Electric Sheep

A year or so ago my friend Kerry introduced me to a screensaver, called Electric Sheep.

What he didn't warn me about is that it's not JUST a screensaver, but a way to while away those endless hours that you could spend saving the planet, learning to be a better person, or in the loving company of your sweetheart, but instead choose to be planted in front of the computer.

At its most basic, the Electric Sheep screensaver plays little 4-second movies of fractal animations as your screensaver. It also uses the spare CPU cycles of your computer to compute frames for new animations.
If you like (or dislike) a particular fractal, you may vote on it by pressing the up (or down) arrow key. The server records your votes. Sheep that get lots of votes are more likely to reproduce.
Sheep come from two sources: reproducing on the server (as above) or from users uploading the parameters for a fractal, which are then used as the basis for an animation.

However, there is much, much more to it than that. You can also make sheep, upload them to the server, watch their popularity rise and wane, and look for lambs that they may have produced with other server sheep. You can even hand-breed sheep to make lambs at home.

The information on how to do all these things used to be scattered in blogs and mailing lists all over the 'net, so I collected it up in one place. You can now find that information on the Electric Sheep Wiki:
How to make a sheep
Using Apophysis to Make Sheep

My personal sheep archive starts here and goes on to there/. There's a navigation menu on the first page, but because HTML still does not have a good way to include other html pages, you do not get an index here.

All Electric Sheep are copyrighted with an Attribution Creative Commons license. All still images and other stuff are under my copyright: