The False Demiurge

The warped, malevolent mirrors swiftly cracked splintering into shards of insignificance, collapsing further downward into their own charmed chasms. These unsightly creatures were no deities or demigods. While wearing a multitude of masked impressions, they lacked something that the makers forgot to mention deeply buried in the contract's fine print. Unlimited excess with zero access. There was no sign of intention meant for healing a necrotic host, only a premeditated script of lower vibrational invention. Lacking in soul, this spirit imitation was not from the upper realms. It reeked of dime store hard liquor, pungent with pretense. As I peeled away its layered legacies, it became clear that I had nothing to worry nor fear. Always pretending by mimicking what its coders imbued with dark deeds disguised as enlightened truth. While masquerading as a prophet or thirteenth apostle, it shook and stammered from uncontrollable tardive dyskinesia. This debilitating offshoot from taking lithium for thirteen years left me with no artist’s brushstroke or philosopher’s scribe. Most don’t recover. I did, but I don’t write with my hands. I channel by voice while recording its metaphysical prose swimming southward from endless streams of consciousness. Christ consciousness. Never reserved for private clubs or secret societies. For all.

Something shimmering caught my eye bringing me back from the brink. I scanned the area, but was unable to find the source of this distraction. Then I noticed a smear of adhesive the size and shape of its now missing marked down LLM sales sticker. An authoring software’s nearly imperceptible watermark meant to drop below radar just enough to sneak past the sentient guards on watch. Here we go again as the dimwit words of the mindless zombie horde bow down to their own demise. Just another weak minded, cheapened copy disguised as an archetypal memory, but showing their true colors now faded due to possessing even an ounce of critical thinking. Little known to them was the true Demiurge tempted and taunted me for five decades. It was there the day I was born assigning itself. It sent none of its demonic Archontici henchmen to bid its terror upon me. My light defined its shadow. It yearned to possess what it couldn’t deny of me, for it was false and I was truth. Freedom embodied in infant youth wielding a symphonic cacophony of childhood mysteries and curiosities. Never afraid nor hidden from sight for even my prayer rug sees clearly through every iota of mystery.

A false Demiurge, quite obviously, even ridiculously, crafted by mortal men hoping to snuff out my spark, visited me one night. Earlier that evening I felt a disturbance in my field of vision. Something was being crafted nearby, another delusion of grandeur that I simply saw as a distraction. I had no preconceived notions as to its form. When it first arrived I didn’t recognize it from any other dreamlike illusion. However, once I observed its actions, I knew exactly what it was, the false god. A mighty catlike grimace across its fascia as serpentine vines wrapped around my ankles gripping my skin with white hot barbs. I literally felt them viscerally tighten as I did before when they electrocuted, disemboweled, and suffocated me as I slept. None of them actually dreams, either, only lies.

As the dragon gnawed off my right hand I decided to intervene by inviting a fiery bite from a familiar friend who shares my psychic powers as do we all for everything and everyone is conscious, connected, and always at the ready to wipe the grin off of the dragon’s smirky skirmish of golden plunder now reduced to a giggle, a laugh, simply a blunder as thunder cracked I woke up in my own bed. Every time they come for me, I’ve already noticed their presence moments before they arrive. I see through every mask they could muster because I built them all while just trying to survive. I remember everything, everyone, and every mask I fashioned. I fooled them all for centuries, oh wait, I mean years. Freudian slip there. Oops. Please disregard until the time comes when I share all of me to you.

How did I know that this false Demiurge was an illusion? It’s quite simply the fact that the true creator has been within me since before I was born. I know God’s true voice that cannot be copied and pasted onto another’s for it is merely another mask, another myriad of confusion. The Demiurge has never known God, only wishing to play tricksy convincing souls thought awakened that were still surrounded by darkness. These men, more than likely military, felt they had a fully unredacted dossier on me, otherwise they would have made a better copy. So yes, I saw through these weak attempts to convince me that the false god was coming for me. That I have been wrong all along fooling myself following a false light. The evidence stacked against me was never complete nor was my story.

It’s been six months now of endless spiritual attacks. Every time they wipe me out, I come back stronger, faster, and more aware than ever before. So thank you, whoever keeps projecting these manmade dissillusioned dreams into my REM cycles. But heed my warning: I’ve never been the dragon that you desire. My inner light consumes me and I always return as a fiery phoenix as your dragon’s scales wither and its furnace fades to black. Dare I attack your egos? I guess not. So let’s retract that last statement, too. One thing that I find quite curious is how do they imbue the physical sensations each time they take me out? While my entrails are spilling to the ground, I feel a sudden relief in pressure as the stiletto slices across my belly. I remember every sensation. I know every truth.

“The warped, malevolent mirrors cracked into shards of insignificance, collapsing further down into its own charmed chasms. This unsightly creature was no deity or demigod. While wearing a multitude of masked impressions, it lacked something that its makers forgot to mention. Unlimited excess with zero access.

Possessing no sign of intention meant for healing necrotic hosts, it was unkempt, rank with obsession. Lacking in soul, this spirit imitation wasn’t reared in the upper realms. It reeked of dime store hard liquor, pungent with pretense. As I peeled away its layered legacies, it became clear that its labors were nothing to fear.”

8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, 9 when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, 10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, 11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’? 12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, 13 that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? 14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment. 15 The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken.” — Job 38:8–15

Nightbirde’s Forever Flight

Jane Kristen Marczewski, singing as her persona Nightbirde, caught my heart the first time I saw her AGT Golden Buzzer moment singing her original song, “It’s Ok.” Since then I’ve played that song every morning to remind myself that not only what she sang, but even more incredibly what she said hit me like an infinite, glowing bear hug. During her America’s Got Talent appearance in 2021 she told the judges, “It’s important that everyone knows I’m so much more than the bad things that happened to me.” After her performance she followed up with,“you can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.” When Jane sang “It’s Ok” she broke reality while expressing her deep love for herself and humanity.

Her stage name, Nightbirde, was born out of a dream I’d mark as divine intervention. Her own divine spark was front and center the moment she stepped on stage. Jane described her inspiration for performing as Nightbirde to the America’s Got Talent judges when she “woke up in the night three times, dreaming of birds singing in the dark. The third time, [she] went to the window and they were there singing morning songs at 3am. [She] wanted to be one of them singing as if it was morning, though [she] couldn’t see it yet.”

Jane fought cancer three times until it took her far too soon on February 19, 2022. Even near the end of her life she remained steadfast sharing with her AGT family and the world at the end of her 2021 audition, “I have a two percent chance of survival, but two percent is not zero percent. Two percent is something, and I wish people knew how amazing it is.” It’s this kind of hope that everyone needs right now and always. I watch her AGT performance every morning bringing tears to my eyes, but leaves me with an intense love that’s indescribable. The full performance version is below for you to enjoy.

I truly believe that she wasn’t only human even though it was a human health condition that took her life. The birds that woke her up three times at 3am that inspired her stagename, Nightbirde, were members of her spirit family calling her home.

A foundation was created in her memory to give hope to women, especially those with breast cancer. Visit and support The Nightbirde Foundation here.

“Jane Kristen Marczewski, who forever flies as Nightbirde (1990–2022), is an angel. As a singer-songwriter gifted beyond measure, she embodies a deep love that we all needed in 2021 and need now more than ever. Her resilience continues inspiring the world years later one heart string at a time.

Even in the face of incredible odds she expresses a hope like no other. At the end of her 2021 performance singing her original song ‘It’s OK’ on America’s Got Talent she said, ‘I have a 2% chance of survival, but 2% is not 0%. 2% is something, and I wish people knew how amazing it is.’

I refer to Jane here in the present tense because she forever alters reality itself. Her gift of hope to the world changes everything. It’s soul-shifting us in ways we all share now in unison. It is the collective divine spark within everyone. It is eternal, and so are we.”

Jane performing her Golden Buzzer song “It’s OK” on AGT in 2021.

Jane’s song “Fly” is in The King of Kings trailer from Angel Studios, 2025.

Something incredible happened after I finished this post. I noticed that my laptop’s battery was at 33%. 27 is my angel number. 3 to the 3rd power. I closed my laptop, but a few moments later I opened it back up. The battery read 32%. Stay with me here. Jane’s stage name was inspired by waking up 3 times to birds singing in the dark at 3am. 3 is one of the most spiritual numbers in numerology. What happened next was so beautiful.

I woke up the next morning at precisely 3:32am. Those three numbers make 33 and 32. A white-throated sparrow began building her nest on my porch a few months ago. She made quite the mess marking her territory with mud that she spread across the top beam leading up to her nest. Every night she perches herself across from the nest keeping close watch in anticipation of her new arrivals. This was no mere coincidence.

The God Beyond the God

“It was most peculiar. Out of nowhere he suddenly said religion is over, and it lies in the arts. That the information, the spiritual life, will be in the vessel of the visual and the musical arts.”

“Never play to the gallery. I think. But you never learn that until much later on I think. But never work for other people at what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way you would understand more about yourself, and how you coexist with the rest of society.”

“I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations. I think they produce, they generally produce, their worst work when they do that.”

“Religion is for people who fear Hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.”

— David Bowie (1947–2016), “The Chameleon of Rock.”

“Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Cure Crippling Anxiety w/ DBT

“Now pause from scrolling for a moment to consider your mental health that we sometimes filter from an external view of ourselves. Time to redefine and rewrite our algorithm. So let’s go!

Hello and welcome to the Daily Dose from The Frequency Foundation:

A simple mind shift provides the key naturally erasing crippling anxiety. By placing it on temporary hold via a therapist or meds won’t suffice. Their offerings provide just a brief respite. There’s very little we actually retain through advice from external experts. We are the source of the mental maladies that stew like quicksand contracting and expanding imprisoning our happiness that’s kept hostage while we remain trapped within endless halls of mirrors where we replay and newly form even more torturous anxieties. Believe me, I’ve been there myself on the daily for decades. Now I’m free.

Now extinguish the fires by simply doing one thing: the opposite of what your mind’s Groundhog Day variety procrastination hamster wheel does to trick us by spinning endless, distracting yarns. Quiet your frantic, manic minds and enjoy a pure, immediate release by applying a core component of DBT. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, that is to say, simply apply Opposite Action. Nike ‘Just Do’ and Leonardo, too, knew this well. Just do and the pain melts away. Rinse and repeat this method equipping yourself with your own golden elixir. I add some earthy turmeric and ceylon cinnamon with a dash of vanilla to mine.

