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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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An arts and culture aesthetic that has a certain unexplainable mood.
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founded 5 months ago
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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
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
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