[Illustration of the author above ^ by G. Alden Davis aka Greg Grub]


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Begun in June thirteen years ago & Continued in November, 2015, DUMZINE
presents an exclusive 13-part serialization of the epic poem
by Shaun Grub
~now back to yr regulrly scheduled 2024~

Sunday, November 5, 2023

Populating Lollipop Lake in the Kingdom of Mushroomland


by   Shaun Grub

     These days, it's impossible to tell, not the difference between what is and isn't real, but more to the point, to differentiate between that which appears to be masquerading as another false front, and whatever's left (i.e, whatever's actually part of the natural scene).  It's not only difficult to tell what's really going on nowadays (unless you separate yourself from whatever shell-guise you happen to prefer strutting down the lanes of Candy Town all dressed up in) but there still persists that nagging question following us around, what the Hell are we even doing here? 

     Most citicents don't know this, but their souls are already bought and paid for. That's how they manage to rush en masse down concrete city sidewalks while regulated through a synchronized system of traffic light sequences programmed into the hive of a metropolitan complex that's no longer run by an electrical grid, but rather maintained by the plethora of geosynchronous orbiting stations aligned in a super-symmetrical cybernetic shroud of Turing wavelengths interpenetrating at the solar plexus of the world. 

     The courtesans of industry float in and out of their reserved parking spots in an industrious multi-levelled traditional exercise that could be better described as a modern tesseract dance, but no further developed really than its beginning-to-be antiquated precursor generated by more recent historical episodes (such as presented by the early frontier days of the wild west, for example). 
     

   When the connective tissue presented itself by which the mystery could be solved (various petri-dish incantations that had been written for a key sequence in the circumstantial orchestra to be showcased), I was led by a surehanded means from a series of impulses drawn from having begun dabbling in the ongoing software development exercises helping to shape the artificial intelligence algorithms responsible for not just individual requests but for the general approach toward semantics that machine-learning may be bound to take, and shown where to go ahead and try being myself despite potential adverse consequences.  Since all possibilities should be explored ahead of time, I took it upon myself to generate various renderings of vital icons I had already determined played an integral role in our developing consciousness.  Especially when it comes to documenting impressions of the paranormal. But I digress.  

    Outpainting in my mind be like "Show me the Guardian of Lollipop Lake surveying the Kingdom of Mushroomland during a Rainbow Thunderstorm in a lightning flash," or some such spontaneous wordplay designed not to stump but rather challenge the AI algorithms. Somewhere along the synthographic mutation of a subvariant following a series of remolded prompts into the next iteration of expression, my eye got caught up in a recurring theme of mirrored similarities I kept seeing pop up with certain sequences of modified variants.    Don't try to figure out what I mean, just trust me that I know what I'm talking about. 

   Since the best art remains a process of elimination, I like the challenge of eliminating the three worse variants, and nevermind the efficacy or lack of what's left; I just use it even to the point of going against my own aesthetic, because more often than not it produces results, yielded from a process whose common denominators cross-reference one another just enough to take hold, like ivy on a trellis, or snowflakes on a cherry tree branch, to name two relatively obtuse examples.  Bear with me.    

      This character was borne of a prompt my wife snuck into my DALL-E 2 account: "A Takashi Murakami character trick or treating in a post-apocalyptic Hellscape."  

  The initial render prompted by my wife with the trick or treating Murakami character a quirky inspiration.

     This variant depicted above happened to come along after many different rendered  manifestations. To my mind, this curious character has something to do with a subvariant line of escaped SCPs, and something tells me there may be a programmer whose game got twisted into another reality, courtesy of random interstitial holographic spark induction maneuvers, as in the case where an army of alternate hallway mirror reflections morph toward a different outcome amid the war they are waging, forging a divergent potential line of futures beckoning.  

       The suggestion implicit in this illustration appears as a singular slash of a lightning stroke split-dividing the possibilities of the Transmission Beams, shown here clearly depicted as being architecturally associated with the folds and division within the Mirror Labyrinth.  Our cloaked explorer holding the Lollipop Staff seems to be in the midst of a journey being transported across adjacent realms of wonder grown from the perspective of a seaside meadow where mushrooms flourish on a hillside by a lake with glowing green globules gently hovering in the distance casting their mercurial twinned reflections in the glassy water.  