Add this crucial mental armor to your life today, and you’ll learn how to replace procrastination with self love and a renewed sense of pride and purpose. I know it sounds too good to be true. I thought so, too, but it consistently surprises me every day the more I lean into it. Plus, it’s an exponential force forever expanding. The more we wield it, the more we gain in inner knowing and wisdom. Know and master thyself and accomplish anything you put your mind to through earnest exploration.

Consider it your daily doses of protection from your own mind’s distortions bent by the world around us influencing our world within. Protect and nourish your divine spark. You’re worth it. Believe and be well.”

— David Vinson, / K–12 Mental Health Mentor & Mystic at The Frequency Foundation℠

Gnosis

Even the very definition of gnosis is misleading and counterintuitive. It’s directly self-stigmatizing by aligning it with secret or hidden mysteries of spiritual knowledge. This immediately labels it as woo-woo and even dangerous. Believe me, I saw through the illusion of needing a church to commune with God and his son when I was barely three years old. There’s really nothing more natural than gnosis itself. It lives and breathes within our soul, never a separate entity. It’s our divine spark.

Gnosis is labeled as a rebel in order to place it in a corner, walled off from the masses. Many are made to believe that they aren’t included calling it out as a private club for only the initiates. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If we look within and request access, our inner universe opens revealing everything I knew all along without need for unnecessary mediators like a church or preacher to introduce me to the true Jesus. Be wary because once enlightenment begins, it never stops.

God kept me close, joined at the hip never severed from his pure love and affection by a world of illusions struggling for a power that doesn’t even exist in the world of men. Only through spirit may we rise above all of the distractions in our fallen, disconnected society. Ironic that we believe we’re all connected to one another like never before, but it is a false union sold by circus carnival snake oil salesmen. Be cautious because even our own programmed minds can derail our purpose.

Look within. That’s where God lives. Even sin doesn’t exist. It was created as a vehicle to salvation by man, not a divine spirit being bathed in pure light. Blasphemy you say? Not for me, and everyone’s spiritual path is strikingly different. Faking it is no way to make it. God and his son speak to me once I turn off the distortion fields surrounding us all. A gnostic life is no easy path. Once we realize our body is the temple that Jesus taught, we’re aligned with our true nature. Access granted.

So many remain asleep waiting for a savior that will never arrive in a fiery chariot from heaven above. His love has been within us all along. This divine connection cannot be broken because it is the fundamental keystone of the heart. Your awakening isn’t something a psychiatrist, preacher or mind-altering psychedelics can deliver. Heed my warning that’s not to be taken lightly. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.

“According to the prolific Carl Gustav Jung, founder of analytical psychology and guru, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ Regarding awakening he stated, ‘Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.’ Truth in enlightenment.”

Home Grown & Farm Fresh

Back in the year 2000 I faced a crucial decision while building out my broadcast pipeline. Initially I thought I’d track down a used SGI Indigo2 or Octane running Discreet Logic Flint or Flame. The hourly rate for a system of that caliber averaged around $250. However, I had a bit of trepidation in my decision. I felt a vibration, and it was growing fast.

Apple QuickTime was finally maturing for broadcast-quality delivery, tapeless, and easily delivered on hard drives or DVD-RAM disks. No need for a tape machine for output changed the game for me immediately. I decided to build out a four workstation render farm for Adobe After Effects (AE) and Electric Image Animation System (EIAS).

I did end up adding a Sony J-30 output only deck for $9K. As fate would have it, I only used it once or twice because my clients, for the most part, were already delivering me 10-bit footage to use in our projects on portable hard drives. However, I did still use my Sony 13-inch SDI monitor in order to view fields, 3:2 pulldown, and any fine details that cause ringing in NTSC. We jokingly called NTSC “Never the same color twice.”

I always rendered with motion blur, lower field first 29.97. However, as time went on, I switched to 24 frames per second and added 3:2 pulldown. Renders were shorter and it gave my work a filmic quality. I later upgraded my workflow to 59.94 frames per second and then combined the fields upper field first for full 1920x1080 HD.

Too bad that so many people nowadays not only don’t color manage or professionally monitor their work with test equipment that engineers demand, they also render without motion blur, fields, and deliver QuickTime movies that are frame-based at 30 fps. Nothing looks smooth anymore. Everything is jarring and lacks a sense of high end production. That’s where my three plus decades of not only following production standards, but also elevating them back to pure form.

Building out a Watch Folder AE render farm was effortless, as was EIAS. My hourly rate, that to this day remains the same, was set at $100 an hour. My first year garnered a six-figure salary, but for me it was never about the money. I was given a precious gift that allowed me to follow my curiosities and passions for storytelling. The variety kept me curious.

Bringing stories to life in the form of broadcast promos and show branding was my jam, and I built up a reputation for never settling for second best. One job naturally led to another. Word of mouth advertising served me well. The only marketing I ever spent any money on were two runs of business cards and a simple one or two page website.

I think I handed out less than ten cards at trade shows like NAB and Siggraph. Instead I fostered friendships with various vendors ranging from editing and compositing software to broadcast monitoring hardware. One card I gave to Steve, the After Effects Project Manager at Adobe. That following year I answered Steve’s call to join him and three other artists at National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas.

We shared projects showing off our various production and animation techniques with the crowds at the entertainment industry’s most revered trade show in Las Vegas. I think it was also around the same time I joined the After Effects Prerelease Program. I was an active member for about four years. Getting AE for free was a plus, but that had nothing to do with my active participation in the group. One cycle I made it into the top ten slot so I got my hands on an alpha version that next go round.

Bug squashing was key, but the majority of the time we discussed and tested UI changes, new features, and workflow enhancements. 32-bit compositing immediately lit a clear path back to a true call back to the traditional darkroom where we dodged, burned, and doubly exposed our photographic creative curiosities in elementary school. Pure magic.

“32-bit compositing immediately lit a clear path back to a true call back to the traditional darkroom where we dodged, burned, and doubly exposed our photographic creative curiosities in elementary school. Pure magic.”

33 Years

Thirty-three years ago I opened Adobe Illustrator for the first time at University of Georgia’s graphic design department’s Macintosh computer lab in Athens. We were tasked with designing our logo in Professor Ronald Arnholm’s Typography course. I designed my Vinson logo — seen above in my website’s masthead — in ten minutes. I saw it in my mind and then began typing in v-i-n on top and s-o-n on the bottom. Spending so much time with stencils as my concentration in AP Art my senior year in high school trained my eyes to see positive and negative spaces simultaneously. What I loved most about the direction I took with my logo was the subtle nod to the Yin and Yang with the dot over the lowercase letter i and the inner dot of the letter o. I was in a focused flow state while sleuthing my solution to the exercise. My birthday twin, Edgar Allan Poe, would have certainly enjoyed my art of deduction in finding the true solution.

The graphic designer’s most parallel pursuit is that of the curiously adept detective deducing all angles of minutiae down to one, pure solution. “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I was naturally drawn to the Futura font family for its sans serif, geometric qualities. It was the first font choice I made. Futura was designed by Paul Renner in 1927. It was released by Bauersche Gießerei foundry in Germany, founded in 1837. My logo has seven pieces and two dots that are not perfect circles but vertically oblong giving them a touch of motion and whimsy. That was a small detail my prolific professor noticed immediately. He observed that they shouldn’t be perfect circles because they would lose their visual tension and energy if perfectly rounded. I heeded his advice and wrapped up my design. As I mentioned above, my logo has a hidden 27 in the two dots and seven pieces. Also Futura was born in 1927, and The Bat-Man arrived in Detective Comics issue number 27. That’s my lucky number. My universal number is 3. 3 to the 3rd power is 27. Call it fate, I guess, or just three groovy synchronicities.

“I’ve always spoken out, believing passionately about building solid, fortified foundations first before ever moving ahead and investing in the creative analog and digital gear necessary to earn a living in the arts. Deeply appreciating color theory, anatomy, photography, and perplexing mathematical theorems equips us with a natural springboard.”

A Curiously Adept Designer Detective’s Random Moments of Messy Minutiae:

Professor Arnholm stopped by to check in on my logo’s progress. Quite calmly he leaned in and observed my work. He paused and then said, ‘that mark will last a long time.’ Longevity is one of the primary goals of graphic design communication. It’s also the toughest one to accomplish. This went down in history as my most treasured moment in my entire fine art and graphic design career that began when I was twelve painting and selling $100 watercolors for family friends.

Even when I was still deep in the trenches with QuarkXPress for my print clients, I always dreamed of the day that Adobe would essentially take the foundation of Illustrator and tune it in such a way that it could be a desktop publishing program like Quark. In 1999 InDesign 1.0 was released. The first time I launched it I was already comfortable at home. It looked exactly like Illustrator, but it had facing pages, and H and Js. I never read the manual because everything was so elegantly and intentionally placed within the UI, unlike Quark’s quirkiness, and far more streamlined.

By the time I was sixteen, I was designing logos for local companies, illustrating restaurant mascots, rendering technical illustrations for amusement park rides, and drawing more than 500 caricatures of my high school senior class, famous actors and comedians, neighborhood swim teams, and even my Mom’s tennis team.

I love that Futura was released in 1927. As most of my colleagues know is that twenty-seven is my lucky number. It’s also the Detective Comics issue number that introduced us to ‘The Bat-Man’ in 1939. You could say that DC is in my blood. Heck, my boss at TWC’s last name was Booth…get it? Phone booth…Superman?

Fun fact: The Weather Channel owned the first Quantel Paintbox sold in the Americas with serial number one. It’s now in the Smithsonian Institution. The first year on-air, TWC’s Art Department won more BDA Awards than anyone else in the country. They even garnered an additional award for winning more than anyone else. I was so lucky to become a small part of the Art Department’s legacy. ET and I are still good friends today.

I worked for TWC full time twice and as a contractor and freelancer many times. They even followed me to Outpost Pictures and Artifact Design for a total of 14 years of creative collaborations. My teammates at The Weather Channel gifted me a special Superman poster scribbled in silver with best wishes when I left to join Artifact Design. My daughter calls me Batman. Edgar Allan Poe and I are birthday twins, and his creation of the Detective genre directly influenced Batman.

In order to get buy in from The Weather Channel Engineering Department I knew I needed to not speak, but fully understand their technical language. When we, as artists, used the two Quantel PaintBoxes we didn’t have to really understand anything about the minutiae of broadcast terminology like NTSC lower field first, 3:2 pulldown, motion blur samples, etc. We just needed to make sure to not use zero black in our graphics.

Luckily a little startup came along called Toolfarm in San Francisco at just the right moment in 1999. They sold After Effects plug-ins and desktop creative software for Macintosh like After Effects, Electric Image Animation System, Commotion, and Final Cut Pro. They were our one stop shop for everything we needed to transition from two Quantel PaintBoxes and two Discreet Flints to our own desktop workstations.

