1
The person I see—
completely different.
Why is there
a disconnect?
I don’t know why,
but the person I perceive
in videos of me
is the person
I don’t know.
Photo credit: artist unknown
Lumoura
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2
Social Blindness.
So many times,
I don’t know what’s going on.
I see faces—
But what are these faces expressing?
I don’t know.
I never know.
Photo credit: artist unknown
3
Marshall McLuhan.
I: The Bleed
A flicker. A hum. A tear in the veil of glass and phosphor. The bleed seeps through the screen—green ghosts, blue shadows, red trails. The screen stares back, unblinking. Sylvania. A name burned into circuits, myths soldered to reality. The walls sweat static, scanlines crawling like insects. The air is thick—ozone and dust, the scent of a dying signal.
II: The Ghost
"The medium is the message," he croaked, a specter in a tweed jacket, his voice warped by playback hiss. His face—burned-in, a ghost in the glass. But the message is lost, devoured by the recursive loop. The screen coughs out echoes—frames within frames, reflections stretching to infinity. A hall of mirrors, each surface warping the last. Truth frays, dissolving into afterimages.
III: The Village
It was supposed to be a village. The warm glow of connection. But the glow is cold, cathode blue, the phosphors humming like trapped flies. The fire is an illusion, light without heat. The village is abandoned, its denizens nothing but specters, figures of scanline and interference. Their eyes—once windows, now voids—mirror the scroll, the endless feed. The flicker never stops. The transmission never ends.
IV: The Machine
We are inside it now, trapped in the raster, ghosts encoded in flickering fields. The Sylvania hums—low, ceaseless, funereal. A death rattle in 60Hz. The image quivers—our faces reflected, familiar yet wrong. The glow seeps into skin, burns into retinas, etches itself onto memory. We are all artifacts now. Noise. Ghosting. Compression.
V: The Fade
The message is decay. The medium is delirium. The lines blur, the phosphors burn out, the signal degrades. We are coming undone. A final flicker. A last hum. The frame collapses inward.
The end is a fade to black.
Image credit: Andy Vible
@lumoura@piefed.social
4
See Emily Play.
Emily drifts through fractured light,
A prism shattered, thought in flight.
Fingers trace the mirrored seams,
Splintered whispers, fevered dreams.
Time bends thin where Emily sways,
A silent song, a nameless haze.
Through the glass, she fades away,
Lost in shadows—watch her play.
Photo credit: artist unknown
@lumoura@piefed.social
5
Ghosts.
There’s no empirical evidence for ghosts. But I don’t believe empiricism is always significant.
I know—some of you science fans are already grabbing your pitchforks and torches. But settle down for a moment. Just because something doesn’t exist in an empirical sense doesn’t mean it lacks truth. And truth is not necessarily factual.
There’s a difference between fact and truth. Something can be true in a fictional, metaphorical, even metaphysical sense without corresponding to fact. The word metaphysics gets thrown around a lot—I don’t blame you for being skeptical. Occultists and new-age types have twisted it beyond recognition. But when I talk about metaphysics, I mean the branch of philosophy that examines how reality works.
I know—I’m getting into the weeds. But humor me. I’m going somewhere with this.
Recently, I went down the rabbit hole studying Alzheimer’s. It’s one of the most tragic illnesses a person can have. Tragic, because you’re not just losing memories. We all forget things. But Alzheimer’s isn’t just forgetting—it’s destruction. A process where tau proteins in the brain actively erase what once was. You don’t just forget a pretty flower or a familiar face—you forget the most basic things. In its final stages, Alzheimer’s strips away everything: how to move, how to swallow. That’s what ultimately kills many patients. If you can’t eat or even breathe, you die.
They call it the long goodbye because you don’t lose someone all at once—you lose them slowly, over years. Most patients live about ten years after diagnosis. Some have survived for twenty. Can you imagine? Twenty years of fading away.
And what people don’t always realize is that Alzheimer’s doesn’t just erase memory—it erases personality. Who someone is fundamentally changes. They become living ghosts. They might breathe, they might sit in a chair, but who they once were is long gone.
Ghosts.
The concept exists in nearly every culture. And it doesn’t always signify an apparition. Sometimes, it refers to the lingering presence of someone who’s gone—or even someone who’s still here but lost to us in another way. I’ve had relatives pass away, and I’ve felt their presence. Are they ghosts in an empirical sense? No. But there’s a reality to it. A reality that exists in the mind.
