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Who am I? A very good question, and one that I wish I had a good answer to. I’ve been called a lot of things: Phreak, Gonzo, Zmeu, LostinTheMatrix¹, Xien, MatrixPhreak (sometimes stylized Matrix^Phreak), Michael, Gabriel, Valarik, Xi’En, Anrathi, GREVANE, Raven, Shikyo…

About Me

What do I do?

Another great question, and I’m glad you asked. I’m sort of a general nerd, I guess, That’s probably the best way to put it. Just a nerd who has interests that shift constantly.

Software Developer

When I was 8 years old, I wrote my first program.

10 PRINT "HOME"
20 PRINT "SWEET"
30 GOTO 10

Yes, this is a Futurama reference, but it’s true. I remember going to the elementary school library and looking for a book about robots. You see, back then, I was super into Star Wars (I still am), and there was this one book I must’ve checked out hundreds of times. I still sort of remember it, even: a small hardcover book that just talked about robots in reality and fiction. I remember it talking about R2-D2 and C-3PO, and have a vague eemory of it claiming that Robbie The Robot was a villain. But I also remember it showing things like: the sort of robot manipulators that were/are used to perform radioactive experiments in a “hot cell”.

But this day, in particular, the book wasn’t available, so I picked another nearby book figuring that “robots are near robots”… This was a book about programming in QBASIC. And it just so happened that my father’s old Windows 2.1 laptop had a BASIC interpreter on it, so I started going through the exercises in the book. Printing a “HELLO WORLD” and moving up to coding a small tic-tac-toe game VS the computer. Of course, this was all just copying code out of a book²

When I was in high school, my friend Eric showed me The Matrix for the first time, and I instantly fell in love with the cyberpunk dystopia. He was also the one who introduced me to the Anarchist’s Cookbook for the first time, which eventually lead to me reading up on phone phreaking³ as a pet interest and finding archives of old BBS text files. I also stole the username “MatrixPhreak” from him. Sorry, I guess?

Also in high school, I took my first C++ class and decided that what I really wanted to be was a hacker, or at least a computer programmer. I have a clear memory of doing a speech in my English class and talking about hacking. To demonstrate, I just wrote a simple C++ “Hello World” style printf program and used a hex editor to change the string compliled into the exe. Not really that impressive, and I remember the class not being that impressed. I also built some of my first robots.

I eventually went to college for Computer Engineering, but quickly dropped out of the program. Partially because I realized I didn’t want to spend my life staring at spreadsheets, and partially because I also realized that I would rather play World of Warcraft than do homework (or go to class). Following that, I enrolled in a local community college pursuing Computer Science. And then promptly dropped out of that program a few more times.

Eventually, I lucked my way into a paid internship as a software developer, and they decided to keep me on post-internship as part time, before proceeding to get a full time position. And so that’s where I am now, having just finished my fifth year working for them. If there’s one thing I do alright with in this world, it’s writing code.

Actor

This all starts in 2005 — My girlfriend (at the time) showed me “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the first time. Immediately I fell in love with that movie, and said to myself: “I know I’ve never acted before, but if I ever get the chance: I want to play Riff-Raff” (based solely on his vocal performance near the end of the show⁴.

In 2011, one of my friends auditioned for a community theater production, and she asked if I would go too. I told her, “No thanks. I’m so busy with work all the time, and I’m always tired, but I’ll sure come to see you!” Besides, they were only auditioning ensemble members and looking for a narrator. But, less than a week later, she called me up and left a drunk voicemail:

Hey Phreak— We lost our Riff-Raff.

Well, actually, we lost our Frank and moved our Riff up to the role.

Anyway, we need someone to be Riff-Raff…

Can you do it?

So of course I jumped at it. And that’s how, in 2011, I stepped on stage for the first time. And for the last 11 years, I’ve been going strong.

What do I think?

At a certain point, pretending like I’m not asking these questions to myself grows tiresome. Anyhow, I guess I should start out with: I’m an ex-Catholic, just like every other Catholic I know. What’s interesting is, I’m not even the only occultist ex-Catholic I know. There must be something inherent to Catholicism that encourages the occult⁵.

At a young age, I got interested in the occult. In probably the most nerdy way one could: I wanted to be Goku from Dragonball Z. So— of course I googled “How to do kamehameha” and came across a few websites that claimed they could teach me how.