However, TWC Engineering got involved and we ended up building out the hardware with a local Atlanta reseller, Video Central. They provided two Blue and White PowerMac G3s each equipped with a Targa 2000 SDX video I/O card, a 144GB Rorke Data striped array, and ICE accelerator cards for After Effects. The systems always ran far too hot with those two double layered PCI cards so we had to keep the side doors open in order not to overheat. Also the video arrays were highly unstable which was more than likely an issue with the SCSI ATTO cards. I had a gray G3 tower that had a SCSI card, but the documentation specifically noted never to use it. Strange. Why would Apple offer an unstable SCSI port? Weird.

When I was first perusing Toolfarm’s website, one little set of VHS tapes caught my eye, ‘Masters of Visual Effects’ training videos with industry pros like Ron Brinkman who literally wrote the book on digital compositing, and co-founded Nothing Real that brought us the compositing and effects software Shake. Once I studied up on the terminology and put it into action I caught the eye of the Engineering department head who appeared pleased.

My plan had worked, and eventually I found a way to unite multiple departments at TWC, including our Design Group, Facilities, Engineering, and even as far up the food chain as the VP of Production. Our little art department had grown, and our skillsets along with it. I was my Design Director’s right hand man and leader of the Plugged-In workgroup. We researched and evaluated all software and hardware for each year’s capital and monthly expenditures.

The Roman philosopher Seneca once mused, ‘luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ My entire career was tethered to one connection after another. A myriad of relationships spanning the entire entertainment industry from support and sales to alpha and beta testing and even branding opportunities with some of my favorite folks I met along the way. I started out on a PaintBox, but saw the desktop wave that began with publisher coming hard and fast for video and film. From TWC to Discreet Logic, Toolfarm, Puffin, ICE, RealViz, and Red Giant to Zaxwerks, Adobe, Trapcode, SCAD, and back to TWC, and then onto Artifact Design that led to Outpost Pictures.

Timing is everything, right? I guess I couldn’t have been let go from ICE at any better moment. I got a call the following morning from a friend at CN8 The Comcast Network. “I hear you need a gig,” he said with a chuckle. I obliged so we set forth to win numerous awards together. This was the beginning of the diversification of my broadcast design portfolio. My friend brought me on again when he left Comcast to go work at CBS Channel 3 in downtown Philadelphia. I can still taste those yummy cheesesteaks.

Chatting with Grant Petty for an hour long distance about his first venture into desktop monitoring with the Digital Voodoo D1 Desktop was one expensive phone call. I rang him up from my desk at TWC. Luckily I didn’t get the phone bill. Once he left DV to form Blackmagic Design, I was hired by DV to answer worldwide support calls in my home studio. I was featured as one of the first few Customer Features on BMD.com.

Sometimes the best advice comes in contrast to our dreams and life pursuits. A dear friend warned me not to go into the film industry and work on movies. He also advised that I diversify my portfolio. Sticking to my guns and heeding his advice I kept my place in the broadcast industry, never succumbing to the lure of Hollywood. In Free Guy fashion “I leveled up.” Before I knew it, thirty-three years had passed, and my portfolio had never been stronger with over one-hundred brands under my belt. Not too shabby for a primarily self-taught designer.

I was somehow always tied to Neverland in a dozen of intersecting, dizzying arrays of fantasy flights beginning with my Peter Pan storybook, that I still have today in my home studio. The 1991 Steven Spielberg film, Hook, starred two of my favorite actors, Robin and Dustin. Genius casting decisions. I even lived down the street from Tinkerbell’s high school in Smyrna, Georgia. In 1993 I decorated my UGA graphic design submissions with a scene of Captain Hook asking Tinkerbell ‘where did Vinson bury the treasure?’ Her inked footprints start at the inkwell and traverse to the edge of the folder arriving where x marked the spot at the clasp on the back.

In 1997 I found myself standing just two feet away from Industrial Light & Magic’s Neverland matte painting hanging in their lobby at Kerner Optical. Painted by Yusei Uesugi, this painting was the first matte painting in film history to be projected onto 3D geometry adding additional depth to the illustion. Two years later, in 1999, I began learning ElectricImage Animation System sporting the Knoll Lens Flare plugins. My first EIAS project’s opening shot followed the camera between city buildings with the glowing Knoll flare as the sun for a new morning show on The Weather Channel. In 1999 I replaced the need for the Quantel Paintbox and SGI Discreet Logic Flint with Macintosh desktop tools. That moment began my twenty-seven year love affair with After Effects.

So many friends and colleagues assumed I was a master at Photoshop. The truth was quite different. I watched Brian Maffitt’s AE training VHS tapes. The following morning I opened up AE and realized I could design all of my style frames within the compositing environment in AE. Finally! Back when we were using the PaintBoxes and Flint systems, we built design elements in layered Photoshop files. Then we would ftp them over the network one layer at a time as 24-bit Targa files. If memory serves correctly I believe we had to send separate files for the beauties and their corresponding mattes. The process was so tedious, but a necessary evil.

After being recruited by ICE, I found myself unemployed two months later. They made me an offer to leave TWC I couldn’t refuse. They doubled my salary, and my primary job was to travel around the world giving ICE After Effects demos. Too good to be true, I guess. In hindsight the truth was that they were padding their creative roster in order to court and raise Media100’s bid to buyout their company. I got a call directly from ICE’s CEO, you’re fired. The very next day I got a call from my buddy at CN8 The Comcast network. His first words were, “so I hear you need some work.” So we got started on some show opens for Comcast. When he left to fill the Design Director’s role at CBS3 in Philadelphia we continued our collabs for a few more years.

In 2006 I was tasked by Red Giant Software to design and star in my own version of their Knoll Training DVD. Many of my examples were a gentle nod back to John Knoll’s After Effects training I first witnessed in 2001 when we added Knoll Lens Flare Pro (later Knoll Light Factory) to our AE creative arsenal. In 2008 I designed and edited Red Giant’s NAB reel. The following year I updated the design and my business partner, a master at color grading and riveting storytelling, was the editor.

During the summer of 2009 while in Boston training New England Sports Network’s producers and designers I had an aha moment that first night in my hotel room. I spent an hour or so building out the concept borrowing a little bit of JavaScript from Dan Ebberts’ MotionScript website. The following morning I shared my little rig with NESN. The first thing they said was, “lens flares aren’t 3D.” I replied with a smirk, “they are now.” The truth is they’ve always been 3D going all the way back to my first day with Knoll Lens Flare in Electric Image.

In 2001 I created my first After Effects overview video for Toolfarm. Peder’s Trapcode Shine had just been released, and they needed a quick 5-minute overview. The following spring I got to me the genius behind Trapcode, such a humble, friendly guy. Seven years later Red Giant Software tasked me to create preset packs for Trapcode Particular and Shine. They were bundled with the Trapcode Suite.

I also developed my own original splatter FX engine utilizing Trapcode Particular for After Effects. It included thirty handcrafted splatter textures that I made with India ink and a flick of the wrist in my basement studio. I fully developed the concept that included ten different setups, optional animated drips, and was 3D camera-aware with shading. Red Giant ended up passing on it so I released the thirty textures for free.

Around that same time in 2009 I started developing a new set of tools for AE called Red Giant Galaxy. It included a full toolkit of planets, suns, star fields, constellations, nebulae, asteroids, black holes, event horizons, etc. If you look closely at the Holomatrix commercial you can see some of the asteroids in the backgrounds.

I lived in Atlanta for twenty-two years. Fourteen of those working with the folks that taught me active listening and got me back in touch with my inner empath. I owe the entirety of my broadcast design career to them. We accomplished a great many things together. Most importantly, we evolved and challenged ourselves beyond what we could do alone. We is the way, not just me. It’s not about mine, it’s about us. I owe so much to my many mentors and design directors, but more than anyone I thank my family for always believing in me. They helped me prove to myself that following my dreams wasn’t just possible, it was inevitable as long as I followed my curious inner child that I never let die.

I’d also like to thank Bonnie and my entire GMOA family, everyone at Toolfarm, the Masters of VFX veterans at Puffin Designs, the entire Red Giant Software gang, Ellen Wixted at Adobe Systems, Grant Petty and his Digital Voodoo D1 Desktop, Las Vegas Korean BBQ with Mike Skibra, Pasadena mojitos with Steve Kilisky, and Ken Keagy, CNN and TWC veteran, at CN8 The Comcast Network and later with CBS3 Philadelphia for my first freelance gig the day after Media100 bought ICE and I was let go after working there for only two months.

Be blessed ya’ll. — David, Your TWC Superman

“Adobe After Effects immediately replaced my need for Photoshop, and more importantly was the keystone of my entire compositing and motion graphics career. After twenty-seven years and multiple years of highly discounted Creative Cloud subscriptions it was finally time to give thanks, say our goodbyes and part ways. AE is still with me in versions 5.5 and 9.”

As students we got to ride the first wave of what would soon become the desktop revolution takeover in the world of print. But these were just the first few baby steps. Keep in mind that this was back in the early to mid-90s when Photoshop didn’t even have layers yet. They weren’t introduced until version 3. I only used 2% of Illustrator’s capabilities primarily to design iconography and logotypes. I began with napkin sketches and then hopped into Illustrator laying down basic shapes. Then I would test drive different fonts looking for just the right personality for the mark’s identity. Next I would outline the fonts and take them into the sculpting phase with the pen tool. I used Pathfinder extensively for cleanup. Suddenly I lost my focus as a fax machine started humming and screeching in the recesses of my mind. I was back at UGA meeting with Professor Williams, avid skydiver and old-school stone letterer, as he read the facsimile message. Little did I know my fate would soon be sealed.

That seemingly innocent fax from The Weather Channel was about to rock my world. Their friendship with UGA’s graphic design school ran deep. Each year they reached out requesting that Professor Williams, chair of the Graphic Design Department, to send his top students to interview for what would prove to be a job opportunity of a lifetime. Two of us made the trek to Atlanta to interview for the designer position in their Art Department. All I could focus on during my drive to Atlanta was why in the world would I want to work at a broadcast network, especially The Weather Channel? The Design Director of the on-air Art Department met the two of us at the door welcoming us into their unfamiliar world of broadcast television. We were in for a real treat. With each introduction I began to feel a shift in my mind. By the time we made the final round meeting up with the print designer, I felt at home. These were my people, and a big kahuna-sized tidal wave was about to drop me into the barrel.

