I have been enjoying many of the flames here recently. They're not all crap and there is plenty of non-flame crap to go around too. Besides, we really shouldn't call anything here "crap". This place has a range of experience levels. I would never call my granddaughter's finger paintings crap. That's just not cool. I have said this many times before but it's worth saying again: First and foremost, this place is a community. The social aspects of it dominate the art, but I have learned to enjoy both. Stagnation, now that's a thought worth thinking about. I wonder, have we taken fractal art as far as it will go? I have to bring up DA one more time. This might seem strange, but the reason that it has my attention is because my older teenage daughter is visiting it. She didn't hear about it from me, she heard about it from her non-artist friends. It's becoming popular among the youngsters, like MySpace is (my daughter hates it when I look at her MySpace. I get to see who her friends are and what they are like, thus getting to know the real her better). DA has great art but I think it's the blog/social aspect of it that is moving it forward as fast as it is. Flames, one more time Apophysis is becoming the fractal standard. It used to be Fractint, then UF and maybe XD, now it's apo. Apo is bringing in the new generation of fractal artists. I found it amusing to hear the old "pure fractal" expression get used for flames. Apophysis was originally created to be a front end flame finder for UF and I still use it that way. It's like the poor flame is defiled when I stuff it into UF to give it a background or mask a chunk of it off. I've stolen its virtue :-) New people don't know the history of apo, so when a flame is taken to its fullest potential in UF, they think it's been violated :-). This is funny to me because I used to use the same "fractal purity" argument about UF images that were altered in Photoshop. My philosophy has changed. I want to see the art of fractals move forward as much as possible and I want to leave all creative options open so that it will move forward as fast as it can.