Page 15: issue 22 - Country Song

shastab24 on May 14, 2025

That overhead shot of the 501 was interesting to do, it being all from memory, but one of those things that really shows the scale of the place better than I sometimes do. It's also a bit of a throwback, because the actual, real-world Club 501? It's gone. Went out of business years ago. There's been recently a new gay bar opened in its spot, called The Vault, but I've never been to it. I plan to at some point, but I know it can't be the same. This hub world bar will still remain the 501, though. Just because the actual business went under doesn't mean this cozy little place will be affected. Heck, the guy Deviant up there is inspired by no longer works for any bar (I ran into him at Pride a couple years ago and he seems to be doing well).

Also, of note: it's become so hard to do Fractal's fractal patterns. At one point, I found the perfect site, which just had a randomly generated fractal pattern every time you refreshed the page, nicely in computer wallpaper size. That's disappeared, and I had to scrounge to find something. For this issue, I used a site that's all about AI images. I can't stand this AI stuff, but they had specifically a fractal image generator as one of their offerings. It's one of the things I think AI can be better used for, since it truly is something that I'm okay with computers doing instead of humans. I mean, fractals are all about math so complex we couldn't even create them without computers. And since computers are all about math, that's where it's best directed. Something tells me these aren't actually fractal patterns, though, and just the AI doing something to approximate the idea of them, because that's that this AI stuff tends to do.

This is a part of the 2016 Halloween Cameo Caper.