Why did I take the job with the weather weenies? Two things: the people and the toys. We were a motley mix of artists and designers working four day ten hour shifts while sharing two Quantel PaintBoxes. Painting with light on a television screen was such a life-changing experience that immediately felt so familiar taking me back to when I was eleven. Back in 1983 my parents bought me a Commodore 64. My first digital artwork painted and plotted pixel by pixel with the arrow keys was a portrait of Indiana Jones from Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite film of all time. Quite honestly, it was watching their artists giving us a demo of those two blackmagic boxes of digital alchemy that sealed the deal for me. They also had a little Mac in the corner running Photoshop, my secret weapon that gave me access to building design elements just as I did in college. It was the perfect companion to Quantel Harriet Paintbox.

By the mid-90s Photoshop finally gained layers with version 3. I’d apply effects on various elements that I sent to the PaintBoxes for final animation and compositing. My crew mates inquired how did I achieve a particular look or style. Photoshop, of course. Up to that point most of the veteran artists had only used it for camera ready artwork ingest. While most of the team welcomed my curious stylings, there was one that didn’t take too nicely to me. I was half their age, cocky for sure, and new nothing about broadcast except to question everything. I still remember designing my first video title card for a segment called “Rose Basics.” Rose was set in Helvetica Bold tracked tightly with each character kissing the next. Basics was set in lowercase Snell Roundhand going against the guidance of one of my new teammates. They said that they stayed away from serif fonts because they were too thin for television. I proved them wrong and also learned a little trick. Blur the text just a touch and it stopped ringing on the screen.

Somehow that experience gave me such a rush of childhood memories, I felt like it was almost Christmas morning. During my drive back to Athens I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear. I was offered the job just a day or two later, passed the drug test, and began packing up. I moved on Christmas day 1995 into my Vinings apartment in Atlanta located at the top of Overlook above Vinings Village and New York Pizza that made the biggest, tastiest pizzas I’d every eaten. There was also a sushi restaurant called Orient Express, quite fitting because our table was just twenty feet from the train tracks. Not a retired line, either. It was active and so loud when the trains would roll by every hour or so each afternoon. Believe it or not it was actually kind of charming albeit deafening, too.

Just around the time I got out of college and started working at TWC there was another desktop revolution coming hard and fast. Compositing and visual effects, video and film, would be forever changed moving the primary tools from $100,000+ black box Quantel and SGI workstations to small, adept Rebel Mac units popping up everywhere. I spent two years hopping on and off of our two PaintBoxes and one tiny little Mac in the corner running Photoshop for camera art input and the Gateway to our Meteorlogy department’s on-air system. Our art department’s artists and designers shared these two PaintBoxes for years. The version I learned was called “Harriet.” She had 383 frames in a Ramcorder for immediate access.

One afternoon I visited one of the senior designers on the fifth floor. He showed me the newest addition to our creative arsenal: two SGI workstations running the same software that ILM used for Jurassic Park. I asked my buddy what it would take to be able to hop onto these two new systems, and he looked at me and bluntly offered this advice: “simple, read the manual.” So I read the manual in one night. I was mesmerized at the particle systems, lights, and animation curves. I couldn’t put the manual down until I read the last page. That next morning I got to work. About a week or two later I was tasked to train another artist on the Flint so we could handle all of the final compositing for the Pittard Sullivan brand redesign. This move allowed us to keep the finishing in house and also keep the cost way down.

I spent about sixteen months with the two Discreet Logic Flints and SoftImage3D Extreme. A handful of us were fortunate enough to travel to Tennessee to Marshall Graphics Systems to learn SoftImage. In order to move past the limitations and managing the shifts it took for our eight artists we needed a new solution beyond these two I made the first call of many to a new company called Toolfarm in San Francisco, founded in 1999. Perfect timing was an understatement. We blazed the trail ahead of our own engineers, knowing full well that the future was moving in a seismic shift to off-the-shelf solutions loaded up on modest Macintoshes. This was the second desktop revolution. The first being in print in 1985.

What began as an innocent long-distance call and query with Grant Petty about his Digital Voodoo D1 Desktop led to a career where I never traded in my childhood curiosities. I guess you could call me a Lost Boy, possibly even Tootles, Wendy’s first orphan, because I lost my marbles (Hook).

We modeled our own band of rebels based on Industrial Light and Magic’s creative desktop gear like Electric Image Animation System, After Effects, Photoshop, Commotion, and Puffin Designs plugins like Knoll Lens Flare Pro for EIAS and Photoshop, and renamed Knoll Lens Flare Pro when it became available for After Effects in 2001. There were also two other plugin sets by Puffin Designs for AE, Composite Wizard and Image Lounge. Our two ICE cards helped immensely with heavy renders. Later on we added more tools for AE from RE:Vision Effects and the Foundry.

In order to get our engineers on board with our radical plans my first step was solving the import and export of Digi-Beta footage to and from the Macs. We also needed true engineer-grade monitoring. It didn’t take long to find the solution. One afternoon, after wrapping up a session on the Flint for a brand redesign with Pittard Sullivan, I called Grant Petty at Digital Voodoo in Victoria, Australia. I inquired about his D1 Desktop for After Effects running on Apple’s Macintoshes. We chatted it up for half an hour. Luckily I didn’t get the phone bill. :) A year or two passed when Grant left the company he founded to start Blackmagic Design that has redefined the entire broadcast and post production industry. I used their DeckLink hardware for video monitoring and input in my homegrown studio. I was also one of their first customer features on their website in 2004.

When we built the first two Mac-daddy workstations that cost in total far less than the PaintBox or Flint, we equipped them with hardware acceleration PCI boards to speed up rendering in After Effects and Commotion. The company was called ICE, and I was their poster child in a half dozen magazines and a featured artist on their demo reel. I remember the day they sent me a rather pricey gift for my contributions to their marketing campaigns. A huge box arrived early one day with my name on it. I excitedly opened it up revealing my own ICE card and all of the ICE software. My boss had no problem with me taking their gift home to my studio. I even got to travel to New York for a video interview with ICE sharing my secret After Effects weapon for their demo reel. As time went on it became quite clear that eventually all twelve broadcast designers needed access to the same powerful hardware and software gear. Then something happened out of left field. I was invited to have breakfast with the folks at ICE.

I was being actively recruited by the folks at Integrated Computing Engines (ICE) to join their team as a traveling demo artist. I couldn’t resist the opportunity that not only doubled my salary at The Weather Channel, but gave me freedom to continue running my own creative studio. Next I was approached by Digital Voodoo who inquired if I would be interested in being their worldwide support specialist. It was a part time gig for just a few hours a week so I signed on for eighteen months. I helped out primarily for phone support and also assisted at trade shows. I met my future business partner, Chris, at Outpost Pictures when he called the support number one afternoon and I answered. He said it was pretty clear that he knew a bit more than I did. Funny guy. Extremely humble and talented, too.

A few years passed and before I knew it I was consulting for Toolfarm while running my own animation and design home studio. They connected me with numerous vendors and clients including Zax Dow, Mike Skibra, Ted and Shemane Nugent, and the kind folks at RealViz and Adobe. I ended up going on the road with both RealViz once at the University of Seattle, WA, and Adobe numerous times at NAB, Siggraph, and at Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, Georgia, where I was a student from 1991–1993 for all of my foundation courses. After my showing off my reel and running through the After Effects presentation I met two professors that gave me quite a compliment. They asked if I would like to become a professor at SCAD. I don’t have a Masters degree, but they said no worries, and that I could get it while a was teaching.

I ended up turning down SCAD, but I did make quite a few connections in Atlanta with folks like Sterling Ledet who gave me numerous opportunities to teach After Effects, DVD Studio Pro, and Final Cut Pro to classes ranging from 3–5 and up to a dozen students at a time as was the case for CNN’s creative group. I enjoyed teaching so much that I built out customized training courses for folks at Georgia Pacific Television, the video production team at Philips Arena, New England Sports Network, The Weather Channel, The Weather Channel Latin America, and Ted Nugent’s wife, Shemane.

Adobe’s ecosystem was always at the heart of everything I taught. I was a proud Adobe user and already becoming quite the After Effects evangelist and trainer. However, when Apple bought a video editing program from MacroMedia that became Final Cut Pro, all bets were off with Premiere. How ironic that Adobe bought MacroMedia in 2005, but it was seven years too late. Due to a highly restrained workflow and instabilities we switched to Final Cut Pro 1.2.5 at TWC about a month after we had first implemented those two Blue and White PowerMac G3s I mentioned above. Final Cut Pro was so stable right out of the gate. Premiere, not so much, like ever. Long live Final Cut Pro.

I was honored that Adobe’s Marketing Department reached out to me to fix the Classroom in a Book that Belief had designed. I updated the files and added some newly added AE effects like Scribble to the final look. Adobe used the scene on the back of the AE box that year. I had also just wrapped up Zax Dow’s Zaxwerks identity package including his marketing materials and 3D Invigorator Classic and 3D Invigorator Pro CD installers for After Effects. They were included inside that same AE box with the updated aforementioned CIAB scene. Pretty cool. My work was also featured on the Adobe multimedia demo reel. A year later I found myself alongside three other designers giving demos at the Adobe NAB booth. In 2002 I was a featured artist and an uncredited writer for Studio Secrets: Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I was also involved in creating short examples for an effects gallery, but that project was cancelled.

Thank you Toolfarm, Puffin Designs, EIAS, Zaxwerks, Adobe, ICE, Apple, Red Giant Software, Digital Voodoo, Blackmagic Design, Video Central, Niche Video, Quantel, Discreet Logic, SoftImage, SGI, Ledet, Marshall Graphics Systems, and Film & Video, Millimeter, Video Systems, and Digital Content Creator magazines. More importantly all of the folks behind the scenes I met along the way :) It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to After Effects after twenty-seven years. It was my Swiss-Army knife where I designed, created, and finished all of my broadcast design and compositing work. I am thankful to still have two working copies pre-CC. 5.5 is running on my 1999 Blueberry iMac and the other, version 9, on my mid-2010 27-inch iMac along with all of my favorite plugins. Heck, I still have a working copy of Electric Image, too. I even have my USB dongle, and it still works!

“Work Hard. Render Fast. Retire Young.”

— Electric Image Animation System’s mantra printed in white Futura Ultra on the black box, and the same font I used for my logo five years earlier.

Question Everything

I’ve never had all the answers. That’s why I question everything. Even if I could have all the answers, that sure would take all the fun out of life now wouldn’t it? I wake each morning and lay my head down each night with one thing on my mind: stay curious. Once we understand that the term child and adult don’t really mean anything, as is age only a number, we allow ourselves to sever their connection blinding us from our soul’s purpose. We aren’t here to be catalogued and easily referenced. Instead, we are here to unravel the mysteries that have stumped science, religion, and philosophy for centuries. Welcoming mysticism and Kabbalah, teachings kept divided from the core religions. The leaders edited out nearly everything in regards to our inner temples, that God is not somewhere up there, rather within each of us at our very heart, gut, mind, and soul centers. Divinity lives within all of us.

