About
Pittsburgh. Local AI Vocal Artist. One man, no studio, no staff — and a workshop that runs at zero dollars a video.
There's a probe out there — Voyager 6. Its whole purpose: learn all that is learnable, and return that knowledge to its Creator. That's this operation, and it's not a slogan. Everything on this site was built by machines that absorbed the internet and came back with shows, videos and automations.
I don't type much of it. I talk, and it gets built. That turned out to matter more than it sounds — because the moment the cost of making something drops to nothing, the only question left is whether it's any good. So that's the whole job now: taste, judgment, and knowing when to throw the first nine versions away.
I was twenty-two, cooking breakfast on the line at a casino family restaurant. Five a.m. start. The bar next door meant I had to leave my stool at 4:55 to walk across the casino floor and punch in on time. I got good at that walk.
It didn't last, because I hadn't gone to Reno to flip eggs. I'd gone to learn the craft. I found it at Columbo's Italian, tucked on the lower level of a parking garage facing the Truckee River — forty-five seats, a piano bar, a marble bar looking out over the water, open from five at night until seven in the morning. A hidden diamond. That's where I actually learned to cook.
I used to carve faces into pumpkins. That year was an election year, so I did both candidates — Gore and Bush, in pumpkin flesh. They came out well enough that the local news ran a story on them.
What I remember better is that while I was carving, I'd turn my head and see a sudden flash of light. A few times through the night. I chalked it up to being tired. Then came numbness in my left hand, then pins and needles down my left leg. No health insurance, an ER, a CT scan that showed nothing, and a neurology clinic that could see me in two months.
When the MRI came back I drove it to my own restaurant and handed it to Dr. Bob — a chiropractor and a regular at my bar. He read it standing there and said, "You have multiple sclerosis." That's how I found out. I was thirty-three. Married, two little boys, a restaurant to run.
So I retired at thirty-three — not the way anybody dreams about it. My first neurologist told me: find a hobby, keep your mind active, or you'll spoil and rot. I took that seriously and never stopped.
I went back to school on a state rehab program to be an electronics engineering technician. The kid who wouldn't carry a book in high school, who told his English teacher to put the unreturned books on his tab, pulled a 4.0 every semester. Turns out I love to learn. I'm a sponge. Nobody was more surprised than me.
Today I have multiple sclerosis and using a mouse is getting harder. I wear that as a badge, not a complaint — but it changes how I build. Every click I remove from my day is a click I don't have to spend. None of this is a clever demo. It's me routing around a problem with the tools I already had.
And here's the part people don't expect: MS let me live a life most people only imagine. Does it suck? Certainly. But it cut me loose. Twenty-five years, twenty homes, coast to coast, because nothing was holding me anywhere. It broke in my favor.
I cooked as a French chef for nearly twenty years before I opened anything of my own. Then I opened my first restaurant: French. A disaster. It turns out most people don't much like French food.
The second one, I took over an existing place. Kept their menu, added half of mine. Half a concept, half committed. Also a disaster — and that one taught me more, because it proved the problem wasn't the cuisine. It was the hedging.
The third, I cooked the food I actually like to eat. Theme and concept a hundred percent me: unpretentious European-American, no apologies. We opened it for under a thousand dollars. Absolute home run.
My second wife and I ran restaurants together — five between us over the years — and the marketing turned out to be the thing we were best at. In 2006 we were named North America's best independent restaurant marketers. That's where I learned what I actually do for a living: not cooking. Figuring out why a place nobody's heard of should be the place somebody picks tonight, and then making that true.
The best thing I took out of those years wasn't a recipe, it was a principle: claim the name before you've earned it. A woman in that same program called herself the Pizza Queen of Canada when she was still just a pizza operator with a good crust. The crown showed up later, because she'd already been wearing it. That story is here, and it's the single most useful thing I can hand anybody who's building something.
Same lesson I'm living now with different tools. The stuff that works is the stuff that's all the way yours.
We moved every other year. Sometimes to the apartment next door, sometimes to the country next door.
The turkey farm. I found it thumbing through the classifieds — four bedrooms and a pool on a three-hundred-acre working turkey farm with three lakes, for less than we were already paying, with a mother-in-law apartment in the cellar. To lock it down, ReNae sat and wrote twelve post-dated rent checks in one sitting so the owner would never have to wonder. Fourteen thousand four hundred dollars in checks, against my nine hundred a month. We moved in the following week.
Phoenix. We lived in the poolside cabana of a bed and breakfast at the base of Camelback Mountain until the one-bedroom came open. My favorite of all of them.
Calgary. A house I'm fairly sure we weren't allowed to photograph. The restaurant was Mexican-themed with a drag club attached. Once a month I flew back to Phoenix for a one-hour infusion and an hour of observation, because that's where my MS treatment was. Canada eventually got tired of me coming and going as I pleased and asked me to leave the country. Canada and I don't play well together.
Chicago. Four years, the longest we stayed anywhere. Two homes, right next door to each other.
Minneapolis. The coldest winter on record — the actual record. I came away convinced the ten thousand lakes are just big puddles left from all that melting snow. We didn't stay for spring to find out.
Then Plano, and a cabin on the Connoquenessing north of Pittsburgh, where I built a climate-controlled bar with its back to the creek, because I was done cooking myself over an open fire while the bugs ate me. It held ten, no bugs allowed, and the propane fireplace had every bit of safety equipment stripped off it. Rule was: last one out shuts it off. We never burned the place down.
