Writing Excuses - 20 - A tribute to Alex TD

Previous homework: Imagine someone is a serial art collector AND a serial artist killer

A Tribute to Alex TD (Uuugggg): https://tdsgames.com/

The Mandelbrot Mirror

I was sitting at my computer, trying to finish a story about an AI that kills artists to preserve the value of their work. It was supposed to have a dark, cynical premise with the idea that art is worth more when the source is gone. To clear my head, I tabbed back over to Rimworld, my favorite game about survival and managing chaos.

For days, I had been feeling the absence of a specific mod. It was a tool called "Replace Stuff," a piece of invisible infrastructure that makes the game flow better. It is the kind of code you don't notice until it's gone because it silently fixes frustrations before they happen. I went to the workshop page to download it and found the notice:

I don't know what possessed me to keep digging. Perhaps it was because the theme of my writing, the value of dead artists, was fresh on my mind. I found the reddit post announcing his death. Uuugggg was Alex TD. He died on June 29, 2025, at 38 years old.

I turned 38 on the exact day he died.

While I was writing fiction about the death of artists, a real sculptor of code and logic had slipped away six months before I was aware of it. I never knew Alex. We never spoke. But in the strange, algorithmic serendipity of the internet, I went looking for the man who built the tools that helped me escape reality. I used his mod for seven years and never gave a further thought about the person behind it.

I found his YouTube channel and on that is a video titled "Mandelbrot Musings: Stability". And in his own gentle and intelligent voice, I found the only explanation for grief that makes the most sense to me.

In his video, Alex asks a question that feels hauntingly prescient: "How does a tiny change in one direction create instability and then a tiny change in the same direction create stability again?"

He explains that for a point to remain "stable" within the Mandelbrot fractal, it undergoes a process: a rotation, a "squishing step" toward the origin, and finally, a "nudge". In the math of fractals, this is the variable (+C).

"No matter what point you pick," Alex says, "there is just a rotation step, a squishing step, and a little nudge."

Life provides the rotation and the squish. The days turn; the routine compresses us. But Alex was the (+C). He was the specific, constant nudge that kept the system from flying apart.

According to his mother, Marilyn, that nudge was witty, and "teal-loving." It was a nudge that loved puzzles and word games. It was a nudge that named his three cats Callisto, Ganymede, and Io, and consequently named his apartment Jupiter so they could orbit him properly.

Without that specific variable, the equation changes. Without the specific artist, the art is just a "Dumb Mandelbrot"; a perfect, boring circle. It is the human element, the (+C) that creates the complexity and the beauty in life.

As I clicked through his channel and his website, the grief shifted from general to piercingly specific. I didn't just find a modder; I found a mirror.

Beyond the shared age, I saw the landmarks of a life I recognized. He loved Stargate, he played World of Warcraft. He spoke the languages of Portal and Dungeons & Dragons. He built puzzles and word games, dissecting rules to make them better, just as I was trying to do in my own writing.

In his video, Alex points to two spots on the screen and asks, "How in the world is this point in the Mandelbrot set, but this point that's right next to it is not?"

We were points right next to each other. We were running on parallel lines, consuming the same stories, playing the same games, interested in the same patterns all around us. I felt an immense, retroactive grief for the potential of a friendship that never happened; a conversation about nostalgia in Westfall, or why our favorite characters in Stargate were actually all of them. It feels like a glitch in the simulation that we never met, and the cold cruelty of the code that I found him only after he was gone.

Alex describes what happens when a point gets too close to the edge of the cardioid. He talks about "chaos" and points that "push outward."

"Fundamentally," he says, "you are either spiraling into a point or spiraling out towards infinity."

On June 29th, that tiny change in one direction manifested as an aortic aneurysm and shifted his trajectory forever. And Alex, who had spent his life spiraling inward into code, into games, and into the hearts of his community, suddenly spiraled out toward infinity.

It is the nature of the set. Some points are in, and some points are out. It feels cruel in its randomness, but as Alex said of the chaotic zones in the fractal, "I’m not about to explain it or give you any intuitive understanding… it's honestly just a bit of black magic."

But the final chapter of Alex's video broke my heart and then put it back together. He zooms deep into the "middle of nowhere," far from the main fractal, and finds a perfect, miniature replica of the set.

"Why does a mini Mandelbrot set show up in the middle of nowhere?" he asks. "Well, it's simply because it behaves like the Mandelbrot set... everything that we've learned before, it all applies. It all works the same."

This is what I saw in the wake of his passing. Alex is gone, but a "pocket of stability" has appeared. His mother wrote about the "village" that formed of community members stepping up to maintain his mods, lifelong friends watching over his legacy, and strangers donating to the "moons" he left behind. A new structure formed out of the void, behaving exactly as Alex did. Preserving the code, maintaining the logic, and keeping the "game" running smoothly.

Alex said, "I’m not going to tell you how or why that works, but you can see that it does work."

I sat there, 38 years old, mourning a man who will never make it to 39. I realized that my story about the AI was wrong. You cannot kill the artist to preserve the value of the art. The artist is the value. The artist is the (+C) that turns a boring circle into an infinite, beautiful spiral. Alex's most commonly used mod was called "Replace Stuff," but the man himself is irreplaceable. He left behind the invisible infrastructure of our joy, a map of how to be kind, clever, and constant in a chaotic world.

In his video, Alex repeatedly says, "The math works out that way."

He was right. The math of a life lived with his kind of wit and generosity doesn't just end; it iterates. It becomes a permanent part of the structure. A pocket of stability for the rest of us to find when the chaos sends us spiraling.

"So that's it, I'm out of here, goodbye."

o7