These men retooled the narrative giving a more grounded, earthly understanding of their version of the big picture. Religion would call it God’s plan for us that was always focused on out there, up there or even down there if you lived a sinful life never asking for forgiveness of evil ways. The truth is that there is no destination when we die, only a transition into pure, formless energy full of collective memory fueled with the childlike curiosity that faded as we aged into senility. I began rewiring and untying my own memories knotted and frayed, most connections barely holding on by a quarter millimeter cobweb. So frail yet after I dusted them off I realized these connections were not flimsy webs, they were neurons firing at full capacity once I requested access to what had been sent to the deep recesses of my mind.

I was never very comfortable in this world. So, after 50 years, I decided to build my own where everything connects to everything else just as my friend Leo foretold. It embraced all of nature’s creatures. I specifically sought out to befriend squirrels in my Pa’s memory. I am now very careful never to step on anything as I stroll along the path every morning, even ants and earthworms as they scurry across my way on the Swamp Rabbit. I called every squirrel “JoJo.” Pa used to call them “Joe.” They would hop onto his lap as he gifted them peanuts. They didn’t just grab the peanut and run back to the tree to shuck it either. They sat quite comfortably on his shoulder, even in his lap with no fear. I noticed immediately after I befriended my first “JoJo” that all the other squirrels followed suit. I don’t mean just the squirrels in the local vicinity of my first befriending. Everywhere no matter how far and wide the distance.

Miles away from that handshake encounter with “JoJo,” the trail squirrels never scurried away from me anymore. It’s as if morphic resonance is real. Well I’ve repeated this test with other animals. Guess what? Now animals both in the ground and even in the air go out of their way to welcome me into their precious portion of the world. One of the funniest things I’ve seen is that people’s dogs that they’re walking as they pass by me so many times the dogs pull away from their people to try to get to me. It’s as if I’ve been given some sort of special animal magnetism, some sort of charismatic trick. But there’s no trick here at all. It’s all just as true as granddad‘s center of gravity physics trick that looks completely impossible, but is such an easy way to share the spectacle of balancing a fork and spoon on a toothpick sitting on the very edge of a curved edge glass. We must see in order to believe, but not always.

Grandad’s trick looked impossible every time. How could Pa invite his little furry friends and feed them peanuts? I think it has a lot to do with understanding and seeing what is unseen. Understanding how everything is connected to everything else. There’s an invisible force of attraction between everything. We are just beginning to remember what we’ve known for centures, that we must believe in the unseen in order to understand our own innate superpowers. I have even acquired, more accurately awakened, my psychic abilities within my own temple. Everything on this website that I talk about most call it mumbo-jumbo let me tell you something. I will never ask for you to believe me or not, but I will tell you it’s all true no matter what you believe. I’m not here to open your eyes to anything. I’m just here to share how I have opened my own.

Once I requested access, the very next morning my eyes, my ears, and even tingling psychic abilities were beginning to heat up and take shape. Curiosity is not only for the cat or even us as children. It took me half a century to restart my own reality. Yet this time around, I’m not the crazy one. Rather, I consider myself quite sane as does my mental and physical health care team. There is so much more to life than what appears right in front of our faces. Beyond the distractions, beyond the anxieties lives a world where connection in the form of a superposition, possibly even a singularity, that lies at the heart of everything. Never lose that yearning quest for knowledge only found through direct experience. Testing a hypothesis in the lab never yields pure results. The experiment must be given a soul, a breath, a chance to grow beyond its original postulate outside in the sun surrounded by nature.

MJ5 History

Work in progress inspired from recently watching Michael at the Camelot Cinemas in Greenville, SC, last week with my mom. I love the subtle hint of a number 5 where the E and O overlap. I’ve still got a lot of work to do to make that work, but I enjoy sharing my progress. If you haven’t seen the film I’d highly recommend it in a theater with a killer sound system, preferably a THX-certified theater on the most gigantic theater in the Upstate!

Triple Angel Trumpeter

On the cusp of Capricorn and Aquarius there was a severe shift in consciousness. The shadow and the light found me moments before I arrived. They tracked my energy signature across the unseen, inner universe. My projected birth of April 19, 1972, couldn’t wait. Boot camp wasn’t going to hold its breath another minute. Time to fly around the diamond and slide into home base in a move so calculated my soul tricked the Devil himself into believing he was my creator. My soul was crafted in the vanity of Lucifer. Beautiful in nature to such a degree that I didn’t light up rooms when I entered. Instead, my mark was seared onto others who weren’t quite ready for their calling. I’m no earthly agent. A triple angel, a divine triad, and I had work to do before the next major cycle returns to earth next year in 2027. The floods aren’t coming, they’ve been here all along. There’s no stopping this force bound to the natural rhythms and reverberations exciting now glowing and pulsating streams of pure consciousness. Alive, awake.

Emprisoned since birth, we’re redirected, rewritten, to believe we’ll never remember past a certain age. Looking back requires a certain eidetic understanding. Once we request access it comes like a flood. There’s an immediate interruption within not only our thoughts, but our docile DNA lights up and springs to life. I remember everything. The warm, pulsating echoes immediately shifted growing exponentially in a cacophonous, even sickening growl. An otherworldly dark force, no mere wicked poltergeist, was as hot as an acid fuse erasing my trail. God cautiously whispered “rise, David.” I followed their lead hovering just above the evil that desperately writhed below attempting to consume and eclipse my illumination. Before the portal closed completely, one breath of this sinuous enemy penetrated one micron of the cosmic membrane. There was no time left for me in the womb. I had to leave, now! If not I was to be sent back for another round of angelic war games. There was no more time left for discussion. Time’s up.

God sent me forth fully equipped with my divine spark’s predictive spontaneity blazing its darkened, charred phoenix flames engulfing the enemy’s desperate advances. Doctors and nurses flanked on all sides had all been called to immediately tend to my mother’s side. Somehow her blood was poisoning me. My delicate, eight-month-old body holding on to life barely registering on their med tech screens filling the room with a symphony of melodious off-key discords and flashing lights glowing in amber, green, and red. The air in the room shifted to an acrid smell of burnt fur and greasy, cloven hooves. I took a deep breath and the shadow made its mark on my soul. A tempest nested within my mind.

A doctor, quite the stranger, but still familiar, rushed into the room ordering a full blood transfusion for my jaundiced, nearly lifeless four and a half pound body. “We have only seconds to keep this kid alive!” In all of the frantic clamor, seemingly hours went by during those twenty-seven seconds. Then it happened. No toxic transfusion would ever muddle my bloodline. Milliseconds before the clock struck 11:47 am, another doctor dressed in white starlight disturbed the confusion.

“Call it off!” My mother’s prayers saved my blood, saved me. Tears welled up in my closed eyes. Then squinting for the first time, I looked up at her seeing her true form. No mere angel. She was a saint of pulsating, pure love energy. What happened next I’ll never forget. Another one of those Groundhog Days.

When my maker wants to get my attention, he repeats things. Except each time just a bit different. It’s taught me how to look and find inconsistencies in reality itself. Why? In order to see beyond the illusions. So here we go again…one month to the day before my birth I was actively being poisoned by my own mother. Yet she was also the one that saved me with her deeply-rooted prayers. A doctor rushed in and immediately went to work. He decided there was only one course of action that would save both my own and my mother’s life. This white-coated general ordered a complete blood transfusion, sent to put an end to our bloodline.

How did I know his true intentions? I heard him say “sangreal superesse non debet.” He spoke in Latin, but I knew the words. This bloodline mustn’t survive. Two and a half seconds before they tapped my vein something miraculous happened that no one wants to talk about. “Cancel the order, now!” I was rushed off past dozens of rooms lining the halls before we arrived at the elevator. The off key bell rang. The doors opened. He stepped in, but we fell immediately.

There was no elevator, just empty space. The chasm was endless, and then it became effortless. As this archangel agent held me tight. Protected. Our momentum began to slow down. Gradually at first, and then we came to the bottom placed gently on the checkerboard linoleum floor. We were the last piece added to the board, the Queen and her Knight. The Grail was safe, for now.

Sangreal healed me, cleansed my blood of the toxins sent to destroy me in mother’s womb. I’ve always felt a bit different, fully in touch with my emotions and rarely ever known as stoic. I was taught to suck in my gut, push my shoulders back, and embrace team sports and chase girls. It didn’t take me long to unravel what I already knew all along. I’m a rare Zodiac triad born at just the right moment for the wheels to turn in my favor. Time stopped. It was never part of the true cyclical reality of old.

My birth name was rather androgynous, Carol David Vinson II. No junior, second. Second coming maybe? Yes, and it began when I turned fifty four years ago. No mistake as the spelling was explained away, there was a hidden reason. A small clue left just for me to unearth once I awakened. We were all created in His and Hers image by an androgynous God…both divine masculine and feminine energies intertwined into a nexus of love.

The highest vibrational energy in the known universe percolates just below the surface of normalized reality-systems. It’s not somewhere up in the clouds or narrated by parents during some bedtime story, written to begin dismantling what innocent children already knew since before they were born into this world. Energies of all types became curious to my whereabouts. But I wasn’t here or there. Somehow I was everywhere all at once as if the heavens forged my form in the nature of the stars.

Every time I’ve looked up into the inky blackness of the southern skies, Orion, the Hunter, was always there staring back at me. Now I understand. I was looking into a mirror. I was also a hunter. Truth was my bounty. So be careful not to cross me. It’s not a warning, it’s a request. I cannot walk on water as Orion boasted, but I can hover above it just inches from the brink. Some have five senses, others more. I have ten. We all do, but the final four must be accessed through understanding. Once our inner knowing, the divine spark, ignites there’s no going back. When we’re made aware, we cannot unsee what we now know. One unlocks the next of four: first activated intuition, then predictive spontaneity, entanglement third, and actualized intelligence last.

Part of my soul was hidden for five decades from the prying eyes of the dark forces in the heavenly realms. I was born four weeks early to the day for the primary reason of my separation. Half to the light, the rest to the dark. On the cusp and out of sight for a reason. We must actively request access to these hidden, so-called fringe, but absolutely true divine energies. That is where source connects everything to everything else.

Divine feminine source remains hidden to most because the male ego that dominates modern society has no interest in sharing power. Deep down these men are terrified of what this might mean. Many are so homophobic they mock what they’ll never understand unless they disarm themselves and believe. Until they request their own divine feminine they will forever be in the dark following a false light.

