June 21, 2007

Demonic Possession

What has been possessed by demons? James-Gannon.com, of course. Despite the fact that my Sleep Terrors are still affecting me regularly, I still maintain complete control of my mind, body, and spirit.
Some religions believe in demons as much as they do their respective deities, most seeing them as evil. But since I'm an atheist and don't believe in the existence of such things, demons represent a neat accessory to dark spirit culture. Like how "bad" equals "cool", as long as it remains in fiction and not brought into reality. Sort of like Grand Theft Auto, it's all fun and games until some loose-brained malcontent blurs the line separating the play world with our own.

Loner's Dungeon
Although probably heading for a name change, Loner's Dungeon is a web site much darker and emotional than my own. Its webmaster is a young girl from Arizona with many aliases. Mostly known as Demon Loner but now going by Demon Martyr, I've personally referred to her as Lady Demon ever since I met her years ago.
Here's our "how we met" story. I wandered into a chat room she created on AOHell. It was named something along the lines of "do not talk to me", so I naturally tried to engage her in conversation. It turned out that the reason for her making such a room was to collect material from the legions of dimwitted America Online users who would pop into her chat room and make complete asses of themselves. She would copy the "best" comments and paste them onto her user profile or AOL Hometown web site for ridicule. We all have our hobbies.
I lost contact with her when she to canceled her AOL account because they thought her various demon inspired screen names were offensive. Honestly, she would go into chat rooms, religious zealots would cry over the then sixteen-year-old girl with the name "DemonBloodBath", and then she would be cited for a TOS (terms of service) violation. I'm sure the screen name "ILoveJesus" would have been acceptable, but what if you don't? Anyway I asked her for her home address so we could keep in touch. When my first letter reached her, it freaked her mother out because of all the horror stories she would hear about people who met on the Internet hooking up in real life and ending with someone getting raped. All from a piece of paper that contained the first chapter of an online book I was writing at the time.
The main feature of "The Dungeon" is to display her poetry, byproducts of her mind and a small depiction of her life's story. As her online nickname suggests, she also has a particular interest in demons. Her web site is aptly titled a dungeon because one page is devoted to collected graphics of demons, nytemares, and loonies. Those come from web pages that host animated gif files of strange and bizarre looking creatures you can "adopt" and display on your own web page. This was long before "widgets" became popular.
The Dungeon fell into disuse for quite a while after dropping AOL, although she signed up at a web site called All Poetry to feed her creative habit. After a couple of years wondering what happened to that demon girl, I searched Google for "Loner's Dungeon" and found a few sites that featured those keywords, mostly as links posted by Lady Demon herself. Now we are talking again and helping out each other's web endeavors.
During our time away, Lady Demon started to create tile graphics to be used as web page backgrounds. I was very impressed with them and chose several to spruce up my own site. Credit is paid back to her at the bottom of every page that features her work. That, and the aforementioned link to her Dungeon on my Links page.

Adopt-A-Demon
When I visited Lady Demon's web site after first meeting her, I became interested in the three demon graphics I saw there. They came from a place called Adopt-A-Demon, where a vast selection of unearthly creatures can be taken and placed on your own site. The only catch is giving credit to AOD on your find(s). I originally adopted four to keep on my old AOL Hometown site, but that whole thing went away when I ended my own account. Years later, when I finally decided to purchase my own .com address, I gave no thought into resurrecting my Hell babies from their inanimate prison within my hard drive. It was only after reuniting with Lady Demon that they entered my head again. I also went back to Adopt-A-Demon and took nine more of the underworld spawn to haunt James-Gannon.com. So have a heart... visit the site and adopt one of these preciously evil visions to inhabit your own online domain.

"Remember, a demon is forever and not just Halloween."~ Demon Keeper, administrator of Adopt-A-Demon

And that's just the way it is.