Hello Everybody, 

            I guess I should start with a little bit about myself.  My Name is Tom Mack, I was born in Louisiana but moved shorty after to Georgia and then immediately to Philadelphia Pa where i spent Most of my life. From the age of 3 until i was about 12 I lived for the most part in the Germantown section. When my mom met a Guy and got married she moved to the northeast and i was back and forth from her house to my grandmoms in Germantown. When I was 10 My mom gave birth to twin boys Name John & Eric, that i helped out allot with when they were real young. The entire time I was in and back and forth to Germantown i attended Fitler Academics Plus. A school that was at that time a feeder school for smarter children. I made allot of friends at that school while i was there but none of the friends i hung out with at home went there, so i always asked my mom to put me in the school in the northeast.  I finally broke her down by 6th grade or maybe it was the long drive in traffic every morning but my 6th grade year i started at Carnell elementary school. I loved it at first, all of my friends were there i was instantly popular by default because of who i hung out with. It was great! The problem was with the actual school work. I found it to be entirely too easy after coming from a Academics plus school this stuff felt like first grade. So i would get the work done insanely fast and then have spare time to do whatever. My teachers started to hand me extra work so i would have something to do but it got to the point where i would have the weeks work done on Monday. If it was a once a week class i would knock out a months worth of work in a day.  And because i had soo much extra time to goof off, i pissed the teachers off. I was a disturbance they use to say, & for that i ended up with D’s and F’s on my report card. I barely passed the 6th grade and i was the smartest kid in my opinion in that entire school let alone the 6th grade. When i went to 7th grade is when i started to become a problem. I was suspended so much that year that i had to redo the entire year over. And i was suspended the next year just as much but they couldn’t hold me back for that again. 8th grade I just skimmed by… doing just what i needed to pass and thats it, i still had not learned anything new since i left Fitler so i figured whats the point.  After that my high school years are a real mess.

By the time i got to high school My mom and my grandmom got a house together in the same northeast neighborhood that my mom had lived in with her ex husband. My moms New boyfriend and my current step pop moved in shortly after that. I don’t know exactly why i became such a menace but if you want you could blame it on where i grew up. In high school I got Back with all my boys that moved on the year i got held back. The things that happen to freshmen when they come into high school is or was at that point legendary, of course with security and the way things are now i don’t know. But i was never subject to any of the freshman hazing or anything like that. The minute i walked into Fels High i already had a name for myself, because of the things or fights that got me suspended at the other school. Going to high school was pretty interesting i mean there was now new stuff to learn but i had screwed myself by not applying myself in the other school so there was no way i was gonna get the classes i wanted. I wanted to get into a graphics class to learn how to do digital artwork. I was unable to get into that class so i took it upon myself to find a way to learn it on my own.  After that is when i started to skip school with my friends. We would show up in the lot and then walk off to someones house or if everyones parents were home we would go to this… i think hideout would be the best word for it but we had this place behind the local hospital that was pretty much the only woods around anywhere for miles.  There was a old tree-house some of us had participated in building a long time prior to high school and there was a brewery that we could get on the roof of from the woods. So as teenagers we had enough to do there or at a friends house to keep us busy until school let out. After school would let out i would go home and play with photoshop 2 or 3 i cant remember what one i had first. But after soo much of me skipping school i was put into foster care. Which wasn’t so bad, the family i was set up with was nice and they had a beautiful daughter of their own that lived with them. Like i said they were nice, they lived not too far from my family so i went to the same school and i went home on the weekends so it wasn’t soo bad it was just that i didn’t like not being able to see my family whenever i wanted but i did it to myself so i cant complain, its not like my family put me there it was the courts that put me there for not going to school.  I did however get smarter but kept the same mentality about the bullshit that Philadelphia calls high school.  I started doing just enough to pass my classes work wise and most days i would only show up to My Advisory class and that was 10mins at 8am so if i wasn’t staying to catch up on work i was somewhere hanging out by 8:30am..  When i hit 17 i signed myself out of school but eventually got my GED so that i can eventually pursue some sort of extra schooling