     The message in this graphic mystification becomes more evident in the glassine shape of the figure relaxing on the weed infested shoreline (seen in the larger image above), their having gradually taken the shape of river stones, exemplary of the way time can creep up on the best of us, while we're admiring the gleams of the sun upon the surface of a river or pond we happen upon one fine day. 

      Of course, every day remains that "one fine day" we may happen to stumble onto a body of water with the sun or moonlight reflecting off its surface in wavery suggestions of the evolution of stones. It's just a reminder we should all be more prepared to take on unexpected guests. Bear with me as my mind makes a series of small leaps, not unlike the sequence of hops that flat stones make when skipped across the surface of a still pond. 

   There has been zero information on the name or possible whereabouts of this creature, and how it relates to the SCP SERIES 21-77-12 anomaly last spotted in a remote dada club in the Netherlands.    

   Their swirling "Lollipop Cane" seems to me to indicate a sort of transmitting antenna, I mean by now it could be anything if you stop and think about it for a second. Maybe it's an interdimensional vortex cane, I don't know.  But my mind's set on finding out, the only way I know how to.  And that's by continually adding up the clues provided courtesy of this ongoing rush of synthographic emulations churning from computer monitors across the world.  I take a momentary break and crack my knuckles as I wait for the next onrush of variants to come. 



     


Saturday, November 4, 2023

Accessory to the Fisherman on the Loose


by our roving reporter shaun grub



   Here we've all managed to escape into the fibrillating interiors within the fluctuating skein of Aurora B-time, a fractal manifestation of what we experience as ordinary realtime that remains a subvariant offshoot of the preliminary Oceanic time the electromagnetic aspects of the universe keep in bonded subatomic ratio-reversal electric equilibrium sufficiently for us to a) not only have manifested into the post-harmonic but b) lived to tell about it, something that c) 99.999% of individual beings incarnated have managed to escape from during that fraction of the Wavecrest that has yet to even begun to be considered Fallen.  

     Welcome to the minutest hair's-breadth, the most microscopic, unimaginably thin slice of the current brane of Laniakea known to have produced our thralldom, an exteriorized cross-section of the magnifie4d portion of a single cilia-strand revealing a Canyonland Kingdom curling into sight, which is the mirror-image of the Carnival Cusp reflecting the summary crawl of our species, from inception to concurrence, all the way through the constant molting and shedding of a succession of multiplicities of skins, from barest and smoothest of multicolored silks on up the roughening index of parameters which successively sprout chitinous formations resulting in the complete array of talons and horns befitting the bewitched among the squalid subjects of the Endless Forest, namely mammals and amphibians which remain among the few whose genetic programming allows a crossover-current of a certain amperage to be processed effectively enough for conducive shrines to be built in honor of the fathomless Sea that spawned them. 
       
     It's taken me this entire investigation hunting down the alleged paranormals which escaped their facilities to come around to various inescapable conclusions this wild goose chase has led me to consider.  The variant-generating aspect of the twisted trail whose scent I'm on leads me to believe the series of events which have led toward my having been alerted to even the remote possibility of these ex-convicts having escaped into the wild confines of our planet has me reconsidering the position I'm in from a whole new perspective.  And that viewpoint has warped sufficiently to form a sort of moebius-like continuum of events whose outcome appears to have seeded its inception, remarkably this configuration of impeccable logic happens to share it's variables with those selfsame quarks, atoms and electrons which make up our universe.  The realization this process engenders within the individual human mind can trigger heretofore undiscovered pathways in the brain of the recipient.  These pathways in no way shape or form alter the biological physicality of the subjects experiencing them nor the direct environment of the subject, but rather allow the subject's ratio/cortex sub-processing to reconfigure certain stability inducing protocols of the human brain which allow its consciousness to access certain electromagnetic sub-frequencies, in other words the solid nature of our direct environment gets to be temporarily bypassed in favor of a quantum induction action whose tangible results in our megahertz, if witnessed, could only be categorized under a paranormal heading. 