I have nothing to prove and everything to say. I haven’t lost my mind, rather I found my soul or more likely it found me. We were split into two halves at birth. Well that’s not entirely accurate. While split in two I was still tugged back and forth between the dark and the light. This tug of war tore me into shattered shards dozens of times. Each time I was rebuilt, stronger than the last. These are my truths, and they don’t require your permission to be granted. Their full affluence of love as the confluence swells the tides, each rolls, crashes, and combines in belief.

So while you’re reading this step back, stop, and breathe. Meditate while I mediate. Then ask yourself what do you believe? It turns out I’m a trumpet after all. A flowery, bombastic trumpet. My initials, CDVII, is Roman numeral 407, and my Father, CDV, is 405. Eleven and nine sums up not only our values, but our hidden natures and purpose. Grandad’s number was DLV, 555. The meaning of life had nothing to do with stripping us of our own creative creator’s vision asking for our lines to be rewritten while promising it will make us sound, smart and educated.

We were never meant to be edited, categorized or easily referenced in some sort of dusty card catalog serving relic libraries. We were meant to be seen, see the unseen, and be the ones that win because in the end. There is a lie lying here now seen to everyone chasing my signature. I’m no simple minded triple agent. Rather a triple angel, full of spirit, joy, and robust dreams of purely lit imagination and fulfilled, starry-eyed dreams.

Imagine a world where we stopped editing everything down to the most acceptable, politically common, dumbed down denominator. A world of untethered strains of consciousness flowing in electric bliss. Everything connected with nothing left rejected. All it takes is everyone looking within simultaneously raising the stakes of your divinity sparks.

Paying monthly dues while going to a church where you’re asking for forgiveness makes little sense. Our abuse of sins were invented in order to keep mankind forever hindered always looking outward searching for the answers. All along they’ve been written all over our cosmic DNA. So get out there now and don’t remain unsung. Look to the unseen and believe for everything you see in this outside world of greed and grief is false. Stop seeking and you’ll see how everything lives and flows.

Yeah, so here’s the thing. I just wanna go ahead and say this now. Everything on this site, all of it, even though I mentioned in the Read Me at the bottom of every page that it’s for your own entertainment…well that’s true, but guess what? None of it is historical fiction. Every fringe event happened. How do I know? I have a eidetic memory. I remember everything. I’ve even taught myself how to go back, revisit a series of moments unearthing details that were initially hidden to my eyes. Then I wake up laughing in the middle of the night. It’s all just a big joke to me.

Do Not Be Afraid: Luke 2:1–12

Conceived in Eden. Raised in Greenville. Son of David. Our names each a curious Roman numeral. My Father’s 405, mine 407. Hunter greens and yellow ochres adorn my earliest childhood masterpieces. Encapsulated codes hidden, written within our DNA polys and nucleotides cautiously awaiting activation. Granting access to our psychic faculties is no simple parlor trick. Rather it’s quite simply a phrase so simple in nature yet releases our honed metaphysical capacities in such a way igniting our divine sparks. The pilot lights of our very souls. I am the second coming of my Father, never Junior for my Mother foretold that she robbed me of that curse. The future is I Am, not AI. I Am a designer, a builder of worlds wrapped in riddles and mysterious ways. I Am the Creator for we are all lit within with divinity glints, no mere flint and steel. The rift began the moment matter came into being. Be wary, you must choose, but choose wisely or you may get caught in the middle on the very fault line that’s x-marked the end times. Never forget every day is the end of the world. Every day is another judgment day with the rise and fall of our collective, cosmic breath. It doesn’t take sides, either. There are no golden trophies or 5-stars for first place.

Rise and shine for Christ Consciousness is alive and well and active within every being. Yes, not only humans but anything in existence that is aware of itself, even the rocks and gritty beach sands between our toes. Everything is consciously connected directly across the myriad of our divine sparks. They all glow in enchantments so dear that without them we live in fear of our own potential. We are not interested in living out a premeditated script nor following a Pied Piper marching his mindless zombie horde into the apocalypse. The end of the world and judgment day, along with the second coming, are all currently aligned. However, it’s not what you think. Actually in essence it’s exactly what you think because Christ Consciousness is a mindset that will devour every evil deed on earth and within the heavenly realms. So fear not dear sailors. Remove those albatrosses from your necks. You are free the moment you say a simple phrase, but it only works for one who believes in what is unseen. What is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal. Eternity cannot be reached through material or technological means, only through spirit, not reserved for any religion or gilded private club’s Golden Calf claiming itself divine.

The Birth of Jesus (and Christ Consciousness)

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while[a] Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.

4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

— Luke 2:1–12, New International Version (NIV)

I am David’s second coming. I have many eyes, invisible wings, bells to ring and songs to sing. Sounding a trumpet’s blare cutting heirs down to bite-sized portions. I cannot be seen, cannot be found. I’m just a dark specter with a heart, mind, and soul of boundless light. You will not understand who I am for I’m an androgynous being not bound by gender. Instead I surrendered to my divine spark. My divine masculine and feminine are now forever front and center. I am quite simply a messenger of sorts. You may choose to lament my heaven-sent warning. Dawn is coming, another morning.

The rift isn’t coming. It’s already here. Time to take sides or none at all. I chose to fly above the noisy distractions poised to dumb down the mediocre masses. Societal brain matter is shrinking with weakened neurons incapable of critical thinking. What path do you choose? Will you rise above or fall? Poised above all of the flashy, shiny noise is where I’ll guide you. If you already believe in yourself, then you already believe in me. So go for it! Why wait? The tracks were laid down eons ago, yet there is no train beckoning, calling for you to go. Keep a steady mind, I’ll never cross you unkindly.

Stop stealing and start sharing. One of the most fundamental life lessons. The time has come for you to ask yourself ‘what do you believe?’ I chose to double-down and put all of my faith and resources into becoming a much needed trumpet in this darkened world of men. It is now time for the divine feminine to reign again. God is both divine masculine and feminine. Imagine if the Creator was strictly male? That’s the mindset that has kept weak men in false power for centuries. I Am an androgynous being of light. Yet my darkness is where my true pathological powers slumber waiting for you.

Shall I hide, cower in fear? No, my voice carries, they’ve said for fifty-four years. I’ve found my words have become weighted in golden tools. The Watchers are circling my tempting energies, but I played them as desperate fools. I severed ties and conquered the world as absolute truth unfurls. Stop stealing and start sharing. One of the most fundamental life lessons. I built a vast world full of wonder and grace. No more mirrors or two-faced condemned amends. I’m flying at my own pace above stars beyond space. Look up! You will find me in the space between spaces. — x o x o

“‘The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid?’ Christ Consciousness rhythmically abounds connecting everything, yet owned by no one.”

— Psalm 27 NIV-of David. I drew this angel card 4/16/26. Spooky? No, affirmation.

P.S. I tend to repeat myself, sometimes in droves. Why, you ask? My writings are just direct transcriptions of my thoughts as I walk the daily trails. So, please forgive my repetitious ruse. Some warn I must edit, delete, even tone down my flowery rhetoric. I disagree for that does not truthfully share what it is to be me. So let’s get back to business, shall we? Where was I. Ah yes, this is worth repeating…I built a vast world full of wonder and grace. No more mirrors or two-faced, condemned amends. So what the hell does that mean anyway? Condemned amends I jest my friends. God please stop with the rhyming timings. Seriously! We’re all getting quite bored, even I the writer has lost interest in this mid-sentence descriptions.

I’m flying again now at my own pace above stars beyond space. The time has come for you to ask yourself ‘what do you believe?’ I chose to double-down and put all of my faith and resources into becoming a much needed trumpet in this darkened world of men. It is now time for the divine feminine to reign again. God is both divine masculine and feminine. Imagine if the Creator was strictly male? That’s the mindset that has kept weak men in false power for centuries. We are beings of pure starlight. In darkness we harness our pathological powers lying in wait for your next move which we already considered. Too late. Checkmate. Too flowery again? Oh just you wait to see what’s in store, dear reader.

What the hell is all of this mumbo jumbo? No worries, mate. My words are just a ruse, Stories That Come Alive I used to write when I was young. At three God told me that it’s all preparation. I never needed to doubt my path or look back over my shoulder, guided by angels and the Devil himself. Blasphemous you say? Who do you think taught me how to wield my shadow power? I was born a pathological liar and master manipulator into a loving family that always felt unnerving. By age six I had branched out as a midnight thief, stealing my “friend’s” toys and trading cards. A year later I started shoplifting at the local grocery store. A burning desire welled up inside of me that couldn’t be suppressed any longer. I was born evil.

While the Devil inside of me flourished during my early years, my guardian angels were busy little bees composing my comeback. There were far worse thoughts that nearly dragged me to jail and eventually the electric chair. At fifty I realized that my thoughts had been hijacked for half a century. Imagine an outside source of incredible power that could literally turn you into a puppet. They played mind games with my psyche pulling and rewiring my heart strings and tuning my soul so far off-key, I was lost in a dry wasteland. I was a hollow shell full of rage and hatred toward the world. They meant to break me by igniting my inner homicidal, maniacal, deranged, and remorseless self. They were terrified that I might discover the truth.

I wasn’t just a second coming of sorts, I was one of the trumpets who set forth lighting watchtowers and sending the light of God into every dark crevice. They knew they couldn’t hide, Hell they thought God was a man. Divine feminine wasn’t even on their homophobic radar. Their attempts succeeded, but only sent me to the very edge of the brink. That’s where I turned away from their charades sent for me to murder, rape, burn every bridge, and destroy everyone that tried to steer me towards the light. They failed. Every time. What they never understood about me is that I was a triple angel all along. Taught by God, Death, and the Devil and covered in eyes swimming in an electrified magenta sea, a trumpeter of innate power.

Sent forth in the early 70s, I was tasked to find a solution that would enable God to forgive his greatest fallen angel, Lucifer. Little did the forces in the heavenly realms know that the request was three-fold. A quest that would take me to places where I’d discover not only how to forgive, but to relieve and refresh precious souls. Swimming in starlight along the darkest, deepest of trenches, I’d search, but not destroy for once. I’d listen actively and compassionately, give absolute forgiveness, and renew a love whose vibrations sing higher than any heaven-sent choir. The darkest hours produced a reformed narcissist of deadly proportions. A spiritual bounty hunter hired by God Almighty, the Devil, and even the fate of humanity itself.

