The Dark Prince

Welcome back to an exciting and rather self centred thingo where I babble on and slowly create my logo and show just how terrible I am with various graphic tools! It should be a veritable treat for everyone who is me.

First off, what do I want in a logo? Well I’m glad you took the time to ask that and didn’t force me to pretend that you did. I’m looking for the following features:

• A non-standard font and very obviously so, something that clearly has each letter designed carefully,
• Should be more symbol like at a glance, but easily readable when examined.
• A sharpish, edge like look, each letter should be pointy (both in 2D and the possible 3D render)
• Should be very curvy with points wherever possible

Armed with these ideas, I did what any professional design person does. I made a few sketches. Unfortunately, I’m not a professional designer and my hands are rather shaky, so my sketches were pretty horrible, but the ideas did start flowing. So my devoted readers, if you ever feel like making a logo, try sketching, even if you can’t draw a straight line, at least it will get the ideas going.

This was my first attempt. It’s horrible, I didn’t even bother with the rest of the letters, the style is okay, but the curves are all wrong and it just looks boring. But it’s a start, and all things start somewhere, except a circle. Or a square. Or any joined curve. Or plane.

A slight improvement on the T, but went quickly downhill as it went. Rather like this entry. This was the point when I just decided to concentrate on the “The”, it being 1/3 of the logo (or technically 3/13).

“Perhaps the curves look shit?”, I said to myself in a comic sort of voice. “Maybe I should try something different”, says the genius inventor. So I tried to keep everything pointy but remove the curves. Tim Burton would like it, but I don’t. Oh well, maybe next time.

So, back to the curvy bits, and overlapping letters and it’s starting to take shape now. I rather like the start of this, but things need to be fixed here and there. The overlapping is going to stuff up any chance of a straight silhouette, and the T is a bit wrong here and there. Still it’s a start. The thing is, a good (or crap writer, depending on the opinion), always leaves the audience hanging for more.

Well, first off, Logo Adventure really is coming, for all of you who I know are waiting with ever bluer cheeks. Please continue holding your breath, I assure you it won’t be too much longer and it would make a very good news story if you died due to asphyxiation.

First off, I’ve been working on bits of things involving PHP and it’s new Object system. First impressions were extremely negative, since there are still some consistency issues, and the weak typing thing takes a bit of getting used to. However, now that I’ve done a bit in it, I can see that it could get quite useful. It’s a bit worrying that an interpreted language is taking a step that will clearly devastate any efficiency, but it seems that this is less and less of an issue nowadays. It’s also very sad to see that the ingenuity required to program things on a lower level is no longer required, there’s practically nothing that can’t be solved by either the basics of the language, a large amount of memory or processing time or a pre-written function. I can see why this might be a good thing, but it takes all the fun out of it.

In news of the same interest, (ie. none), I’ve been very busy not getting anywhere with Java documentation. It’s amazing just how difficult it is to get a serious description of the various things available at the GUI, or indeed anything that isn’t the newest thing. In particular, I’m trying to use only the AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit), which is not very nice, but has the significant advantage of not being entirely shit, unlike Swing. Despite all these serious setbacks though, my Commodore 64 editor/mapper/thingo bits and pieces are coming along nicely and I’ve provided the newest update on another server, because WordPress makes uploading applets far more difficult than I can be bothered figuring out. If only someone somewhere would write a system for webdesign which wasn’t plagued all these problems. Oh well.

Anyway, go here, be impressed, leave comments, but not about watches, gay marriage and stocks please. Thanks internet!

Unfortunately for anyone reading this though, it may not make a lot of sense. See, I’ve just started writing for this site. A good site, and I’m more than a little dwarfed by the guy who runs it all. To put it bluntly, he’s a brilliant writer with his finger on the pulse and about 48 more hours in his day than everyone else seems to get. So, in other words, he’s far better than me.

Now I know this comes as a shock, my hallucinated readerbase. How can anyone possibly be better than me? I know, it’s something that defies the very nature of the physical world. But it’s also true. Presumably he exists in some sort of magical parallel dimension where women don’t insist on putting the toilet lid down and don’t always have headaches at extremely specific times. They may or may not also enjoy wearing school girl outfits but I cannot say at this point.

School…girl…err.. What was I saying? oh yeah. So, that’s the guy who I’m essentially working for, and the problem is, that he’s too fucking fast. He writes about 20 articles in a week, at least, and they’re all usually of a very high standard. Plus the forum related to this site usually contains a large number of links about material that could be used in an actual piece. So this brings me to my first problem, actually finding something to write about.

Because you see, the wonderful thing about the internet, is that everyone likes finding things wrong with everyone else. The moment you write something that has already been said, some wonderful specimen of humanity points out that it was in fact done before on sub obscure site that no-one else reads, not even the person who writes said site. It’s impossible to find something that doesn’t already exist somewhere else, because people are fucking inconsiderate.

Despite all this, due to my amazingly cool amazingness, I did actually find things that weren’t covered on this site or others and wrote about them. They were vaguely related. WHAM FUCKING BAM, the internet provides it’s finest thinker and instantly my only abilities are writing on a field which practically covers an entire scene anyway, according to Confucious reborn. It may also have been because I criticised an old movie, and presumably said intellectual liked this old movie. To top this off, another figment of the internets imagination who had otherwised seemed nice suggested I should do more research when I practically screamed out that I didn’t want to see some festering old try hard movie about things that I don’t care about. That was part of the joke. Maybe I should have written it in bold and capitals, but I assumed that was a bit unsubtle.

It’s these sort of things that make you feel like throwing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures at random people. And if you’ve never been hit by one of these plastic menaces, you won’t realise how damn sharp and pointy they are. And that is as good a sentence as any to end this on.

I’m so terribly sorry for not updating. Really I am. I’m sure there is at least someone out there who is mortally wounded by me not writing a new totally pointless post about something that has no point.

Right then. So what’s been happenng then? Well, I’ve gotten a sort of job thingy writing for somewhere else, so the scope writing here is going to be limited somewhat. This is probably a good thing because well, it might give this place a bit of an actual context rather than a random collection of passable and not-so-passable writing. I’d say most of it will now be about programming and such.

Aside from that I’m actually getting some programming done, some of which I may be able to actually talk about. I’m sure that will thrill everyone.

Coming soon! More logo adventure!