Hey guys! Looks like I found this so-called "official" dA journal layout. It's not really official, but it is a layout, and it does have some neat stuff in it. I did notice that a lot of people using this have broken 'wishlist' and 'rint' buttons. Apparently the creator of the layout neglected to include complete code for these two links. I have fixed that in this one and I probably ought to let him know to fix it or include that in his installation instructions. Ah well.

Expect this page to be changing quite a bit soon; I'm not completely satisfied with this layout and I'll be changing it as I see fit.

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Anyways, since I can freely type now that my roommate isn't asleep, I'll let everyone know what's been up with everything lately. First off, for the one or two of you out there who were actually paying attention to my deviations: I'm sorry I haven't posted in forever. I run a few servers for a small webhosting company I've been trying to get off the ground for a while now. I thought it might seem more scholarly of me to have my photos and art on a personal domain name rather than the MySpace of artists. After slowly adding things to my main gallery, I realized I needed a less portfolio-ish place to put the rest of the OK-enough stuff I produce. Thus we have my Coppermine-based gallery. But the only people who see that stuff are those I link directly to it. Parts of that gallery are even invisible and password-protected. And it's a lot of work to have to email everyone I know every time I post something new.

And so here I am, back on deviantART, posting stuff again. If you've bothered to glance at my past journal entries, you'll remember seeing that I whined about being stuck with the name "KabakaLion," and may have wondered what the big deal was. I'll try to summarize this a bit, here, but I can't go into too many details just for the sake of not making this way too long.

I started out in the artistic community going by the very original and creative name "Simba." At this point, I had no artistic talent and knew very little about computers. I started a small The Lion King fan website that resembled most other websites of the same topic; it had a message board, a gallery of screenshots, lyrics to all of the songs, and I was working on writing a copy of the script (yes, I didn't want to copy and paste someone else's copy--I think I wanted to prove something). Several people joined, but as I began to get more involved in another online community, I stopped maintaining that project.

Eventually, I changed my name to Kovu. Again, very creative and original. It was just after this point that I decided to stick with bad names like that until I could conjure up something that I had created and a character to exist under that name. The only thing holding me back was my artistic ability. Eventually, I created Kabaka, a black-furred, golden-maned (partial mane) lion. It wasn't really what I was looking for, but would serve its purpose.

I decided to stick with this design until I could create something that was a better representation of who I really am. I toyed with adding wings to the character and simple things like that. It seemed like a decent direction to go, but nobody else really caught on to it very well.

Then, around December of 2006, I saw Eragon. It occurred to me that I've been completely obsessed with dragons in a deep sort of way, but never really acknowledged it. And so what was it: I am a dragon. Well crap, I have about eight KabakaLion screen names for chatting, a few email addresses, and my dA account. Sure, I could have made a new dA account when I got back from being gone for like a year, but then all of my old contacts would have been less likely to continue watching me under the new name. That would have been very depressing, so I'm just going to tough it out and stick to this name for now.

And if you read this whole thing, kudos to you.