I started my criminal career when i was young i cant remember exactly what age but at a young age i started stealing bikes with some of my friends. Smoking weed, Drinking. I stole bikes so i could get extra money for weed, beer, liquor anything that i couldn’t justify buying with the money my family gave me. My family hooked me up most of the time while i was growing up I mean now with the little things that i wanted all the time but with the things i needed. I was one of the first kids i knew of with my own computer and the expensive programs that would of taken months to download over a 56k. But i couldn’t justify to myself or to them spending the money they give me for food and other things on “Drugs” (I’ll get to what i think about drugs some other time).  At 15 i got a job but was too caught up in the lifestyle i had created for myself that I didn’t stop the stealing when i got a job it only got worse. I never stole anything from any job i have ever worked! What i did do is upgrade from bikes to cars, systems and occasionally motorcycles and drugs. I occasionally got locked up for stupid shit that would get thrown out as soon as it hit court. For instance one time a friend of my decided to hop out of the van me and my mom shared on South Street. Now if you don’t know about South Street.. you can goggle it, but its a long street in Philly that allot of tourists visit and allot of residents come to shop, hang out and eat. Its usually at a traffic standstill where you may move about one mile an hour it may take you as much as 2hrs to get down this street sometimes. But anyway this kid hops out of my van to try to talk to this girl he saw walking by, She immediately sprays him with mace and he comes screaming and running back to the car. When he gets in I’m not to far from the light so i turn off of South street so we can see if he is OK. Well a cop pulls up and arrests all of us because the girl said that he tried to steal her cell phone and her friend acted like a witness. When we finally went to court the judge found out that the friend lied and said she didn’t know her so it was all thrown out. Now as i am older i believe that Karma is a bitch and it comes back to bite you when you least expect it. I continued to steal cars and such until i was 21 after i turned 18 it became a once and a while thing to get some much needed extra cash.       But when i was 21 my life turned around. Soon after my 21st birthday my grandmom passed away hurting me in a way that will only rival the loss of my mom when that time comes. But my grandmom passed away and then in June of the next year while i was still 21 my Grandfather you can call him my step grandfather but i called him pops. He went into the hospital at the end of June and i received a call early in the morning about him Being in the hospital and i need to get to New Jersey to watch my brothers while my mom and my step pop ran to see him. Now at this time my car was broke down to shit and was beyond in need of gas. So i decided to take this Neon that i knew was stolen but had been to jersey and back without problems before. So i decided to take the neon.. As soon as i get off of the exit by my moms house i get pulled over, Now my mind is going haywire i have a stolen car my grandfathers dying and to top it off i recently lost who i thought was the love of my life. So I got the bright idea to run from them. Its not like i hadn’t done this before and lost them in Philly so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Well after a long chase i ended up crunched into a median with the airbags deployed. I immediately got out of the car and ran for my moms house and at this time it wasn’t but a mile away. So i take off running and i loose the cop but some good Samaritan decides to help out and tries to run me over with his car. I jumped over the car as he pulled in front of me and i get to 3 doors away from my moms house when some neighbor that did not know i was related to anyone on his block tackled me like the huge football player he looks like. After running about a mile in less than 2mins and jumping over cars you tend to get really tired and out of breath when you get a shoulder thrust into your chest as your running full speed not so much paying all of your attention to whats ahead but more as to whats behind. So after this dude tackles me i start wheezing and going into a asthma attack, i was cuffed while having an extremely hard time breathing and taken to the county jail where i sat for a few days until i was bailed out just in time to goto the funeral.  I later when back and forth to court where the best deal i heard was 10yrs and i had to do 85% of that. So i neglected to show up at half the court hearings or trials unless they held me in jail until court.. but after the last case i went to and was released i stayed on the run until they picked me up almost 4 years later. When i went to court they gave me a 3 flat and i spent about equal amounts of time over the 15 months i did total in the county jail, prison and a boot camp style program. I am now out on a intensive parole system designed to send me back to jail. But i am working toward getting off of this thing on schedule.

Like i said earlier, i started to teach myself graphics at the age of I’d say 14. After I’d come home from cutting school I’d sit at the computer and play around with the filters that photoshop had and ones that i downloaded for it. I did my best to learn them in and out and then i went out and tried to learn effects that i could not achieve with the filters, i started getting into the graphics community in a private chat room on AOL. People there showed me how to do all sorts of cool things with photoshop. This was around the time that “Punters” and such programs were big. (for those who don’t know punters were a way to knock someone offline through a instant message)  I wanted to learn how to create one myself so I tried to learn Visual Basic. Some of the artists in the room i went to pointed me to another room for programming and i learned a little bit about it but all ended up being useless info because i ended up not retaining any of it. But i learned how to make a punter and various other little vb apps that would do all sorts of stupid things, like programs that would open and never close things that would make it look like your whole computer was being deleted, But all of that lead me to meet someone that will remain nameless.. I started making the artwork for some of his punters and programs and he really started me off in the right direction at the time with my artwork. We would meet every other night online and talk about things we needed to do for whatever it was that he was programming. I would add what i thought it should have and what i would do to make it look right, he would create his programs and critique the hell out of the work i was doing for him and my side art projects. One day we were supposed to meet online and he never showed up, in-fact never got online after that. So i eventually started drifting away from the art scene for awhile, i would occasionally load up photoshop and make something cute for the girls i was dating. But did not really get back into it until i was forced to move to new jersey because of my running from the cops situation. After My grandfathers funeral i ended up Back at my moms house and without a car. So i was sitting in the house allot doing nothing when a friend of mine suggested that i get online and take a look at what he has done and how he has improved from the skills i taught it years ago in photoshop. So i hop online and take a look and I’m actually quite amazed and disappointed at the same time. Now i was amazed that my buddy took further steps than the ones i taught him but i was disappointed in myself for not being as good or better than my former student.  So he points me to this site that he goes to, so he can show off his artwork and so he can have fun photoshopping members of the site, friends etc. So i sign up and started getting back into graphics. From that site i found information on other sites on how to further educate myself about the programs i use to do artwork. I also found another site that i am a member of that  got me into Magazines for my artwork and resources that i developed for photoshop. Now at the age of 25 its time to start actually doing something with myself and my skills instead of talking about it.

That is all i have for now i know it is a bit long and drawn out but i think its the best way for you to understand more about who i am. I will have more posts containing background information but they will most likely relate to one specific idea or behavior unlike this one which explains multiple aspects of my background.

-Tom Mack