The Life of a Demoniac

The first installment of Intercepted demonic communiqué (or, Things demons have said behind my back)—which, originally, was meant to be the only installment—has been so popular with people and demons when I published it at the beginning of February that I haven't had to intercept a single communique to learn new words and phrases demons and people use in their communication (although, I have been doing that); rather, demons have been handing all kinds of new information to me directly, claiming that it's fun to watch people react to them. My (or should I say, their) explanations and stories tend to tell readers a lot more about topics I generally don't cover anywhere else on the blog, even though they sometimes still leave a lot unsaid.
NOTE | There are lots more words and phrases unique among demons and their people on the Factoids page. I call them, demon idiom. To make this post a bit more interesting, I've included a few more things I've intercepted (versus han…

But wisdom is justified of all her children.— Luke 7:35
Anything but another demon pic, every one of my Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Path, LinkedIn and Swarm followers have thought at one point or another–if not outright said. Are you obsessed with demons or something? all have thought—if not outright said.

I've always ignored these questions in the past, as they are so stupid to ask, and too stupid to answer; but, if I had answered them, I would have said, I hear ya, and, No, respectively.

Ironically, insodoing, I would have begged what I consider to actually be a valid question: Then, what's the deal?

I wouldn't have answered that one, either, though, until I finished that which is presented in this post. The answer would have sounded crazier than taking pictures of violent demons sounds; but, now that I am finished—and alive, thank you very much—I will answer that question:

Introducing the world's first and only machine-learning image classifier model for a…

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.— Isaiah 40:31

It was the best of days; it was the worst of days—depending on how you look at it.

On one hand, it is clear that my health is on the mend if my leaderboard ranking in three of the Nike Run Club Monthly Challenges, which pits its members against each other in a race to get the most miles in the allotted time, is any indication. As of the time of this writing:
In the August Weekly Challenge, I rank #9 out of 49,923 runners world-wide, having in just two days logged 75.43 miles;In the August 100K Challenge, I rank #10 out of 39,879 runners worldwide, having in just two days logged 45.97 miles;In the August 50K Challenge, I rank #8 out of 63,672 runners, worldwide, having logged the same amount of miles as in the August 100K Challenge.
So far this week, I'm averaging 17 miles per day, having achieved n…

A few weeks back, I took a pop quiz to test my bilinguality via Busuu, an app for iPhone that purports to teach people new languages and to expand their fluency in foreign languages already known. Demons have periodically taunted me for having once claimed to be bilingual on my résumé, saying that I can't honestly make such a claim after so many years out of practice (I studied German from 6th grade to 9th grade, and from college freshman to college junior, but never again since). So, when I recently saw an ad for the app via a recent Apple WWDC 2018 promotion, I decided for scheiße und kichert to settle the argument by testing my skills.
I scored a Level 18—about 18 levels higher than any of the demons with which I exchanged loud obscenities as I took the test thought I'd score, and about 10 levels lower than I could have scored were I not shouting, Fick dich, dämonischer Schmutz, while trying to interpret the words of the German speaker, the part of the test overshadowed mo…

One of the very first posts to this blog (about seven years ago) featured an image showing the most artistic death threat ever made. The threat was from the Spectre of Death (no less), and was made out of a set of empty plastic closet hangers. Apparently, while I was slept, he crept into the apartment–or, should I say, flew into my apartment—and skillfully arranged the hangers to form the near-perfect likeness of his skull-like face.

It was an illusion made out of the shadows each hanger cast onto the other. By tilting each one at just the right angle, he controlled how dark the shadow was, and how much area the shadow covered an the adjacent hanger.

That alone would have been enough to put the scare into me; but, the Spectre of Death went one amazing step further: he arranged them so that his head could only be seen from a very specific vantage point–one that I would normally never be in, specifically, on the floor, looking up at the closet. Perhaps I dropped something—I don't r…

If the shoe fits, you could say.

To the layperson, many varieties of demonic species don't look cognizable as such. Take, for instance, the demon shown in these two images:

That's why demonic insignia is so important to find; by matching insignia to the markings on any object suspected of demon possession (here, it is an iron), demons that stray far from the more recognizable humanoid from can't hide as easy:

NOTE | Since the time of the first post making a connection between insignia and the demons shown in my photos, my collection of insignia has skyrocketed, as have the number of matches between the insignia shown above. More to come... The following video shows a technique that uses an edge-detection filter to make finding insignia-to-demon matches easier and faster, particularly for demons with a foreign shape and highly complex lines and curves:



Insignia also serves a second, equally important purpose, in addition to identifying strange, new life: it tells you what th…