I am a simple man, with simple goals. I am sure that this mission statement will help you to understand that:

I created this site with a single purpose in mind, that purpose being that when scholars look back over the 21st century and have to decide what single event was the most important, they will all concur that the founding of Shadowtwin.com was the most monumental event in that century, and possibly since the invention of the wheel.

Also, the site will hopefully make the world community so enamored with the peace, the joy, the LOVE that is Shadowtwin.com that they will feel compelled to send me all their earthly belongings and move into remote villages where they do nothing but create idols in my likeness and chant Shadowtwin. After which, Christianity will fall before the new monotheistic 'Shadowtwinian' religion.

I predict that my reign will begin within three or four days.

As I said, I am but a simple man, with simple goals.

First of all, who am I? My name is Donnie J. Burgess, I was born in Roseburg, OR in 1974. If you came here looking for a Donnie Burgess that isn't in that age range, or from that geographic area, your search must continue elsewhere. Now on to the fun stuff.

My online presence started in roughly 1994. Although at the time my "presence" was limited mostly to frequenting old-school message boards. I used ICQ extensively, and was one of the first on board with the newfangled Java Chat rooms. In fact one of my proudest achievments was being the first ever moderator of the Megadeth Cyberarmy java chat (how sad is my life that that is a pinnacle?). Then the free webpages started their boom, and everyone who was anyone had one. It turns out that one of mine generated enough traffic that it remained, while half a dozen others I had created failed. And now for your enjoyment, I give you: "The Nether Realm of Shadowtwin. I even made some flashy banners, like the following:

(I have to admit I still think that banner is catchy.)

But seriously, don't click that link, it is horrible to see a standard mid-90's homepage.

My stated purpose behind creating the free web page (and several others like it) was to showcase my writing. The Shadowtwin site was there to showcase my poetry, and I had created others to house my Arthur Witles stories and my horror short stories. The other sites were hosted by geocities, which eventually became part of Yahoo, but somewhere along the way the free sites just sort of disappeared. I don't know if some stayed based on use or what, but the pages that housed my Arthur Witles stories and short stories were gone for good. I happened to have copies of 2 of the Arthur Witles stories saved to disk (at least drafts of them), but that left several that -through a couple of computer upgrades without backing up files...dumbass- were just plain gone. I still hold out hope that I may have mailed paper copies to my Mom, but I haven't seen them in 15 years, so the hope is pretty slim.

The short stories were another thing altogether. I had about a dozen of them online I would guess. I began writing short stories longhand in high school, and continued through my early 20's. When I first moved to Arizona, my Mom had one of those ancient Mechanical typewriters, which I used to type probably 40 or 50 stories. I then upgraded to an electric typewriter to type another couple few dozen , well, I have a file cabinet full of them. But since the geocities copies were the only digital copies I had, they were lost when the site was removed. I still have paper copies of them (though a few are too faded to read), but when I tried to type them up to post I realized that most of them aren't very good. I know they say "you are you own worst critic", but I don't think anyone would be able to read these and think they were literary gold (I don't know if they would even have made pulp fiction in a different era). At any rate, I never got around to typing any of them up.

So armed with only 2 surviving Arthur Witles stories, I bought a domain name. Shadowtwin.com. Shadowtwin had been my alias for as long as I have been on the internet, so it seemed only fitting. I don't know why anonymity was such a big deal back then, I guess just because the internet seemed so vast and unknown. But Shadowtwin just seemed a hell of a lot cooler than Donnie.

Once I got my stories live, I started piddling around with doing "updates". There were people doing web logs at the time, and that was what I was trying to emulate. This, of course, before blogger came along and made it easy. At the time you had to have a pretty solid knowledge of HTML to be able to manufacture a post, and especially to handle your archives. I got bored with that after a couple of years, and the site languished until blogger made it easier for me to post. I could just write a post and hit update. So I did that for a while, until I just kind of ran out of shit to say. The posts became less and less frequent. Which really brings us pretty much to current.

Now, with the explosion of sites like Facebook and Myspace, people are getting back in touch with old friends and relatives like at no time in history. As a result the last time I searched "Donnie Burgess" on Google, I found pages and pages of links, even I couldn't figure out which ones were me (without clicking through). So I took the time to register Donnieburgess.com yesterday, which is why I am updating this page. But I am redirecting that site to Shadowtwin.com. Anyone who I met or knew online over the years is familiar with that name (though they call me Donnie in communications), and plus I don't want to have to update all the graphics.