Hmmm.... What can I say here that won't make me sound stupid, arrogant, or boring?
Well, my name is Anthony Torres, but you'll most definitely find me on the web by the alias of A.Lukard. I find that you can tell a lot from a person's Internet "handle", so I'll explain mine a bit.

Several years ago, about a decade actually, I read the novel Dracula and fell in love with the villain. Don't get me wrong, I am not a so-called Goth or anything, I just became fascinated with the character of Dracula. Hence my alias is A.Lukard or "Drakula" spelled backwards, as vampires are (in fiction) famous for disguising their names in anagrams.

Now that I'm done with that, I'll tell you a little about myself.

I was born and bred in New York City, specifically, the Bronx. Now, now - don't worry too much for me, the Bronx is not quite as dark and deteriorated as Charles Bronson movies make it out to be. There are actually houses here and decent people. I'm not necessarily one of such decent people, but I try :)

I've been working with computers for a very long time. I still remember Trash 80's (TRS 80), Commodore Vic 20's and Atari 600 XLs. I took a hiatus from computers for a while and rediscovered them around '93-'94 when I purchased a 386 SL with a whopping 2 Megs of RAM. Since then I've been tinkering around with them, building about five or six systems piece by piece, and system troubleshooting for everyone and anyone who found out I knew how.

About four years ago I got into Computer Graphics and Design and began to teach myself the works. Now I am pretty experienced with many applications including Adobe Photoshop, Caligari Truespace, Metacreation's Painter, Poser, Bryce, Detailer, and many, many more. I also taught myself HTML and some basic JavaScript. This is all getting very boring so I'll just put up the software info in raw, list form later on.

If you're wondering about what kind of hardware I use, prepare to be disappointed. I used to be the type who had to be at the cutting edge of computer technology. Nowadays I concentrate more on my skills rather than my hardware, and my wallet has given me many sighs of relief. That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to upgrade soon, it just means that my cash flow can't handle it so I gave up whining about it.

I own (and built) a:

• 300 MHz Pentium, with 128 MB RAM.
• 15 inch Monitor (had a 21 inch that died - sigh)
• 13 GB of brimming full Hard Drives
• Jaz and a Zip Drive
• Matrox Millenium II 4MB Video Card
• My trusty Wacom Tablet
  
  

For those wondering what my favorite and most used apps are:

• Adobe Photoshop 5
  • Alien Skin Xenofex and Eye Candy Plug-Ins
  • Kai's Powertools 3 and 5
  • Too many other Plug-Ins to count
• Caligari Truespace 4
• Asymetrix Web 3D
• Metacreation's
  • Poser 4
  • Painter 5.5
  • Bryce 4
  • Painter 3D
  • Canoma
• Macromedia Flash 4 and Fireworks 2
• HoTMetaL 5.0 and Homesite for HTML work (as well as good ol' Notepad)
• Ulead Gif Animator 2.0 and Smart Saver Pro
• Thumbs Plus for organizing Graphics
• I am currently also trying to master Quark Xpress 4 and Adobe Illustrator

I think that's most of them Now you know why I don't have much money for Hardware upgrades.

Some of my interests (outside of computers and graphics) include:

Horror : I am a huge horror fan. My favorite of such films is Clive Barker's Hellraiser. It is the subject of one of my sites, Hellraiser: The Suffering.

Home Theater : Give me a wide-screen television, Dolby 5.1 Surround, DVD player and I am truly happy.

Writing, reading, yadda yadda yadda ... Do you really care this much?

I guess that's about it. If you want to contact me you will find such info below.

Say what? What do I look like? Fine, here's a pic of me. It's not very recent, my hair is longer now. And yes it's altered in Photoshop as to make me look semi-handsome :)

Contact Info:

• Email me at: [email protected]
• My ICQ # is 51434538
• AIM Alias is fllen drms