roddierod said:John Zorn...nice!
What terminal are you using? I tried rxvt, both normal and dev and urxvt and I can get the transparency to work, at least with i3, the terminal starts for me, then crashes after about 5 seconds. No core or messages.
I'm actually using unicode-rxvt myself, and I haven't had it crash on me... ever, really :-S What settings are you using in your .Xdefaults?