I'll bet you don't have a Yo-yo like this! - An Invention Story

It all started one day while messing around with fractals! But wait,... what does a fractal have to do with a yo-yo? Well I glad you asked! And if you didn't ask, then I'm gonna tell ya anyway.

Anyway (isn't there some rule of good writing that says you shouldn't use the same word twice in a row or something?), there I was fiddling around with Chaoscope - one of my fractal generating programs - and I came up with this:

Hmmmm,... I pondered. This looks kind of cool. What can I possibly do with it? Oh, OH! I know, maybe these are the hubs of a yoyo.

But I'm never satisfied with the color, gamma, contrast, brightness, etc. of a first version. So......

 

Okay, now what?

Hmmmm,... I pondered again! (It seems like I'm always pondering something or other.)

What can I possibly do for the central spindle/axle? So, off I go looking for yo-yo parts.

 

And here's what I settled on ---------->

But of course, I had to mess with the colors again - I just can't resist messing with colors!

Now, all I want is the center part that looks like it might be some wound fractal string. Or maybe it could be just a bare fractal axle and I'll worry about the string later. In any case, I thought I'd just do a rectangular cut of the center portion. But then, I never like to do more work than necessary, so I decided to just layer it behind the yoyo's hubs layer with just the axle part showing through.

But to do that, I had to separate the hubs from the black background in order to make things transparent and define a new layer for the axle.

And then to put the black background in again. ------

<----------

Now what? Maybe I need a string and finger loop. Hmmmm,... I pondered. Yup, there was an awful lot of pondering going on in this creation. And I wasn't having much luck with this particular bit of pondering.

So, I said to Heck with it, and pondered what else I could do with the yo-yo. Hmmm,... some of those empty spaces could be filled with something else cool. So off I go searching my collection of fractal parts...

 

Yeah, those will do I suppose. ------------>

Let's give it a whirl!

Well, by this time, it's getting late and I'm just about out of steam altogether. So Screw It! I really want to get this work out there, and I can always come back to it at some future point, and put a string and finger loop to it and post it again for more points! Yeah, that works for me!

So that's it for now,... string and finger loop pending.

Yo-yo design patent pending.

I'll bet YOU don't have a yo-yo like this!

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