No, I don’t mean the iPhone software. I mean the world - one of three worlds that my main character will unintentionally travel to during my November novel. Yessir, folks, I’m not divulging any details yet, because if I did this logo and the mere mention of Cydia would be a huge spoiler. In fact, you most likely won’t hear much more about Cydia until just before November, because it won’t become a major force in the plot until about halfway through my novel.

I will say that Cydia is a cyberpunk-themed world, whose inhabitants are all cybernetically linked together in a giant neural network, a “We Are Google” situation, if you will. Thus the entire planet shares a single consciousness; in fact, most of its inhabitants don’t even have bodies, but spend their time suspended in “the cloud.” If they truly want to walk upon the surface, they can rent host bodies - any body they like - and use them temporarily to interact with the real world.

But this has absolutely no hold on the first half of my novel, because the main character will be spending all of his time in a different world - which I haven’t named yet - a steampunk-themed world. Most of the novel will surround this steampunk world. While I may have made a “logo” for Cydia, I’ve created most of the society of the steampunk world. All it really lacks is a name.

The third world, of course, is Earth. You’ll see how Earth comes into plays between these two worlds in November. With that, I present the logo for Cydia, which is strewn across its streets - the real ones and the ones in The Cloud - as a representative “flag” of Cydia. It is nicknamed “The Leaf,” and represents the free-flowing nature of the society as a whole. A leaf will drift in the wind, as Cydia drifts through space and its inhabitants through The Cloud. In addition, “The Leaf” has veins that appear to glow, and it has a shine to it, representing Cydia’s triumph of technology over nature. There are no real trees on Cydia.

It’s this extension for Firefox that… well, let’s you enter a blog post from anywhere in firefox. And it’s quite nice. Hopefully this post will work.

Now, back to studying AP’s with me. And finishing artwork, yadda yadda. You shall see soon an influx of about twenty pieces coming in for no apparent reason this week. In addition, to test out my spiffy new headset, I have recorded myself singing Stand By Me. The verdict? I need to figure out how to lower the sensitivity on the headset, because doing it in Windows sure didn’t help.

Listen to Stand By Me. Woo!

1.) I made a new MIDI last Sunday morning in two hours. It’s originally from Baten Kaitos Origins. Click here to hear it.

Want to know s’more stuff? Read on, friend, read on.

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It’s been a while, but I never posted the finished product of my 3/4 view self portrait. I stayed up for hours several nights to finally finish it. I was sick at the time, too, with headaches and stomach aches and vomiting, yet I still got it done. And guess what? I got a 100% on it - my first 100 in art class. Up until now I’ve been stuck at 97’s, 98’s, and 99’s. But I finally achieved the 100. So, click the image on the right to see the larger version. And yes, as per the usual, the photos aren’t as nearly as impressive as the real thing.

This was created from photos, all taken by myself. Some are from Europe, some from Cape May, NJ. I Photoshopped it together and then drew it. Ain’t I beautiful?

I’ve begun what is a concept of the logo for Zelda Wiki.org… a 2D version, anyway. Make sure you’re using a browser that supports PNG transparency. If you aren’t using one, then you’re very much rooted in the past.

The glass idea is very rooted in Vista’s GUI, and I don’t think I’ll ever get as close to the glass I really envision, but it’ll have to suffice. I want to thank thoosje for supplying some of the glass effect with his PSD - without it, this logo would have looked very mundane. That was manipulated to my own various needs - getting colors, making a back glass panel (which is only visible on a darker background, which this logo is made for), etc.

Now, the REAL logo has yet to be revealed, but I have it… ;)… everything is done in vector graphics, so it’s all scalable, even this logo, though it’s made for smaller use (as a famicon, too). I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Click here to view a larger version, on a darker background.

A sketch for art class, obviously a bunch of abstract hands. They were meant to be "working" hands, as in hands that are doing something, but I kind of failed at getting down what I had intended. If you cannot interpret what’s going on in the sketch, and I know that you can’t, here’s an explanation:

- The bottom two hands are juggling the upper hands.
- The hand furthest to the left is falling into the hand under it, which is ready to catch said hand.
- The largest hand neat the top is at the top of the rotation in the juggling cycle. It had been holding onto the two very small hands next to it, but let them go.
- Those very same two hands are clinging to each other by a single finger, in an attempt to stay alive from the fall that awaits them.
- All of this is being drawn and imagined by the hand in the bottom right corner, which is the only hand without an outline.

Click here or on the image to view the sketch larger.

I drew a sketch of some nervous hands (click the picture to see larger image), which actually belong to my friend. As usual, it looks really crappy in a photo. In other unrelated news, my keyboard seems to like to spaz out now, and either randomly hit the "left" key so one letter of a word is in front of the typing line, or forget to press space. It’s really annoying, and I’m going to fix it or die trying.

Some points to make: This is probably the crappiest photo to date. The fingers and proportions have been thrown way off because the photo had to be taken at an odd angle to avoid being hit by the light in the room. Therefore, it looks like I destroyed the hands. I did not. Just… eh, forgive me for the bad photo.

Enjoy the art and stuff. Look forward to more hands coming soon, since that is our specialty right now in art class. ;)

Grappa is a cool thing I discovered while using the equally cool Stumbleupon.com. Grappa comes in many flavors. What is grappa? What are the flavors? They’re certainly not cherry and watermelon.

Grappa is a Java applet created by Paul Schmidinger, who has a neat site. On his site you will find several of his applets and toys that are almost as intriguing as what has become his most popular. On top of doubling as a functional way to create digital art, Grappa is just damn cool. It may just be the next Falling Sand game.

It comes in six different forms: Delayed Trace, Grappa White, Sepia, Rainbow, BlueRandom, and Galaxy Creator. Each does it’s own special thing, but all have the end result of looking awesome. You control a tracer with your mouse. This tracer follows the mouse and leaves a path. Right now in the explanation it seems as normal as Pointer trails, and it is - it’s Pointer Trails that stay where they are, and are graphics-fied. That is, they have neat physics that you can control, and they have cool lighting effects.

I would bother explaining what each one does, but you’d be better to find out for yourself. I found The original 800×300 windows too constricting for me, so I took the liberty of downloading each applet, editing the HTML, and uploading them here, giving proper credit to Paul of course. You can now play with Grappa in a 1265×860 workspace, which I have affectionately dubbed Grappa Fullscreen. Creative, no?

To have fun with Grappa, click the link on the side called "Grappa Fullscreen." There you will find links to each of the six forms of Grappa, as well as explanations of each, and links to Paul’s website.

Like I said, I’ll be posting Europe journal entries starting at least by the end of this week. It’s been a bit tough because of the family goings on, and I’d like to personally thank everyone who has been here, and even not literally here at the house, giving support to everyone in the family. It really does help.

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