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It’s my great pleasure to reintroduce the world to Consciousness: A Continuing Acknowledgment of Nothing in Particular. For those who don’t know (which would be all but like 100 people in the world), this was a humor zine I worked on way back in high school. It was a creative free-for-all composed of flash fiction, visual gags, comic strips, and bizarre non-sequiturs contributed by myself and a few like-minded friends. It was also a joy to make and my first taste of fulfilling, collaborative creation. I worked on Consciousness throughout my teenage years, printing it on office printers at my mom’s job and selling it through friends at schools and comic shops throughout the tri-county area.

Here for your perusal is the entire first issue of Consciousness. The original files for the zine are long gone (along with the computer that housed them), but a few hard copies are still kicking around, so I went ahead and scanned them for posterity. I cleaned the formatting up a bit while also revising text where it was too awful to overlook, but otherwise, everything is just as ridiculous as ever. Just keep in mind that this is ultimately the work of demented children and should be treated as such.

More to come!

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Never Trust a Blender_Title

Hot off the digital presses comes Never Trust a Blender, a 4-page micro-comic from myself and artiste deluxe Erin Douglas. It tells the cautionary tale of a man with a terrible nickname who must grapple with the fallout of his own ill choices after striking a Faustian bargain with the titular devil in the machine. Pour yourself a thick glass of the blue stuff and let the bad times roll!

Also, be sure to check back in the coming weeks for more new content as we begin the awkward transition from placeholder website to something actually worth visiting. How novel!

Windows

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Across the ocean of roofs I can see a middle-aged woman, her face already lined, who is forever bending over something and who never goes out. Out of her face, her dress, and her gestures, out of practically nothing at all, I have made up this woman’s story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep.

If it had been an old man I could have made up his just the same.

And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in some one besides myself.

Perhaps you are asking, “Are you sure that your story is the real one?” But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?

Original poem by Charles Baudelaire

Brain Waves

If all of our reminders were writ in knitted neural wires,

There’d be no need for pens and paper, screens or keys.

The paths all our thoughts travel-

living streets of layered matter-

Are all the space a being could ever need.

Man’s Ugly Algorithms

  • The trunk of every tree is the handle of a blade that will one day hack at the roots of itself
  • Good relations between species depend upon one party supplying food and heavy petting to the party most likely to eat the other
  • Losing gracefully is the wisdom of knowing other’s success is preferable to seeming like a jerk

Silent Spheres Sing

This galaxy’s an island-

A continent of stars,

And a billion other galaxies

Drift right alongside ours.

A black, vast sea before us,

An image from the past.

Everything is now some place else,

But our vision’s not as fast.

Hidden folds of wonder,

Life humble as clay.

Strokes as bold as thunder,

Origin of days.

The Long Night of History

Inside Room 103

On the back left hand wall,

6 portraits are hanging,

And each one of them all

Shows the very same building,

Just on different days.

6 sides of 1 person:

A revealing display.

Snapshots of progression-

2 Para ll e ll ines

Grouped 2 by 2

And stacked

Side by side.

We gather before them,

Linking thoughts into chains

To be wound round the table

And fastened to legs.

Transfixed, we stay seated,

Though time marches past.

Every moment a portrait-

Each the first,

Each the last.

Goodbye, and Thanks for Trying

There’s nothing you can do about the sores on your spine.

Growth spurts once hurt during youthful days gone by.

But now there’s dizziness in the morning.

And nights of tile for pillows, wondering

How soon sleep can turn to death.

You now face grim realizations;

So have a seat and catch your breath.

One in a million-

If they’re lucky-  will drink of a sweet wine

Before a tired draught weighs down the dozing eIe.

You may get to be that happy one,

Or it may wind up you won’t.

But if you’re counting on a miracle,

Don’t.

Men trace the lines of cloud folds

With brushstrokes slight as flesh,

Yet draw no closer to the true shape.

We just try to do our best.

One for All

Usually when you have Chinese dumplings for dinner or lunch, you don’t have to cook anything else . (Except for on some BIG occasions!) Otherwise, the dumpling itself is good enough for dinner.

This is one of the advantages of Chinese dumplings over other foods, though it certainly has taken a while for most to appreciate it. Since ancient times to the time of now happening, the spread of many dumplings is finally here for the first time.

Take for example, delicious dumplings, but not comfortable or flat; instead, comfortable flat. As the saying goes, dumplings on wine, sharpen your there!

Picture this: New Year, eating dumplings. Only word? Harmonious. Even President Bush and his wife Laura swore by them during their visit to China in “100 Dumplings for Dinner.”

Besides, the new manual procedures for dumplings do away with past problems like paper explosion traps, which always left that “eat an oil” burden feeling that burns at the low end of the dynamic-texture pole. It’s a much better dumpling these days, thanks to the strict supervision of the expected settlement from the settlement areas, and from the surface of the samples.

After testing and evaluating the majority of customers, Asia and the United States agreed that the dumplings with the following six features :

1. Sanitation. Factories, hygiene, and strict compliance with provisions of the “The Place.”

2. Fresh and delicious. (Dumplings with the quantitative ratio of raw material to fresh foods)

3. A beggar eats oil. The end of the evaporation process makes you feel personally-you feel oil, not oil, and not greasy either. Instead, texture and Shannon.

4. Face the burden of a tendon. A special screening and the ratio of flour to face produces the burden of strong teeth to chew gin.

5. Pretty attractive. Professional instructors + professional standards= professional play performance.

6. Convenience and portability. ie, convenience store; easy to cook, fry, and carry.

It’s the privilege of a lifetime to live in a world where all dumplings comply 100% with the indispensable Stephen Cooperation. Truly indispensable Cooperation, Stephen.

Thus, having the conclusion stated, this has fully demonstrated that the Chinese dumplings are indeed the traditional food culture.

At long last, this earth pulses by the throbs of a dumpling.