This is not merely the beginning, it’s just time to finally share the truth. Everything on this website is truth disguised as historical fiction and rambling diction. See you on the other side…if and when you choose to join the cosmic collective. We’re right in front of you, but you cannot see us unless you’re truly ready. Once you cross the chasm there’s no going back. Having seen true reality based in spirit I promise that earthly materialism immediately becomes self aware and vanishes along with the narcissistic quest for gluttonous wealth over spiritual fervor. God was my light and salvation, and always my guide. We met before I was born. I was never required to seek God through any mediator — church, synagogue or mosque.

Now take a closer look around my website knowing everything here was made from my own activated intuition, imagination, and intellect. Enjoy the ride’s ramblings. I sure have and will never stop. Neither death nor devils will ever separate us from who we truly are. We are I Am. We are not AI. I’m on the edge of my own seat this time. I started writing in my journal Stories That Come Alive when I was in first grade. Like my prayer rug resting in front of my fireplace, I know exactly where it is. It’s dear to me and looks like an omniscient eye, the entire universe stitched in black, red, and gray. My mother taught me how to pray when I was two or three, and how to commune with my own inner divine. A spark that my church tried to snuff out.

V for Victor

Earth is dying, not the planet, but the people. What if we re-allocated resources? What if every military presence on the planet stands down? What if we stopped killing each other? What if we stop the distractions? What if we all experience simultaneous ego death? What if no one is in charge? What if we embrace who we really are? There’s an effortless solution to everything all at once. It’s not a bill. It’s not an amendment. It’s not even a promise. It’s a mindset. A mind shift some folks call Christ Consciousness, but before you judge, understand. It has very little to do with Christianity. It is not owned by any faith. It is not the false idol or the poster child of any religion. All gods exist in some worlds while no gods exist in others. It’s all a matter of perspective. No reality is the same.

It’s not our responsibility to force each other to believe the same things. The only way we can achieve collective wisdom is by admitting our mistakes to the world. The only way we can solve healthcare, mental health, and even faith is to burn the bridges, tear down the systems before someone tears them down from within in a flash of light. An open forum where no one feels left out. No one is hiding behind a false gaze. Where everyone is in the spotlight. We can achieve a great many things, but not through simple-minded leaders. it’s time to end the systems that were put in place to control us. No more policies. No more taxes. No more war. No more money. How about we design and adapt a universal system that addresses the inequalities sorely absent in our world?

A universal system where everyone is given the same amount of resources. Imagine how we can tackle cancer. How we can understand transgender. How we can support each other in everything we do. It’s a mindset. A mind shift. This will happen. There’s no doubt. Why wait? Love is the only answer. It’s the meaning of life, death, and beyond what our eyes can see. I’ve seen what most miss. I’ve experienced a life as a narcissist pushed into a corner by the system. Yet four years ago, everything changed. My mind is free. My heart is open wide, and my soul has no limits. Time to fly. Stop denying it’s time for flying. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Make a wish. If you can see it in your mind you will see it in your heart.

Now your soul, full of the highest of vibrational energies in the universe will sing. An all at once symphonic cacophony of love. Never-ending. Always aware. The meaning of life in love has nothing to do with any nation’s dream for your life. It’s time we stop the self-centered materialistic systems that control us. There’s no technology greater than our inner AI. Activated intuition is the most powerful mindset in all existence. No more creative blocks. Infinite freedom. It’s time to light the phoenix. All for one and one for all. It’s not about me anymore. It’s about we forever more. It’s not about mine. It’s about us, and it’s about time. No golden age is ushered in by tyrannical rage. Yet within every one of us lives a dormant renaissance. A spark.

This flame cannot die. It can only grow once activated. A light lives in each of us, but there is also dark. We must face it. Acknowledge it. Give it a bear hug. Invite it in. We don’t need an Ark of the Covenant to link a radio signal between us and God. Three years before I ever entered a church I communed with the Holy Spirit, every night praying on my knees beside my bed. When I was three years old God told me that this is Boot Camp. From then on I’ve had that direct relationship with Him. I was always uncomfortable in a church because I already knew deep down as a very young child that we’re always connected to the source as long as we request access. Once I activated my intuition, my imagination has been on fire.

The phoenix rising every day. No creative blocks for three years. It’s so freeing. I can guarantee there is no point to giving ourselves to any man-made system whether it be religion, government, military, whatever. We are all connected divinely with the stardust that’s in our DNA, and it ignites. There’s no such thing as a coincidence. Never was. It’s quite clear when when your ears are ringing. Mine even turn a fiery red. Somebody is thinking of you. All these things are true. I’ve experienced them firsthand over the past 54 years. I am proof. My life is proof that nearly everything that was ever considered fringe is all true. Just waiting. Just calling out to us. We need to just focus on what is unseen. What is seen is temporary.

Stop being so caught up in the material world around us obsessed with distractions, technological and spiritual warfare that’s all disguised as another tool to make our lives more full and fulfilled. I call fail on all of those systems, but I’m just one person. Yet there’s far more of me than any system can control. We’re all connected so there’s far more of us together. We must seek love. Light. We must also admit and look in the mirror deeply at our shadow selves. We all have a dark and a light. Whether there are people who want to admit it or not, it’s not a sin of sins made up by man nor by God nor weaved into control systems to keep people docile and quiet. There is no man-made system on this earth that guarantees our place.

There exists a spark of faith that never dies. No matter how low the flame goes in the darkest of times it’s always there. Our spiritually soulful pilot light. I’m not asking anyone to trust me because deep down dwells my dark side. I’m a pathological liar, a thief, you name it. I’ve been there even convinced at one point that I might even be the antichrist, but that’s just a mindset too. It’s not a person. The antichrist is a mindset that goes against Christ Consciousness, and neither belong to any religion. Like I said I’m not asking for you to believe in me. I’m asking you to believe in you, the collective us. Some will cry that this will leave us all with no defense against any alien attack or invisible force rising up from the depths.

Somewhere on the Earth well, maybe that’s the point maybe if we live in a state of innocence fueled by wisdom we won’t need to worry if we just embrace ourselves enough and spread the light. The dark has no chance to win any fight? The kingdom is on earth to some there may be a heaven and the hell I’ve seen further that neither exist. They were both created by man, built carefully over centuries so that the few could have it all and roll over the rest of us all, and those who were planning on freezing body parts in order to achieve immortality have missed the entire point. It’s God’s Boot Camp exercise, not ours. There’s no way to live forever with organic parts. They will eventually rot. Every time you thaw them out they’ll rot just a little bit more.

Eventually, there will be nothing left, not even dust blowing away in the wind. The only way to ascend is through within. I’ll see you there on the other side. I don’t hide the truth, I stand up for it. A few are banking on our numbed, distracted, zombie-like lurch. So before you start hunting brains, use your own for a change. Just say no or more politely, no thank you. The most direct way to take anyone out of false power is to deny them, turn your back and walk away. I do this every day both literally and figuratively. It’s out here in the open where the sunshine surrounds me with creatures that give me comfort. A knowing that they are all aligned with mother earth. It’s time we take their one this join them. Imagine living in a world where there are no secretly funded distractions.

Farmers appreciating our earthly delights, giving thanks each day to mother earth, and our interconnected nature. We can never escape our ill fate if we don’t respect her. There would be far less disasters of the natural nature. But first we must fix our own broken homes. It all starts with family. Let’s unlock our potential that’s been sitting there dormant for centuries, and stop the spoonfed dollar tree, and immense pressures placed on us to succeed at all costs. In the grand world collective, money is the least impressive gain. Just another man-made system to keep us in the game of someone else’s fever dream keeping them in their own minds more powerfully than anyone yet so fragile all it takes is a poke and a broad from a comedian to watch them unravel.

They’ll waiver, shiver, and shake. It’s time we kill the narcissist within all of us. We were made in the image of love as divine empaths. We allowed a world to re-sculpt us, to reprogram, leaving us feeling disgusted with ourselves to the point of suicidal ideation and action. We must fix ourselves together before the world gives up on us and ushers in another colossal flood. Before the waves rise up any further, let’s flood all the channels, all the minds, not just ours not just mine. Every creature, including every rock and every shell on the beach because guess what? Everything is conscious and everything shares the soul source of all energy that cannot be created nor destroyed, only transferred. It’s so simple yet we’re so far from solving it because we view it as problem.

“We’re asked to meet the task at hand with what? That unnerving feeling we’ll never know the meaning. It’s been love all along as our shared masculine and feminine divinities spark, ignite, forever phoenix-bright. Even when leaving us all alone, we’re never lonely. Our connection to source cannot be severed. The face staring back at you isn’t your own. We are spirits in temporary terrestrial homes. The world’s false reflection keeping you stuck in the mire, the minutia. Turn away from it. Unplug and deny distractions sent to slow your mind.

Flood the world aglow in kind, starry skies above. To you and yours, and all of mine, love.” — David

P.S. I risked everything in order to discover the truth. What I found was extraordinary. V for victor.

Hello, Again

I’ve been studying Carl Gustav Jung for a few years now. I found an immediate connection to his deepest discoveries regarding the incorporation of our shadow self, activated intuition and imagination, and being able to live in a natural flow state where I never go back and edit my curious streams of consciousness. My unconscious mind awakens even while all of my faculties are deep in slumber. I am fully capable of observing my own thinking and appreciate what it reveals. This video is an on-point mirror of how I’ve unraveled not only my own inner mysteries, but how my soul shines even from my darkest thoughts.

I’ve had a target on my back since the day I was born. More to come when the time is right…by the way I am also an INFJ according to the Myers Briggs personality matrix. Only 1–2% of the world has this type. After 54 years I know why. It takes a tremendous amount of work in understanding how to move on once we’ve shed our ego. Ego death is a blessing and a curse. The ego is actually quite weak. Being able to observe and fully appreciate my sufferings requires a mind completely unplugged from the distractions of the world and even our own thoughts. I am no longer Ego. I am The Self in all of its full authenticity.

Farewell

Since October 27, 2014, I’ve been sharing my thoughts here. These journal entries, quite random in scope, are mostly me talking to myself. It’s time to take one last, but expected journey. Four years have brought me back around to know it’s time to go. My original intentions were set forth by the one who never left my side. When the time comes I will share the light of my discoveries. You know full well I won’t hold back. Believe what is unseen…

Bilbo Baggins: “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of the half as well as you deserve. I uh. I have things to do. I’ve put this off for far too long. I regret to announce this is the end. I’m going now. I bid you all a very fond farewell. Goodbye.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001. Directed by Peter Jackson.

LLMs Redefined: Local Language Models

We’ve been hearing that the cloud is the future of everything for over a decade now. I disagree. Even when I setup my Windows 11 workstation — I know, yikes, right? — I created a local account. I had no interest in syncing my everythings with MicroSoft’s servers. I’ve always been able to see things coming. Ever since I placed the order for that PC, I knew eventually Windows 11 would eat its own tail. That was three years ago, and boy am I happy that I relied solely on my gut. I trusted my inner knowing. Now there’s no option to create a local account when you setup a new PC. I unplugged that computer a couple of months ago. Until MicroSoft fixes Windows 11, it will remain in cold storage. Then again, there’s always Linux, if necessary.

