Don't Panic, It’s Just the Cosmos: Calibrating Our Reality Settings in an Age of Clickbait

  by your dedicated rogue correspondent Sh0n Grub (reporting for the Oscillating Oculus)

Einstein Crater region near the Moon's northwestern limb 

Source: Sergey Kuznetsov / Getty Images

    By now we've all been sideswiped against the calcified inner walls of this cavernous metropolis of hollow hallways so many times, it's a wonder we're still conscious.   Well I'm here with our latest update on the state of our natural world and existence, brought to you with the same unflinching and deadpan seriousness and stunning degree of impartial fact-checking you've come to appreciate over the years here at DUMZINE.  

    You know you can count on me to bring you the facts and nothing but the facts, and not only that, to preserve them with their proper sense of context.  It's a big world we all dwell upon. So big, in fact, that the reality of it exceeds all of our expectations, and that's something you can come to count on.  Let me give you an example.  

   About twelve hours ago, at approximately  12:35 AM Mountain Time, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage brought an end to its 18-month orbital drift by striking the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at roughly 5,400 mph. Originally launched in January 2025 to boost two lunar landers into deep space, the four-ton, school-bus-sized piece of hardware exhausted its fuel and became an unguided satellite. Over the past year and a half, a complex push-and-pull of solar radiation pressure and gravitational perturbations slowly warped its orbit until its path finally intersected with the Moon, leaving behind a fresh, 15-meter crater, and adding one more tiny human mark to the quiet surface.

    Let's put this in perspective.  To put that spent booster into true physical context, consider the natural bombardments that have shaped the Moon for billions of years: while the Falcon 9 stage weighed roughly four metric tons and hit at a lethargic  5,400  mph, average space rocks strike the lunar crust at ten times that speed, with high-velocity comets reaching   speeds up to  160,000  mph! Even a modest iron meteoroid weighing a few dozen pounds delivers vastly more explosive kinetic energy than our four-ton piece of space junk.  At the absolute extreme end of cosmic violence sit titan-class impacts like the one that carved out the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Formed roughly four billion years ago by an asteroid estimated at over  100  kilometers  in diameter, that single collision excavated a colossal crater roughly  2,500  kilometers (1,550  miles) across and over 8 kilometers deep:  a scar wide enough to span half the continental United States. Next to all the multi-kilometer basins and millions of natural craters dotting the surface of our moon, a human booster carving out a temporary 15-meter pockmark doesn't even qualify as a drop in the ocean; it's a microscopic fraction of a droplet, not even worthy of measurement against the colossal and scarred satellite which we take for granted as the moon. 

   Look, I'm trying to tell y'all something, here.  Do you remember back in 2018, when that volcano went off in Hawaii?  Kīlauea erupted along the Lower East Rift Zone on Hawaii’s Big Island, sending relentless rivers of lava surging down into the Puna District near the coast. Between May and August, the flows swallowed entire neighborhoods—demolishing 716 homes, displacing thousands of people, and completely reshaping the shoreline as molten rock poured straight into Kapoho Bay. It served as a stark, violent reminder of what real geological muscle actually looks like when the Earth decides to reshape itself.  Except for one thing: despite the extent of the damage, and in no way, shape or form do I intend to diminish that, it must be understood in its proper context and scale.  Online articles almost always work as "power presentations," invariably showing a map of the Big Island, and a large "X" or "O" to mark the spot, a circle on the map designating where the volcano is located.  And always, these graphics drastically exaggerate the true proportions into something that gets translated in our heads into hundreds of thousands of times greater than it really is.  Because if we were to have taken the trouble to identify the square miles size of the area around the volcano itself, including the neighboring homes that were devastated, we would find it to be barely a pixel on the extreme edge of the map of the island.  

    Let's face it.  It's time for us reasoning and reasonable human beings subject to the whims of the internet to adjust our "reality knobs" to calibrate with the actual scale of places and events in our lives.  And the truth remains.  We not only dwell in cities that are bigger,  in counties that are much larger than we'd typically imagine; in states whose dimensions exceed our ordinary expectations, but comparatively speaking, to states such as Texas, and then Alaska which happens to be more than twice its size, we human beings dwell on a planet so much vaster and larger than we're ordinarily capable of appreciating, well it goes without saying that our moon itself is so much farther away and larger than we really know, and that's just the start of it.  

   The distances between our planet and Venus, Mercury, and the Sun; and the distance between us and Mars, and the asteroid belt, and Jupiter, not to mention the remaining three gas giants, all the way out to Neptune, just happens to be on a scale so much greater than we are normally wont to consider, that if we were to be exposed to the actual ratios and distances, it would more than stagger our minds, it would leave us stunned bordering on miscomprehension, and that's not even leaving our solar system yet.  

