Before setting out on a mission, he used to follow that ritual to get his red scarf out of an opening 
which reveals the opposite symbol of the ace of spades (crime): the ace of hearts, The Shadow himself.

"Even after decades, the unmistakable introduction from The Shadow radio program, 

originally intoned by actor Frank Readick Jr., has earned a place in the American idiom: 
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" 
These words were accompanied by a an ominous laugh and a musical theme, 
Camille Saint-Saens' Le Rouet d'Omphale ("Omphale's Spinning Wheel", composed in 1872). 
At the end of each episode, The Shadow reminded listeners, 
"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay.... The Shadow knows!""

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"Alan Moore has credited The Shadow as one of the key influences for the creation of "V," 
the title character in his DC Comics miniseries "V for Vendetta"."

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The reversed red spade shows both "V" and "v", maybe referring to Vendetta as the Shadow's shadow (the real one ends up with a death's-head). The letter "X" also has two "v"s, and represents at the same time the crossbones that often come with the skull. It is suggested through the knives, the bow tie, and under the table. There is another "V" shape with the gun, and the "X" is missing because we don't see the other gun. But we also see only one of the devil's daggers. That idea of "X" and/or "V" is summarized in this picture. The scarf roughly reminds a heart shape.

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The main character is yet another perfect preposed model for my purpose found in the Archive3D website. I have this color-clamping problem with his suit? But I kinda like it, it looks slightly like old-styled drawing.

My biggest problem with this picture was the mirror (perfectly in focus). Most of the time a mirror is a rectangle, so it is easy to reflect the scene and create a hole using 4 parts of the wall (I did that for "Once a star"). But what do I do with an oval mirror? I was seriously stuck on this issue. How can I do that? Would you guess? Simple enough as I already did (and explained) it for "Illuminatus"!

No CSG needed of course, it just works if the mirror is drawn before the wall! Even though the oval surface appears transparent for the color buffer, it is fully opaque for the depth buffer! So since what is behind the wall has been drawn first, we can see it, but we don't see the wall through the hole because it is hidden by the mirror. Such a language doesn't make sense in ray tracing. Rasterization is truly another world.

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The scarf has been created using my physically-based spring-mass system. It handles the collision with the table, but no self-collision is detected.

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I shall leave the title as it is. I noticed later on that the first letter of the first word, plus the second letter of the second one, and the first and second letters of the last word, yields my member name!

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As in poker, an ace of hearts beats one of spades. Maybe death is only the shadow of life, whose heart beats.