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In fact, I liked it so bloody much that I decided to make a new version of it [last page], rather than just leave well enough alone with the old scanned-in, colorized version that used to grace that page. Of course, I decided to do something easy, like a stained-glass window. Then, why not put the window in some kind of stone wall. But not just any stone wall, oh no, not good enough for this masochistic li'l Episkopos. I decided that the wall should be in the form of a Penrose tiling [which is an example of a quasi-fivefold rotational symmetry, which is supposed to be impossible in nature, since you can't tile pentagons non-holistically the way you can tile, for example, squares, triangles and hexagons], and went about figuring out exactly how to do that [and, since the pattern is non-repeating, I had to put the whole thing together pretty much a stone at a time]. Once I had a good plan, I found out that there seems to be a little bug in POVray [which, despite my bitching, is a fantastic package, and is free besides] which prevented me from doing what I originally intended, so I had to do a whole bunch of it over again. What I eventually came up with was a far cry from what I wanted, but I was really, really sick of looking at it after almost three months, so I just called it ``done'' and went on with my life.
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      After a good year of just not liking how the Mandala looked, POVray 3.0 came out, and had nifty things like atmospheric scattering and suchlike. So, I blew the dust off my archived copy of the POVray source and then spent a week or three fiddling with various different aspects of the image, trying to get the window to look more luminous, the wall more stoney and the air more dusty. The starchy tubers of my efforts (and a little over 123 hours of rendering time on a Pentium 150, woo-hoo) are on ye formerly mentioned preceding page.