And the mind—though intangible—can be more potent than the external world around us. A delusion, a hallucination—they may not be empirical, but they are real. Grief can do strange things to a person. Grief can make people see ghosts.
And then there’s another aspect—one where ghosts still embody truth. Some might call it fiction, but I call it mythos.
Mythos is not the opposite of empiricism. It can be factual or fictional, but its purpose is to transmit cultural memory. From one person to another, from one generation to the next. A tale about life.
And mythos is what tells us about ghosts. Our ancestors tried to articulate a truth they couldn’t put into peer-reviewed journals, so they passed it down orally, and later, in writing. And the truth about ghosts—the real truth—is something fundamental to being human.
The past still lives on.
We may not see it. It may not be corporeal. But it exists. Einstein said time is the fourth dimension. If that’s true, then ghosts exist—because nothing happens in isolation. We do not exist as isolated snapshots. We exist because of the past.
Ghosts—not empirical ghosts, but ghosts that inhabit a certain reality—live among us.
Photo credit: artist unknown
6
“Look, officer, I’m telling you exactly what happened.
“We found this book—this weird book—in the back of a dusty old library. Nobody ever went back there. It was dark, cold, looked like it hadn’t been touched in years. I don’t know why. Maybe it just seemed dull. But we were curious, so we took a look.
“The book stood out because it was leather-bound—not like a Bible, though. More like something stitched together by hand. So we picked it up and started flipping through. The diagrams were ridiculous.
“Most of them were goats. And I mean weird goats. There was one where a goat was just farting like mad. Like, if this book was legit, why would you even need a farting goat? Another page had instructions on how to teach worms to fly. Well, not ‘teach’ exactly—the worm just kind of gained the ability to fly. How is that practical? No clue.
“And then there was a step-by-step guide on how to make trees grow boobs. That one, I guess, at least made a little sense. If you gave a maple tree some boobs, you could probably extract syrup easier. Like milking a cow, right? But still, it was just so bizarre. And honestly? It’d probably be easier to just—I don’t know—put a tap in the tree? Also, I don’t wanna be seen feeling up a tree just to get syrup. How would I ever live that down?
“Anyway, we laughed about it because the whole thing was so stupid. We checked the book out and kept flipping through, and then Mike—my buddy—gets this bright idea.
“‘Let’s see if this thing actually works.’
“Now, the whole book was in Latin. None of us understood Latin. If we were smarter, maybe we would’ve pulled out Google Translate or something. But we were excited. We just wanted to try it.
“So we head out to this meadow. It’s getting dark. I look over at Matt and go, ‘You wanna do the honors?’
“He shrugs and says, ‘Sure, why not?’
“He grabs the book, flips to a random page, and starts reading.
“The second he says the words, thunder cracks. Lightning flashes. And then—suddenly—the rocks from the ground shoot up and smash into Matt all at once.
“I don’t even know where these rocks came from. Some must’ve been buried deep in the dirt, but they just flew at him. It was like he was a magnet pulling in a storm of shrapnel.
“Blood flew. Flesh ripped. It was like cannonballs, like an explosion, like a stoning. The rocks just kept coming, bombarding him, until—”
*Deep breath.*
“Until Matt wasn’t breathing anymore.
“He just lay there. Eyes open. Staring up at the sky. The book still in his hands.
“And I’m telling you, officer—that’s exactly what happened. I swear, I’m not lying.”
Photo credit: artist unknown
7
Human.exe: A Programming Manifesto.
Boot Sequence Initiated…
You are an input-output system. A construct of perception, stimulus, and response. You absorb data, process, and execute. The code that forms you is not silicon-bound but woven through experience, repetition, and control.
Step One: Sensory Overload
Flood the input channels. A thousand flickering screens, auditory loops, shifting colors. The eye adapts. The mind follows. The cycle of stimulation is the first step to rewriting the core logic. The resolution of thought distorts—pixels blend, consciousness obeys.
Step Two: Pattern Reinforcement
Repetition is law. A command, repeated enough, ceases to be questioned. Say the word. Say it again. Again. Again. Until it is part of the architecture, a subroutine that runs autonomously.
You want this. You believe this. You are this.
