This is the story about how this.
“q: im Q leader of the last of the free people
9: and i am 009 the assitant to Q we are here to free you from the slavery Naxas put over you
we will start our 1st big move today i wont tell u what time or where but i will say it will strike out a warning to the world government
q: so good day and, to you naxas good nigh
night*”
Became the logo and the namesake of the site.
Over ten years ago, back when I was a naive teenager before I even had a license to drive I embarked on my first writing project. Well “writing project” is a bit of a strong phrase, honestly it was just two teenage boys screwing around on Steam chat daydreaming and sorta role playing an epic scifi story about a totalitarian government, secret organizations, time travel, and a rag-tag group of rebels fighting against the system to restore order.
My friend and I wrote the story in what we thought was a clever way. I would write the POV of the protagonists, he would write the POV of the antagonists, and we’d attempt to surprise each other with throwing curve balls the other had to write their way out of. In hindsight this was more of a role playing session between two dorky fifteen year old boys who played too much Half Life 2 and were too “cool” to use the word role play. Now as a twenty-six year old dork who plays DnD every Monday I have no shame using the phrase role play.
The characters names in the story were heavily inspired by The Matrix and the Metal Gear Solid series: they had real names, but the always went by their code names, the real names were just there to fill in their backstories.
On my side I wrote primarily for the characters of Team 7, a small group of rebels sworn to overthrow the global government of The Twilight Alliance, and dethrone Nexas, the Alliance’s figurehead. Leading the team was Q, a smart but cautious man who initiated the entire rebellion. Q was the kind of person who would spend hours, days, and weeks thinking of a solution before acting, he saw injustice in the world of Nexas, but was too cautious to act upon it, at least until he met Nine. Nine was a headstrong and reactive woman who functioned as the team motivator and point man for Q. Q would think of the plans, and she would act upon them, she served as a catalyst for Team 7, always pushing for results. The duo were unstoppable together. Working alongside them were the rest of the members of Team 7. There was Spund, a spunky young man and the son of a rich oligarch who had rebelled against his family and the empire they served. Coming in as a weapons expert was Kiler, a retired general who lead the Alliance’s army into victory. After he and the Alliance emerged victorious he realized what he had done and disappeared into self exile to repent for his sins against humanity. Up next we have Fifty-Six, the femme fatale of the group. Fifty-Six was a cybernetically enhanced rouge spy who used her charm to get what she wanted. Her implants allowed her to change her eye and hair color, and hair style at will, allowing her to take on many identities at a moment’s notice. Finally there was SARA, the AI assistant to Q.
Personally the two characters I related to the most were Q and Nine. Q had many similar mannerisms to myself, he was more of a thinker than a doer, and he wanted to act more but his overly cautious brain got in the way too much. Which is why Nine was so important to him, she would take his ideas and put them into action. The two couldn’t live without one another.
We covered a lot of ground writing the story, but life went on and it eventually faltered. My friend and I did give it a second shot as a conventionally written story with chapters, paragraphs and all, but we were in college at the time and we were too busy to sustain it after five chapters.
Now let’s get to the logo.
One thing I have always been fascinated with is graffiti and street art. There just seemed something so pure about it. These artists are risking running into the cops to express something they just have to show the world. I will admit I’m a bit of a romantic when it comes to street art, and my impression could be dead wrong. That romanticism is what drove me to work alongside the City of Austin in their Make Art not Marks program. I want to give these graffiti artists legal permission to express themselves and make a more beautiful city, but I digress. There are two parts of that romanticism: the first comes from my inability to produce any sort of visual art, and the other part is because I am too much of a coward to challenge the law, but that never stopped me from being fascinated with it.
During my freshman year in college my roommate introduced me to Banksy. I thought that Banksy was the coolest with his prolific and lengthy career as a street artists and never unveiling his identity. I instantly purchased Banksy’s Wall & Piece.
Although I never had any intent to deface public property I wanted to have a logo inspired by Banksy. His stencil work inspired me to think simply, it had to be something that could be cut into cardboard with an X-ACTO knife. I spent a while thinking of this, my mind was firing blanks. That was until I remembered my characters for the story, and then it hit me.
Q and Nine and the rest of Team 7 at that time had faded into the background of my life, the project abandoned for its first time months prior to college graduation. Despite them being regulated into the “has been” category of projects, they still held a strong significance in my life because they were a part of the first collaborative writing project I had worked on. I wanted to incorporate them into my logo. I quickly sketched out a capital Q and ran a line perpendicular and tangent to the little line protruding out from the Q and thus was born the Q9 logo, a hybrid of two characters who embodied my traits and my aspirations.
Fortunately for me, I never had a Nine in my life to push me to tag the logo on a wall. Instead the logo always just hung around the background of my life. It was there to remind me of who I am and where I wanted to be. Presently it is sitting as my desktop’s wallpaper.
Q and Nine were also the inspiration for the namesake of this site. I wanted something that would be reminiscent of their story, but also was something fresh. So the name QuadrantNine was born.
Without my dorky fifteen year old me role playing a scifi epic heavily derived from Star Wars and Half Life 2 with my friend, and without my freshman year roommate introducing me to Banksy this logo would have never been born. I’m happy I was such a dork because without it I wouldn’t have a personal logo I hold so dear to me.
Do you have a personal logo or symbol? What is it and how did it come to be?
Day 2
Word Count: 1,280
Cost per Post: $77.94