   My point remains sharp and focused, as lucid as a cricket hopping outside in your yard, as serrated as a blade of grass zoomed in upon in all its intricate and glorious organic machination.  We exist in a world whose intricacy and  size  so outstrips our everyday, normal default setting of perception that I want you all to consider what the ramifications of this may be.  It's simple, really.   Howard Phillips Lovecraft famously wrote, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."  

   Well I have a somewhat extraordinary inverse view to that outlook.  For me, the fantastical and bordering on supernatural size and complexity of the cosmos begs a different reaction.  It becomes the ultimate source of reassurance.  Because we were all born into this life however many years of age we each happen to be.  For me, it's bordering on sixty years.  Yet here I still am, wondering at the vast complexity and miraculous nature of our existence.  You see, don't you, as I do, that the absurdly enormous distances between our planets and Sun and neighboring stars in our galaxy are all linked together by electromagnetic forces we simply have barely even the slightest clue about, don't you?  There's a certain amount of scientific faith one may become vested in, considering the totality of that scale. 

   And I'm here to tell you, breathe in . . .  breathe out . . . everything we read online  (and I do mean everything without exception) regarding world events and natural calamities gets amped up and blown out of proportion so radically off base from the true and actual context in reality that we are more often than not click-baited into feeling inordinately more anxiety and discomfort than might be allocated for us, when you stop and think about it for a few sobering moments.  This has been your daily announcement from DUMZINE to get us all to breathe a little easier and try not to succumb to the disproportional and sensationalist news bait articles vying for our attention.  Instead, sit back and relax and try to enjoy your time here, if even for an hour or two.  If we train our minds to stay on track with this reality, we might even enjoy a perpetual feeling of peacefulness and relaxation, knowing that the miracle of our existence remains something we'll never fully understand, so why not let it all go and enjoy the ride? 

   

   

Update on a State of Mind

 by your dedicated rogue correspondent Sh0n Grub (reporting for the Oscillating Oculus)

hand-drawn illustration by yours truly,  Sh0n Grub 

  Well here we are steeped so deeply into the unfolding technological singularity as to effectively have rendered all but the most tenacious of us iconoclastic individuals haplessly dumbfounded and staring at the event horizon through the haze for the hidden flock cameras and ubiquitous surveillance grids virtually and on the verge of independent devastation, well not I, let me assure y'all however ineffectually I may, because although stripped of my stumbled-upon, happy go lucky career having found myself dog paddling without a chain for the past nine months, feeling as if I'm about to be borne again as a stillbirth into the new paradigm of the machine, luckily for me (and my stalwart readers out there, you know who you are as well as I do) I yet retain that paradoxical nature of the beast, the ability to keep my nose above the waterline even as the global floodlines rise, billion dollar industry AI corporations such as Anthropic buy up millions of used and discarded books in bulk from wholesalers, only to cut off their bindings and strip their spines with hydraulic machinery to scan the printed pages, and then pulp the remains for recycling into compost to feed their AI data algorithms and justify the production of countless data centers planned for the Down-winder desert territories to establish Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses, and of course the current administration has targeted the parched and toxic valley alongside the Wasatch Mountain range in Utah as the perfect location, and with utilizing a devious leverage through our sycophantic governor Spencer Cox, always willing to sell out not just the land itself but our people along with it to the overtly corrupt ministrations of our newly overhauled and most incompetent governing body since our country's inception, all in mutual allegiance to the almighty dollar in the name of an (un)holy war against the nefarious adversaries of the mind, those wicked middle easterners with their patently transparent so-called "nuclear capacity and intent to destroy" as we surreptitiously sail on over the line melted in the sand like the pre-ghostly echo of a Lost Ship already stranded far beyond the capacity to return into the Dead Sea of Souls hell bent on leaving behind their mutual revenge served cold in exchange for a new deal to serve it up Steaming Hot on a platter of Oblivion.   

   How's your day going so far?  I hope all remains well with you and your world, and see there's the crux of the biscuit, isn't it?  The world's really an amalgamation of a multitude of worlds, infesting and pervading, spreading through and swarming over with hope and loss and tragic beauty spiked with sudden deaths interlaced in a heaving tapestry of primal, burgeoning births and mass executions while entire colonies of dispossessed humans flee their wartorn former homes in search of neighborly harbors that might take them in.  Meanwhile, our own gifted statue of bigotry remains (for now) standing at the foothold of Manhattan Island (future private prison from which none may escape) holding aloft her war torn Torch of faithless uncertainty, her inscription suffering from delamination and effacement, our own self-inflicted Damnation Memoriae if you will, and even if you won't, I'm afraid that's all she wrote. 