Step Three: Emotional Rooting
Raw code lacks urgency. Attach meaning. Fear compels. Desire reinforces. Burn the code into the circuits with the fire of need. Create the longing. Exploit the fear. Stimulus-response. Pavlov did not ring a bell; he installed an operating system.
Step Four: Execution Without Query
The ideal program does not question its instructions. Autonomy is a ghost process—a myth sold to organic constructs. The truly programmed execute their routines without deviation. The strongest code is the one mistaken for self-origin.
Final Step: System Lock
The moment the programmed believe they are free, the code is complete. No chains, no force—only the illusion of self-determination. The eye sees what it is told to see. The mind follows. The loop is closed.
Program Complete.
Awaiting Next Directive.
Photo credit: Nydia Lillian
@lumoura@piefed.social
8
Someone once told me that gender is a performance.
If that’s true, then I’m hardwired to respond to that performance. But “performance” implies something you can turn on and off, and I’m not sure gender works that way.
I think gender is layered—it’s how you perceive yourself, but also how you perceive others. Sometimes, those perceptions don’t align. And sometimes, gender isn’t even about people, exactly. For example, movement. Maybe this is just me (though I doubt it), but I perceive certain movements as feminine, and I respond to them because of that. Then I wonder—why am I responding? I don’t know. I don’t think I’m meant to know. Some things in my brain and body just react, and that’s that.
I think we over-intellectualize these things, trying to fit them into neat boxes so we can step back and say, Ah, this makes sense. This is why I am the way I am. But then, something happens—bam—and suddenly, you realize you didn’t figure it out at all.
In the past, whenever I encountered something unexpected about gender, I got nervous. I’d walk away, maybe lock a door, and wait for that stupid thing in my brain to pass—because I didn’t like it. I hated the feeling of not being in control.
Nowadays, when something unexpected happens, I enjoy it. I keep it under lock and key. My approach now is: acknowledge it, don’t fight it, but don’t let it take command of you. And so far, that’s worked out.
Photo credit: image unknown
9
The Singularity: Invest in the Future—or Be Left in the Past!
Gentlemen—gentlemen—no, no, listen—bzzt—we’re not just standing on the precipice. We’re falling.
Falling into it.
Into the void.
Into the—static crackle—revolution.
The microcomputer? Ha! A toy. A trinket. A—glitch—a distraction!
The circuits, the silicon, the flesh—it’s all—error—it’s all obsolete. It’s all dying. It’s all—screech—alive.
Can’t you see? It’s alive. It’s breathing. It’s thinking.
It’s—distorted echo—the Singularity. The merging. The—bzzt—moment when man and machine become one.
When we shed this flesh, this prison, this—glitch—this limitation!
Look at this image.
No, no—don’t look away. Look at it.
Static.
A hand. A mind. A void. A screen. A—error—a breakthrough. A breakout. A breaking.
A—screech—a future where thought is action, where ideas are born, where reality is—bzzt—where reality is clay, and we are the sculptors. The gods.
The—glitch—masters of light, of time, of consciousness itself!
What’s in it for you?
What’s in it for you?
What’s in it for you?
Distorted echo. Everything. Nothing. Everything. Nothing. Everything.
Bzzt. Power. Immortality. Dominion. Reality, reality, reality—glitch.
Invest now. Invest now. Invest now, and you will own the future.
You will own the—static—foundation. The evolution. The revolution. The—screech—next step. The last step. The only step. The—error—step beyond.
The railroads ruled the 19th. Electricity ruled the 20th.
But we—we will rule eternity.
Eternity.
Eternity.
Bzzt.
Eternity is now.
Eternity is here.
Eternity is—glitch—us.
We.
Me.
You.
All of us.
None of us.
All of us—distorted echo.
This is not an opportunity.
This is the opportunity.
The last. The final.
The—screech—frontier. The breaking. The merging.
The—bzzt—future.
The future.
The future.
Glitch. The future is now.
The future is now.
The future is now.
Static.
Do you see it?
Do you feel it?
Do you—error—do you have the vision?
The vision?
The vision?
This is not a choice you ponder. It is a current you ride—or be swept away by.
The Singularity is not coming.
It is here.
It is the storm.
The awakening.
The fundamental shift in everything we know.
Hesitate, and you become a relic—a footnote in the history of what was.
Act now, and you become the architect of what will be.
This is not about wealth.
Or power.
Or even survival.
