The reason for the bigness of my shell was story related, that I had planned on putting in but failed when I couldn't get the journal template from D'Lanor working.
When the next release comes out, maybe this time next week as I have been real busy with other things this week, it won't be in its final state, but rather the state that I had planned to get it to for the contest, plus a couple of other nice treats in GoW plugin 1.3.0
What really interested me in Paradox's shell was that there are 5 shadows around the avatar, would've help with the mood if there were spot lights so I could triangulate the source and effect of the specularity bug, as you say Gold Star for applying a bug in a really great way.