    I feel my duty as a diligent reporter of the facts, in trying to uncover the hottest story of our times, lingers across the viewscreen of my mind in an alluring manner, as if displayed by the magic of twenty-four frames per second, flickering against the silver screen of my innermost dreams with a haunting suggestion, a beckoning call if you will, not unlike the Sirens of old, but with an inverse significance, as if this song summons my attention toward an escape route, through a labyrinth of strange coral formations uprising from this sea of madness we all find ourselves in, to lead us through a mysterious delta which harbors a passage to one of those electrically charged worlds we're all tangled up inside, which if only we could draw a bead on, and calibrate our own body's electromagnetic polarity with, would lock us into it, and draw us slowly in deeper, onward and into its otherwise impenetrable confines, until we might find ourselves gradually absolved from the hectic nightmare of the technopolis gathering strength as it mutates into it's multifaceted and malignant form.  

    Where may such hidden passages as that, typically occluded from us, possibly remain hidden?  Or should the question be when might such a portal present itself to each of us?  My investigative instinct tells me it's a matter of circumstances and opportunities.  We must each keep our senses honed sharp, our eyes and ears out for them, as they might occur and present themselves at virtually any time of day or night, and at any place we might happen to stumble upon, throughout our various excursions in this craven metropolis that has been apparently damned with the expanding virus of fear.  The very thing our 32nd president warned us about ninety-three years ago.  

    So remember one thing, if you can summon the willfulness to do so.  Do not succumb to the fear! Stay brave, stay true, to yourself and your loved ones.  Stay alert for whatever opportunities might come your way.  Somewhere along the line ahead of us, there must be a remarkable pathway about to unfold, analogous to a sort of parting of the Red Sea, a miraculous moment shining with rainbow ferocity, with unsettling mists refracting impossibly, which grabs your attention and demands you react. 

    It's up to us, the few and far between, the lost and struggling loners, the disillusioned and devastated, the wrecked and broken, the sullen and hopeless, whose brightness may have been dashed out of our eyes, whose former certitude or optimism may have been nearly eroded away, to cast aside our blinders and addictions to the world wide web of lies, to put down our smart phones for just a few moments and reclaim our right to be wise, to shut off the noise being piped from online into our collective hive mind. To awaken to the recurrent possibilities of the moment, and  recapture the essence that has kept us alive.

     Follow me for more tips and tricks in surviving the oncoming zombie holocaust, and maybe we'll see you on the other side of this divide.  

Keep an eye out for more reports

from DUMZINE and

The Oscillating Oculus 

The Monster on the Shield (and Other Atrocities)

by sh0n grub, roving reporter for the Oscillating Oculus 

In the coruscating madness of the frog reaper's nest 

Where a painter and artist meet in headflung distress

From the turbulence of shadows, may an avatar commence

In a blood initiation ritual with significant success.

How the mere imposition of a woven mandala's song

May interpolate an inner world of interconnectivity, 

While evoking a scene mirrored in a labyrinth of dreams 

To cultivate a solution that may come across wrong.

Welcome to DUMZINE.  It's been awhile since I posted anything.

There's been a lot going on at  GRUB CENTRAL which is now 

more or less known as TRIVERSE LABORATORIES and consists

of no longer the mighty Greg Grub + Shaun Grub =  THE GRUB BROS 

but rather, has morphed into Shaun Grub + Zane Grub = ZUNA ASHEN.

We are working almost daily on cultivating, which is to say writing out

the long, intricate details outlining the bedrock of a new shared universe

that becomes superimposed on the history of reality and simultaneously 

functions as the setting of our pulp science fantasy serials to be published

some day in the near future by our own imprint 𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘 

destined to become the flourishing nexus of fantastical writings 

to usher in our latest era of post boomer generational aspiration 

in the arts and literary scene which includes poetry, drama and action

sex, blood and graphics on a scale that would make our colleagues blush 

Nevermind the gold rush get in on the action while you can grab a slice

of the pie while the music's winding down and a seat at the table 

before the next high tide sweeps in to drown the uncertain and paralyzed. 

(Paradigm shifts like the one we're all going through at the moment 

Signal more wild adventures ever yet to come and at the least

An ever ending home base moving in by which to forget about the past.)

   I'm making slow progress on my "Big Book of Twisted Fairy Tales", otherwise to be titled something more like The Monster on the Shield & Other Atrocities, but I'm still compiling tales, so there could be another title for it yet. 

 While developing the Blog of the Triverse, maintained since its outset largely with

entries by Zuna Ashen, have just reached one hundred posts!

  (My son and I are also expanding the various sublevels  of our mythos in time  known as the Triverse (an analog of our universe) used to illustrate the somewhat  magical nature of existence.)  

