So I quickly discovered that I'm not good at making realistic materials, as while I understand what the nodes and such do after going through the class, I have trouble figuring out which combinations of them produce things that look like real-world materials.  I am primarily a fractal artist, and I'm mostly good at surreal, weird, and frankly rather distressing art, so I figure, I may as well just lean into it.  

The weird red mess is actually a 2D fractal image I made not all that long ago.  I took that and got both normal and bump maps out of it, and the result is whatever is going on here.  Some extra tweaks to give it what I think looks like an almost organic look, like some creepy thing barely contained by the orb casing.

The casing material as well as the wire things and lights are just done with nodes, with the casing getting the most effort put in to make it look interesting.

The base as well as the floor textures were made with Filter Forge (the same app I used to wreck the fractal).  A little bit of additional odd lighting and some light bloom in compositing and there we go, what a mess I've made.  The frustrating part was mostly just getting those accursed wire things rotated and positioned properly.  Everything else?  Pretty easy.

For reference, this is what the original fractal image looked like: