adding some spheres and such

i’m not sure if this is going anywhere worthwhile…
Merge branch 'master' into more-animation-and-timing
adding some logging to try to diagnose #55, changing the config setup code a bit
backing out the spheres background stuff which isn't ready
fixed #55, which wasn't actually broken

it was a problem with the MessageSpec objects having strange values for
the trails field.
Merge branch 'more-animation-and-timing'