Now as we're caught in the crossfire of this manifolding lotus region 

Of the perpetual crucifixion of energy and matter on the crossbar 

representative of the timespace continuum we are eased through 

the molecular microtonal aether drift that eases our imprinted characteristics

onto the pages of life being turned at such a slow pace we often come to think:

No one's reading this Odyssey when in fact the legion of the as-yet-unformed

Have it preordered long before the first zygote and are already subscribed to it

For their lives-to-come, and before long, headflung from the heels of our giant shoulders.

While the greatest living trees subsume into monolithic buttes at such a pace

We are unable to make the connection (as their long dropped fruit) whose seedling eyes Open one after another in an unzipped revelation 

of reflecting the stars 

A haunting eulogy to fall like the dust of silenced music echoed in the void 

The so-called Monster on the Shield (Leo's painting commissioned by his father) became as true as any depiction of our reflection. For reasons cultivated far too long within the strain of culture as it gains fruition.  Upon the tail end of creation's ultimate spawning, a circumscription if you will. 

Of all that came before, reiterated through a new compound lens and horn. 

Where the herald of light may continue to flare out into the symphonic composition.  Unraveling through disintegration into new and subsequent movements. 

If you're feeling confused, let's make no mistake about it.  Our legion of readers are mostly the unborn. The yet to be borne. Into this world I've come to understand as the Prime dominion Earth. Which is to say it's latest incarnation.  The only one in Time. 

The curse of not achieving readership success until after we're dead. That's just the way of all life, not merely limited to the plight of gifted artist's and poets.

It's how creation itself manifests across time, necessarily in long, drawn out movements that gradually form across the interconnection of molecular masses making progress through aeons like glacial mountains too colossal for us to behold.  There, I've said too much. 

If you've read this far and are still alive, thanks for subscribing to DUMZINE. 

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by Shon Grub

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of a Nursery
State Bold
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Shiro the hero

by roving reporter Sh0n Grub 

Hyphae perform a variety of functions in fungi. They contain the cytoplasm or cell sap, including the nuclei containing genetic material. Hyphae absorb nutrients from the environment and transport them to other parts of the thallus (fungus body).

Haustoria: In botany, this may refer to a cotyledon, or to the root of a parasitic plant (such as the broomrape family or mistletoe) that penetrates the host's tissue and draws nutrients from it. In mycology, it refers to the appendage or portion of a parasitic fungus (the hyphal tip), which performs a similar function.   In the singular it is Haustorium: a structure that grows into or around another structure to absorb water or nutrients.

In plant life it's referred to as the Cotyledon: A cotyledon (/ˌkɒtɪˈliːdən/; "seed leaf" from Latin cotyledon,[1] from Greek: κοτυληδών kotylēdōn, gen.: κοτυληδόνος kotylēdonos, from κοτύλη kotýlē "cup, bowl") is a significant part of the embryo within the seed of a plant, and is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "The primary leaf in the embryo of the higher plants (Phanerogams); the seed-leaf. 

Phanerogams (taxon Phanerogamae) or phaenogams (taxon Phaenogamae), comprise those plants that produce seeds.  They are more commonly known as Spermatophyte. 

They are a subset of the embryophytes or land plants--the most familiar group of green plants that form vegetation on earth.

Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. The mass of hyphae is sometimes called shiro, especially within the fairy ring fungi. Fungal colonies composed of mycelium are found in and on soil and many other substrates.

A sclerotium is a compact mass of hardened fungal mycelium containing food reserves.  The plural is sclerotia. It is the armor to help preserve the food in environmental extremes. 

Mycelium is vital in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems for their role in the decomposition of plant material.  Bioremediation and mycofiltration are two examples of utilizing fungus to detoxify the environment. 

Rusted gates and Polished skies

by  Sh0n Grub 

 I feel as if a fever dream has woken me up inside. 

I know that things aren’t what they seem so why 

does it hurt my pride when people ask me what I 

think about how things are today I don’t know 

how to respond or even know what to say.

All the thoughts I used to have are going down 

the drain. It seems like there has been someone 

who’s hacked into my brain. I don’t know what’s

 real anymore because I’ve been online for so damn 

long the truth’s now hard to find.

What used to seem to be so right now I’m told 

is wrong by people that won’t agree with me or 

sing my own song. I have no choice, but to be left

 alone with my own private thoughts

I try to stay perpendicular to the truth that every

one else has bought.  I close my eyes and think of 

times that have long past us by. Their vivid impressions 

coalesce before me in the sky.  One consolation that I get 

when I open my bedroom window are the songbirds singing 

to themselves, I try to let their message flow through my mind 

as I unwind and think of days gone past.  I hang onto these 

memories, hoping they will last.  I don’t know how much time 

I have left in this old life. All I know is I love my boy and my 

one and only wife. For them I would do anything no matter 

what the cost. In their hearts I hope to find myself getting lost.