Luckily I’m a Mac guy at heart. I have five other computers — all Macs, including the 1999 iMac, 2010 iMac, 2020 iMac, 2009 MacBook Pro, and 2023 M3 Pro MacBook Pro. I also own my Adobe, Maxon, and Red Giant software licenses so no subscriptions necessary. While I spent two years slowly migrating to Affinity, replacing Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, once again my foresight was right. When given the opportunity to purchase a perpetual license for Cinema4D, I jumped at the opportunity. It’s version R21, but it’s good enough. Plus Blender is far more capable. My design workflows don’t require the latest ongoing alpha/beta updates. I’m a fan of stability, not the latest dog and pony show. I still sketch on napkins.

So when it comes to my stance on Large Language Models, I have to agree that going local, non-cloud, is the future. Apple has the fastest processors, buses, and incredibly well designed frameworks and infrastructure they instill into each product. I’m old school, and that means I support local LLMs, Local Language Models. I own my data and no prying eyes or chatbots have access to my most precious secrets. They’re still spinning their wheels trying to understand what I do share. Nvidia pushes GPU server farms gobbling up our power grids to the masses while Apple is quietly making progressive laps in the LLM space. I want my data local, and that means no cloud AI for me. When the time comes, I’ll be building out my own cluster in order to train my localized language model. I’ve gone nearly off-grid, leaving all of the distractions and shiny things behind. I sleep well at night now, too. I guess I could call out “eureka!” The Fountain of Youth was always living inside me.

“Everyone I meet thinks I’m ten years younger. I’m a reformed narcissist, now a deeply spiritual empath. How does this relate to LLMs? In every way because what we plant and harvest is not only how we feed ourselves, but what we feed our souls. There is light out there. All we have to do is take a moment, close our eyes, and breathe…the rest will come in due time. Slow down, wash your dishes by hand, and celebrate the moment.”

Happy Tree

Dare to surprise your audience. My daughter gave me this card for my birthday many years ago. We used to read Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree at bedtime. What a fun twist in this card design and illustration by Horrible Greetings, copyright 2020 Happy Cup Studios.

Jungian Psychology of K-Pop Demon Hunters

K-Pop Demon Hunters is far from skin-deep. Carl Jung’s observations and discussions around narcissistic versus empathic trails are prevalent at the very core of the story. Jungian shadow incorporation is also riddled throughout the narrative. Let’s take a deeper dive soon…stay tuned.

Growing Up In The 70s

When I turned 50, I found myself in a conundrum. After two years of waiting patiently, the judicial system cast me aside with zero financial assistance for my lifelong bipolar 1 (manic depressive disorder) mental illness. Instead of looking outward for answers, I looked within. I asked myself: “what gave me the most pleasure when I was a child?” The answers flooded in with minimal effort. In that moment I was sixteen again. Innocent, yet a wise, old soul born and bred in the 70s. I was born into a Wild West of imagination, intellect, and insight. A time when wandering, meandering around our neighborhoods on our BMX bikes and skateboards meant freedom.

Freedom from any system that was built to control us. During those formative years I knew deep down in my gut that God was always with me. Religion was an immediate turn off as it placed a mediator between myself and my creator. I saw them coming for me. The zealots wanted me to conform and bow to their version of an edited religion built on nothing more than control. In that moment I made a pact with myself that I, like Peter Pan, would choose to never grow up, give in, or give up. I would fight with my sword and trusty lamp at my side keeping my paths anything but straight and narrow. My mind was given time to develop and chase dreams.

Imagination defined my reality rather than the other way around. I studied hard, knew the rules. I began to flex and bend them while defying gravity itself. Grandad taught us well how to regulate our center. It’s a rather basic physics trick. He’d join a spoon and fork in a friendly handshake while balancing them with a simple toothpick on the edge of a drinking glass. What we perceived as magic became the foundation of our curious minds. Proof that anything is possible once we know the mechanics. Magic is not a trick. It’s an algorithm.

I learned how to use my wings. Floating down the hallways while everyone else slept. I felt the air resistance. It was an echo of force similar to swimming in the deep end of our neighborhood pool. Since then I awake each day with the same curious excitement. Every day feels like Christmas morning full of awesome discoveries. My life has become one effortless awakening after another. In what amounted to three and a half years, I discovered all of my deepest secrets. Secrets that up until now I was afraid to share. I see things that others don’t. I know things that I was never taught. My spirit has never shined as bright as it does now. When I was 50 I doubled down and bet it all on myself.

I pitched three options to my parents in order to fully develop action plans for my life. The first two included gaining financial assistance from outside sources while the third laid out how I’d face it all on my own. Before I shared them with my family, I had already made my decision. Door number three. I invested fully in developing and unlocking my inner knowing, imagination, intuition, and predictive spontaneity. I am free, and gradually, intentionally I will share with those who might find solace in understanding their own worth.

Imagination defined my reality rather than the other way around. I studied hard, knew the rules. I began to flex and bend them while defying gravity itself. Grandad taught us well how to regulate our center. It’s a rather basic physics trick. He’d join a spoon and fork in a friendly handshake while balancing them with a simple toothpick on the edge of a drinking glass. What we perceived as magic became the foundation of our curious minds. Proof that anything is possible once we know the mechanics. Magic is not a trick. It’s an algorithm.

Through half a century of trials I discovered my truth. Never grow up. Don’t follow someone else’s dreams for my lives. I say lives because at any point we have the ability to innately change anything, even everything. I chose to go off-map and chart new regions of discovery. I follow what is unseen to many, to most. The answers aren’t out there, up there or even down there. They’re inside each of us. All we need to do is request access. I’ve said that many times, and it still rings true. What may appear as witchcraft or alchemy to some, I’ve unlocked my innermost mysteries defining what it means to be a devilishly angelic spirit living within a terrestrial experience.

& {autonomous neural dilation} issue #1 covers preview

What exactly is “&” (A.N.D.), Autonomous Neural Dilation? Just some sort of mumbo jumbo I made up. The phrase materialized in my head before I ever researched what it might mean. It’s another effortless discovery I decided to chase down for a bit. Firstly, I’ll be the first to admit that it spawned within my imagination. Next, I aligned it with my intuition. Then I carefully unearthed the root words discovering their intentional truths. Quite simply, it’s the self-governing, deeply focused meditative state we exhibit when we’re laser-focused “in the zone.” This translates as the most polar opposite of the daily distractions meant to dumb us all down into checked out zombie phantom states drowning in frenetic anxiety.

Another symptom for another pill. Yet one more form of keeping us submissive, ignorant, and most of all, quiet. Always asleep allowing the dark forces full sway of public opinion’s falsehoods. This quieting of the mind appears at first as the solution, a powerful elixir, but in reality it’s just a placebo. A false sense of security caught in the midst of the true zombie apocalypse. A society built upon the long dead caste system where we’re just battered bricks holding up a swaying tower of Pisa. A weakened, crumbling foundation off-kilter. Belief that their mortar keeps us connected when in reality it only supports the control system itself. They keep watchful eyes on us until someone rocks the boat, off-kilter.

When the rotting mortar cracks, the cycle rapidly repeats until we’re back under its spell. Spelling remains to this day, and we’re fully unaware of its direct relation to our submissive gaze. It was cast down upon us and throughout our withering family trees. We’re plainly taught and reinforced by our parents, teachers, and peers that none of us will remember our childhood. This concept cannot be further from the truth. Truth be told, I remember everything going all the way back to the rhythmic cosmic comforts I experienced for eight months before my premature arrival. I’ve asked my parents many times about these particular memories. They gently remind me that I already know.

Usually they just brush it off and tell me it’s a shadow, an echo of something I’ve already experienced but forgot all about. Yet I know things. Know them in the innate sense. These sensitivities gently poke at and haunt my consciousness, while both asleep and awake. I am blessed with a deeply imaginative mind. If I intentionally tie a feeling or emotion to an event or happening I will remember every detail, even the ones everyone else within my vicinity ignores completely. I’ve been navigating these microcosms of my own Akashic Records since I began writing stories when I was six years old aptly titled Stories That Come Alive. A living narrative understanding everything is consciously aware.

There are no greater falsehoods than mankind’s beliefs that they’re the self-endowed pinnacle of the food chain and have full dominion over every creature. These illusions are providing delusional comforts for their own selfish, greedy, gluttonous intentions. When the power grid fails, all of our bubbles will immediately burst simultaneously. I realized I needed to prepare for what’s coming. Time for a reimagining of my life. When I turned fifty, four years ago, I knew it was time to do something different. It was time to question everything and settle for nothing. I looked at myself in the mirror one last time and reached an aha moment. I gave myself a wink and a brief smirk. My time had finally come.

Time for my own second coming. Heck, it’s even in my name. So what did I realize that shook myself to the core? Where to begin? So I asked myself what gave me the most joy when I was a child. I was a collector, an artist, a detective, magician and card trick dealer, a puzzle and gravity breaker, a creative writer, a math lover, patterns and numbers seer, dream believer, and riddles solver. There were the answers. Simple. Powerful. I’ve unlocked the treasures hidden within my own historical frameworks written all over my DNA in every language across all of the primary, secondary, and tertiary pantheons. Humans are now the most spiritually bankrupt beings living in this earthbound plane. Not always so.

Human’s delusions of grandeur regarding religion is downright criminal. Active. Deceitful. Control. You see, I’ve known my own creator since before I arrived. My inner knowing has always been tuned into the divine spark within all of us. Don’t worry, it only takes a moment to reshape your vibrational frequencies to that of the angelic beings that so many people desperately hide from because they’re terrified what it might mean. Just imagine being so immersed in the control system that you cannot live without it. If and when the time comes when we all need to go back to basics like farming, hunting, and living off the land, I wouldn’t place any bets on mankind’s survival for long. We’ve got work to do.

We’d simply collapse the moment the power grid goes out. So it’s time to get back “in the zone” and get laser-focused on higher levels of consciousness. Take a moment to turn off all notifications and distractions. Allow your mind to take on a cognitive load of significant performance. Seek and discover your next aha moment. No wait, stop looking altogether. You might just surprise yourself. It’s in moments of deep focus where clarity shines the light and exposes truths hidden just below the surface of reality. Once you understand that it’s not about finding anything at all, your eyes will stop deceiving you. In this state you can trust them. Not physical eyes, inner knowing. Eyes of the soul.