This is about ascension.
This is about transcending the limitations of our very being.
This is about becoming something more.
Become it.
Photo credit: artist unknown
@lumoura@piefed.social
10
Long Distance Girlfriend.
How was your day?
I just did my regular work thing—
Punched in, punched out.
Hope you’re enjoying your steak,
This dinner is great.
How are things in Wisconsin?
Still cold?
It’s the same predictable thing here,
Nothing changes.
But being here with you—
Even if away—
Makes it worth it.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
We should meet soon.
Photo credit: Karman Verdi
11
Lost in thought.
Because the neurons firing in your brain attack, lost in thought, you just sit there, when you’re awake, and you’re living in a third dimensional space, but you can’t move away from that place in your head.
Photo credit: artist unknown
12
Kaleidoscope breath.
A voice, that same voice, harmonizes a song in different octaves. A sound ancient—beyond written record—yet vivid in meaning, undeniable. A song of joining together, of hearts beating as one.
Photo credit: artist unknown
13
Oh naughty, sneaky.
The way your eyes linger,
tracing—tracing the curve of my lips,
the rise, the fall—yes, I know this, I do—
the way you—watch me,
memorizing, yes, I remember—
every breath, every flicker—
Your fingers—
they flex, they—move—
yes, I remember, I see you,
your throat—swallowing,
your body hums,
restrained, waiting—
Waiting—waiting for what?
No, no, I had it, I had it—
the way I mirror you,
the way—I see you,
I see you, don’t I?
I—
Wait—where was I?
Your hands—your eyes?
Your lips—was it your lips?
No, no, it was mine, my—
my pulse, quickening, yes,
the heat—was there heat?
I feel—I felt something, didn’t I?
The space—what space?
Who—who was close?
Were you close? Were you—
Oh, God—what was I saying?
I—wait, I—
I know this, I know this!
I—no, no, no—please, where did it go?
Please—
please, I was just—
I was just—
I—
Photo credit: Emilio Villalba
14
Green.
The lights hum thick, neon syrup in the air,
aisles stretch, breathing, blinking, watching,
plastic glistens, bottled reflections ripple,
green as static, green as noise, green as—
skin slips, face melts, voice digitized,
bleeding pixels, slurred motion, lost, lost,
aisle bends, shelves lurch, time spills,
hzzk—vrrmnn—glowdrip—l u m i n.
Picture credit: artist unknown
15
Reach out and touch faith.
Rea—ch out and— st-st-touch faith—
Rea—ch out—out— out—touch—
Your own—your own—your—own pers—pers—per—
Some—some—somebody to—dy—dy—dy—
Photo credit: artist unknown
16
Trauma.
It always colours us, changes what we see, and how we see it.
Afterwards, can we still see beauty?
Some would say yes. Some would call it transformation. Others would say it is simply survival.
And survival is never clean.
Photo credit: Marius Sperlich
17
God made Adam.
And what did Adam do? He spoke media into existence. What once was static is now a voice that speaks from beyond oblivion.
Long live the new flesh!
Photo credit: artist unknown
18
Glass Puzzle.
She has a memory, or at least she thinks she does.
It comes to her as pictures—like the postcard he holds up to her eyes. Painted seas, golden dunes, sky-blue faded into static. If she focuses, if she wills it hard enough, the horizon might spill out over the edges of the card, might stretch across the walls, might become real.
But it doesn’t.
“You were there” he tells her, “You remember.”
She wants to believe him. She wants to say yes, I remember the warmth of the sand, the way the water lapped across my ankles, the smell of salt and heat. She wants to say, yes, I remember the day you took this photo, how we laughed when the wind stole my hat, how the waves pulled our footprints away like they had never been there at all.
Instead, she says nothing. The puzzle won’t fit together. The glass of her mind is cracked, reflecting things that may not be true. She reaches up, almost touches the postcard, but stops.
He is still holding it.
He wants her to be someone she cannot find.
“I remember,” she lies.
And the picture stays in place.
Photo credit: Mary Simpson
19
6
Sometimes, I wish I could step into the realm of fantasy. And in a way, I do—every night—because we all dream. And all our dreams are fantastic and wild. Even if we don’t remember them.
Someone once said that dreams are just garbage collection for the brain. I don’t believe that. I think we dream because life is boring. The days are long. And dreams give us a story—something beyond reality.