    The Fisherman was reputed to have been an escapee from a covert government organization's maximum security protocols.  Therefore, it can be surmised that this mysterious entity currently resides somewhere on Earth.  The city or country which harbors it at the moment remains unknown, as does the answer to the question of its whereabouts in any capacity.  For all we know, it has ensconced itself in a remote wilderness area.  The Fisherman' (called so due to his reputation as a blink dog analog remote controlled virtual puppet) said by some to be as vicious as can be and yet by others reckoned as more to be determined. Make no mistake about it, this creature possesses a sort of radar mind control ability rumored to be powered by gazing into its eyes. 

      Too many valid reports of a creature matching this description have been filed with the Organization, as of late. What's interesting to our panel of secret scouts seems to be its ability to shapeshift through a limited range of bodily contours.  Said to be accompanied by a presence of astral spirits or strange forms of radiating energy, as depicted by the enigmatic red cloaked figure to the lower right in the illustration above.   




    


   

Thursday, November 2, 2023

DETERMINISM vs. FREEWILL (?)

 
an exercise in true itching
by  Shaun Grub 


    Roving reporter Shaun Grub here over this morning's cup o' brew.  Whilst skimming through my daily stream, I came upon this ad put up by MoveOn, which is a grass-roots organization, so let's try to move on ourselves from this confusing claptrap while I conduct some fast and loose riffing over what it all means to me. 

   First off, why in the Hell are they even televising this trial?  In a nutshell, it's because while federal courtrooms generally don't allow cameras, many state courtrooms do, and in this case, the state of Georgia believes allowing cameras helps to preserve transparency. Fair enough. 

   What really irks me about this is that the state of our national divisiveness has now reached such a critical mass that "bipartisanship" appears to no longer be on the menu.  It seems useless to even ask if anyone reading this remembers how it was years ago when some democrats voted for republican bills and some republicans voted for democrat bills, but that's the way things were in what appeared to be a more fair and balanced world. But was it, really? Allow me to suggest that this deadlock stalemate is a perfectly natural and inevitable outcome for our experimental form of governing.  So we have merely reached that imminent stage of the evolution of our democratic republic.  Third party, anyone? 

   Today, democrats and republicans seem to have become ultimate enemies, fighting each other in a death-lock of mortal combat, each party vying for supremacy in order to take back or maintain control of our country (that they each have irreconcilable views about).  Let this sink in for a minute while I finish my coffee. 

   Okay, I'm back, theoretically wired, except that's my natural state, so now I'm justifyingly hyperwired enough to continue this impromptu essay.  My point being, just a cursory glance at this sort of paid ad streaming through the MetaVerse [FaceBook, et al] pleading for us everyday Americans to "help run ads to combat MAGA lies" suggests, to me at least, that vested corporate interests in the United States of America circa 2023 [meaning "just three years post-pandemic"] have taken such a stranglehold on the everyday American's wallet, that it got me to thinking. It seems to me more and more every day that we are sadly living in the midst of a craven new world that's inexorably culling the poor and disenfranchised while invariably strengthening and enlivening the one percent. 

   It must be due to the fact that our ordinary way of conducting politics has been fully subsumed by profiteering. I mean, what else could it be?  It seems to me that we have long ago abandoned conducting our political affairs with earnest integrity.  The very notion of "civic duty" seems to have nearly withered altogether from the vine.  Somehow, after all the dust from the rapid succession of previous storms hasn't settled fully, but on occasion thins enough to let us catch a glimpse through all the haze, it seems the answer lies half shrouded before us all, that is if you're straining your eyes and mind to pay enough attention. 

   If you ask me, our two major political factions in this deadlock have simply merged sufficiently to the point where profiteering motivates enough of their respective careers. It must be as simple as that. Which leaves us with a question that should be asked by us all:  

   "How much longer will we, the American public, continue to allow ourselves to be fleeced dry of our money and blood to these revenant undead politicians?"  In other words: "When will WE, THE PEOPLE take back our country from these con-artists proliferating in our government?" 



Only YOU and I can STOP 
these Corporate Vampires
from draining our lifeblood dry!  
SO BE SURE TO VOTE! IN OUR
FORTHCOMING ELECTIONS 
BEFORE OUR COUNTRY
IS STOLEN FROM US ALL
BY SELF-SERVING
POLITICIANS