll need to give the page time to load about 700k before the show starts.

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