Actually, some of these "weird" things are due to the fact the he isn't using a bignum library, or not using it correctly, or doing insufficient iterations. He

Actually, some of these "weird" things are due to the fact the he isn't using a bignum library, or not using it correctly, or doing insufficient iterations. He's really seeing floating point artifacts. For example, the main antenna IS straight, due to the fact that the Mandelbrot set is symmetric around the real axis. The non-straightness is due to floating point artifacts in his Mandelbrot generator.