There’s a distinct core memory that I have of this one website⁶: - Black background - Green text - Sidebar of links

And on this website, they claimed some really outlandish things. They talked about Ki, or Qi, or Chi, or Prana, or Mana, or Psi (all words that different websites used to refer to the same thing) and how you could use it to definitely 100% truthfully shoot energy beams from your hands. And if you “compressed it” down in your arms, you could manifest this other energy, which I think was called “Jing” if I remember right. There was also a whole page full of “spells” made up of fake Latin sounding words which promised that you could create and control fire, or summon the wind, or call up a storm.

It was fuckin wild

Also around that time, Harry Potter came out. I remember going to the Scholastic Book Fair and buying this little purple book about being a wizard. It was full of rhyming spells, and instructions on making a “magic wand” by tying your hair around a stick and sleeping with it under your pillow while repeating one of the rhyming spells over it. Really: it was no crazier than some of the mainstream wiccan practices out there right now. But I was still so young, and scared of eternal damnationn, and I remember actually (I shit you not) going to Catholic confession and confessing to a priest that I had been studying witchcraft. See, I knew it was forbidden. I knew they burned witches. I knew it was heresy…

My punishment: say 10 “Hail Mary”–s and 5 “Our Father”–s and all will be forgiven.

From then on, I just started collecting books about the subject. For a while I was really into alchemy, so I collected any books with old alchemical treatises in them, including a few books that were (disappointingly) using transmutation as an allegory for “Transmuting the Leaden Soul into a Golden Soul” as a self-help meditation.

I got copies of old grimoires: Classics like The Lesser Key/The Greater Key of Solomon the Wise, and Francis Barrett’s The Magus, which used the old “long-s” character that looked like an f (ſ) and made it really weird to read as a teen⁷. I also collected both the Simon Necronomicon and the Necronomicon Spell Book, first as illegally downloaded PDFs and then as physical copies. Slowly and steadily growing my collection, trolling the New Age section of book stores, looking for new finds. Withdrawing books on Transcendental Meditation from the local library (having once read and believed stories about buddhist monks levitating themselves through its practice) and absorbing everything I could find on anything even remotely related.

I guess I haven’t really explained what I think, though. And that’s partially intentional, and partially because I’m not sure what I think. I guess, I could sum up my core beliefs as: There’s something else there. I don’t think it’s a soul, necessarily. And if it’s a God, then it’s a God that we created for ourselves (see the This Site page for more on that, until I write an article). But there’s still something weird and “woojy” going on, and I’ve experienced enough proof of it for myself that I feel comfortable in my beliefs about it. Of course, your mileage may vary.

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1. This is a throwback. I haven’t gone by Lost since DA (dejitaru-anime.com) went offline. For the record, the wayback machine’s latest snapshot is April 3rd 2005, 17 god damned years ago. Funny how time does that. There’s a weird nostalgia looking at this archive, too. I’m seeing screennames of people I haven’t thought of in years. Actually, decades at this point. Friends of mine from middle school that abandoned me shortly after, and friends who are no longer alive. It’s somber and dark, and I wasn’t ready for this at 3am.↩︎

2. I never did get the “choose your own adveture” sample program. But I do remember that it had something, like, electrified glass or something.↩︎

3. Stylized as “fone phreaking” — Hacking telephone exchanges for free phone calls. Made largely obsolete by the move to purely digital switching technology and the advent of cellphones. That being said, I do have a blue box that I built as a curiosity when I was learning to solder. Now it’s just a cool relic of counterculture and a conversation starter.↩︎

4. Frank-n-furter, it’s all over. Your mission is a failure, your lifestyle’s too extreme. I’m your new commander, you now are my prisoner. We return to Transylvania – Prepare the transit beam↩︎

5. No surprise there, really. All those candles, and the incense… And the enforced belief that you are eating the literal body and blood of your saviour as part of some fucked up ritualistic cannibalism.↩︎

6. I can’t remember now if it was hosted on angelfire or tripod, but it was definitely one of those.↩︎

7. Despite this, it’s still one of my favorite 400+ page “occult stereo instructions”— so named because the thing reads as boring and obscurely technical as an instruction booklet for a stereo.↩︎