Moving that often teaches you something you can't get any other way — how to land somewhere knowing nobody, read the place fast, and start over without flinching. Navigating a different state's health system every other year is a full-time job by itself. Starting over is survivable. Most people never find that out, and spend their lives afraid of it.
It all sits under Hellfire Marketing — a publicly funded marketing and AI agency. Publicly funded is the literal description: there's a donate link and no invoice. Under that umbrella:
Most people are still being sold the idea that AI is a subscription with a chat box. It isn't. It's a workshop. The interesting work is not asking a model a question — it's wiring the thing up so it makes something real, on its own, at three in the morning, whether you're watching or not.
And the part nobody says out loud: the machine will hand you something plausible every single time. Plausible is cheap now. Deciding which one is actually right is still the human being's job, and it always will be.
Which is why I stay on the artistry side of this, deliberately. Here's the line I don't cross: I want my calculator to say five plus five is ten. Not ninety-nine percent of the time. Not ninety-nine point nine. A hundred. An AI doesn't have that margin and never will — it gives you what's likely, and likely is a different animal from certain.
So I never let the model be the calculator. I let it write the calculator, and then the calculator does the arithmetic the same way every time. The machine writes the code; the code does the math. That one rule is the whole difference between a workshop that produces and a party trick that embarrasses you in front of a customer.
And it's why a picture, a video or a piece of writing is fair game. If an image comes out ninety-nine percent right, it's right — I look at it and decide. There's no wrong answer there, only a chosen one. Put that same machine in front of somebody's money, somebody's medicine or somebody's safety with nothing deterministic underneath it, and you've made a category error that a percentage can't save you from.
Full disclosure on the funding model: this entire enterprise is technically managed and partially funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in cooperation with the federal Medicare system. I didn't pick that arrangement — multiple sclerosis did. But it's the truth, and it's why Hellfire calls itself a publicly funded agency without a wink. It really is.
I have two things most people don't, and between them they're the whole answer. Time, in abundance. And a spending budget I'm genuinely liberal with — because money sitting there at the end of the month does nothing for anybody. It only counts once it's spent on something. I do keep a drawer full of cash, mind you, in case something around the house needs it. Everything past that drawer is meant to be moving.
I sleep about four hours a night, at best, usually less. That leaves a lot of week. So I'm a hobby guy — that's the honest description of me. I try any hobby I feel like trying, all the way in, until I know it.
Rule one is simple: if I catch the scent of work, I run for cover. Somebody offering me money is the warning sign. Money brings deadlines, scope, meetings and other people's expectations, and that's work — I retired from that at thirty-three and I'm not going back.
I'm also a digital pack rat. I hate hitting the delete key — my answer to a full disk has always been more disk. There's something like a hundred terabytes on the server in my house and most of it is honestly crap. But every so often a thing I abandoned two years ago turns out to be exactly the piece a new project needs, and it's still sitting right there. That's happened enough times that I've stopped apologizing for it.
I should be straight about the other half of that: I abandon projects just as fast as I pick them up. If a thing stops teaching me something, I'm gone, and I don't feel bad about it. Some of what's on this site is finished and polished, some of it stopped the day I learned what I wanted from it. I'd rather tell you that up front than have you find out.
The trouble is that every so often a hobby turns out to make money as a side effect. That breaks rule one. So whatever comes in goes back out as a donation. That keeps it a hobby, and a hobby is the only thing I'm any good at doing properly.
My problems aren't unique, either. Millions of people live with MS, and far more have had something take their old life off the table. So I build the things that help me — and if they help you, take them. No charge, no catch. I'd put it on a billboard if that's what it took.
A lot of what I make ends up in my community — the classes, the builds, the files themselves. It's free to join today. I'll say plainly that it won't stay free forever: once I work out what that place is actually for, it'll cost something. Anyone who's already inside when that happens is fine. That's not a countdown timer, it's just how it's going to go.
Same with my time. I set aside real hours every week for people building something on their own who've hit a wall. Mostly they aren't stuck on the technology. They're stuck on what the thing is for, who it's for, and whether anybody wants it. If that's you, say so. Worst case you get an honest opinion from a man with no reason to flatter you.
I buy domain names about as fast as I abandon the ideas attached to them. Some of these work, some are parked, some are gone entirely and I'm keeping them on the list out of respect. Current state, honestly labelled:
dmpgh.com — home, this one
dougbug.com — the ladybug button, live
hellfiremarketing.com — the agency, live
theimpatientopportunist.com — live, and an accurate title
unproductivebrain.com — live, also accurate
video.dmpgh.com — my own video host, currently face-down
convertmyclothestocash.com — a marketplace, deceased
paperbackfighters.com — the fight show has a home here instead
ndmpgh.com — I no longer remember what this was for
Which brings me to the only advice in this section: if you want a name and it's sitting there wide open, take it. Now. They go fast, they cost about as much as lunch, and nobody has written the rules for any of this yet — so the people holding the names get to help write them. I'd rather own ten I never use than watch the one I wanted get taken while I thought about it.
If you're keeping score, that's the pattern from further up the page, printed in small type at the bottom where it belongs.
The probe is still transmitting.