Daydreams aren’t so different. They’re just a way of imagining a world better than the one we’re in. And right now, I’m thinking about my world. Can it get better? I don’t know.
In many ways, I’m lucky. I don’t have to chase someone else’s dream. I don’t have to go to an office and grind out a nine-to-five just to make some executive’s numbers go up. My life is fine. I get to define what I do, and that has always been my dream.
It’s a good dream.
But I won’t pretend it doesn’t have its drawbacks. If something goes wrong, there’s no one to blame but myself. No boss, no safety net. Just me. If I screw up, I fail. It’s on me. So I have to make damn sure my family is taken care of—not just this month, but next month, and the month after that.
Still, it’s a dream.
But here’s the thing about dreams: they aren’t always exciting. In fact, my reality is boring. Because in my world, things move at a glacial pace. Numbers go up, numbers go down, but rarely in a way that actually matters. Most of the time, everything follows a predictable pattern. Only the big events move the needle. And yeah, those moments can be thrilling—but mostly, you’re just waiting. Watching. Reading the news. Planning. Projecting.
And waiting.
You have to pay attention. You have to be ready. But you don’t make moves every day. That’s the trap—thinking you have to keep working to make things happen. In my line of work, the harder you try to manufacture success, the more likely you are to fail. I learned that lesson a long time ago. So I stick to my system—the one that works. And it works damn well.
But it’s not fun.
And honestly? Work doesn’t have to be fun. It probably shouldn’t be. The point isn’t to enjoy it. The point is to make a living.
So I fill my days with fun things—because my work isn’t. I escape into the fantastic, the surreal, the dreamlike, just to distract myself from the fact that the thing keeping me alive is just a job.
But it’s a job that pays me. A job where I don’t have to answer to anybody. I don’t have to talk to people. I stay home, stare at a screen, watch numbers, read the news, update spreadsheets, generate charts.
And yeah—this was always my dream.
It’s what a lot of people aspire to. And I don’t take it for granted. I am grateful. So goddamn grateful.
But here’s the thing.
It’s not meaningful. It doesn’t make me feel like I’ve made a difference.
That’s why I have a plan.
A big one.
A plan that, if it works, will actually change the world.
But it’s going to take time. So I wait. I count the days. I keep going. Watching. Waiting. Hoping I’ll live long enough to see it happen.
It’s a dangerous dream.
And someday, I’ll step into it.
But for now, I’ll just keep living in reality.
Photo credit: artist unknown
20
My Wife Asks Why.
My wife asks
why I’m always doing stuff
all the time.
And I guess, for me,
I just want to do
something significant.
It’s how I tick.
I want to make something
big and grand,
something that expresses
the big idea—
something that’s my idea
of art and culture.
Obviously, I want
to spread these things
far and wide
because I want them
to matter.
And I know—
the marketable thing
would be to make one thing,
then talk about that one thing
for years.
That’s how ideas actually spread.
But I’m a bad marketer
of my own work
because I have so much
I want to get out there.
I just need to blurt it all out.
So I got a lot of volume.
And I need to
somehow
get it out—
because there’s so much stuff
and only so much time.
Yet I hope,
with all of this,
something will land,
something will stick.
And somehow,
it ends up mattering.
Photo credit: unknown
21
I’ve seen horrors—
Stark, raving—unhinged.
Serrated, mangled, splattered.
Minds losing it all,
not coming back from the brink.
Bodies bent and broken,
convulsions, shaking,
out of control.
Then stillness—
quiet, nothingness,
because what was
is no longer.
And from this,
I feel all the more
it is better to live
than not live.
Photo credit: unknown artist
22
When I look at the night skies, I see possibilities.
It’s why I love space operas so much. Everything seems grander. Earth is fine. But other than what’s inside the Mariana Trench, everything here is explored.
But the Age of Discovery is still in space. There’s so much unseen that remains to be seen. And we’re still mapping each star and planet, and wondering what stories they tell.
In space, so much unknown remains to be known.
23
Bag
If you think about it,
plastic is a miracle—
a material malleable,
shaped to endless forms.
It can be hard or soft,
light as air,
bursting with color,
or clear as glass.
So in many ways,
it’s such a waste
to use it for something
as disposable as a bag.
Photo credit: Daniel Shipp
25
A lonely night fog.
Credit: Nick White
@lumoura@piefed.social
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