Welcome to the sci-fi fantasy electronic and alternative opera... For your information, Shhhh! Digital Media is in no way associated with the Salvation Army or any other religious or ideological organization. I myself have no association with them as well. There are people trying to sell you a much different picture of who I actually am and what I'm about than is the truth. I do not live or work in a homeless shelter with all due respect, nor do I live or work in a prison. I am an advocate for the charities represented here on Shhhh! Digital Media, but I am not a volunteer. I choose to do the best I can, where and when I can. I've never worked as a security guard in my life, but it is an honest way to make a living for an honest person, especially if they don't take the identity of other people.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026






Chapters


This content is produced by the artists indicated on the site, including myself, Brian Joseph Johns.

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The World Veterans Federation is a humanitarian organisation, a charity and a peace activist movement. The WVF maintains its consultative status with the United Nations since 1951 and was conferred the title of “Peace Messenger” in 1987.


I'd like to point out that it was the incredible Gary Sinese Foundation that brought the issue of Veteran's rights to my attention. I've always had little respect for those who'd forget the great contribution made by those who've risked life and limb to defend those values that so many of us espouse. Perhaps the true measure of one's principles are by that for which they'd risk their life.

"None can speak more eloquently for peace than those who have fought in war."

Ralph Bunche, Nobel Peace Prize 1950


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Because Barris told me to put it here. If I didn't, he said he'd walk. Geez. Stardom really gets to some people's heads. Maybe I could kill him and bury his heart beneath the floor boards! Or I could encase him in behind a brick and mortar wall, for shaming my family name of Amantillado! 

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Shhhh! Digital Media
Brian Joseph Johns


Shhhh! Digital Media Presents:

Grand Tapestry Of Moments 04

The Other Side

by Brian Joseph Johns



The Campbell Paradox


There is for the most part, only one way we make an entry into this fray that we call life and that is a fact that we cannot escape.


Or so we thought.


In July 25, 1978, a baby was born via cesarian section. The baby born was the very first baby conceived via in vitro fertilization.

For those of you without formal training in Latin, that means test tube baby, though in ancient Rome, in the region where the Latin language originated there were no test tube babies, and the phrase actually translates to in glass. 


Quite applicable it would seem, though that only attends to the concept of conception. Is that redundancy? Concept of conception? Pretentious perhaps, but oh well. I'm the writer here.


As much so as there is only one way that we come to exist in this life, there is only one way that we escape.


Yes, you read that correctly. I did indeed write the word escape, and that is because when you arrive close to the end of your road here, you'll quickly begin to realize that everything you've laboured towards for your entire life is a trap. A dead end. No way back. 


And it all ends in confinement of a sort and that is because life is a prison.


Or so we thought.


...




The heart monitor blipped at regular intervals, the LED display periodically jumping in a familiar pattern that any mathematician or engineer would recognize as a rapid spike merged logarithm. A waveform common in many bodily functions, not limited to or excluding the act of excretion, though thankfully we're not presenting content here promoting any form of scatting. However, tread carefully while you're here and don't tell me that I didn't warn you.


A step to the left of the heart monitor was a bed, occupied by a man, elderly so and Scottish as was evident by his faded red hair, and angular nose which sat comfortably amidst the wrinkles of his age worn face. He lay in a deep sleep, in his medical gown beneath a thin layer of medical blanket, his only walls, the curtains of the ward within which he was situated. 


His belly elevated slightly and rotund enough to accommodate one of his age, the slowly deteriorating functioning of his digestive system allowing for the accumulation of ever more digested material that could not find its way to its proper exit. Again, I remind you about the fact that we are not promoting scatting of any kind, though this poor fellow could have certainly benefitted from the relief of the biological kind.


The day nurse suddenly arrived at his station. A man. Twenty-six. Thin. Handsome. Groping at the cables connecting  the patient to the heart monitor to ensure their proper functioning, as the patient suddenly awoke when a tug on one of the cables found a nerve.


He awoke with a start. Looking wide eyed at his nurse, and then to the heart beat monitor.


He suddenly recalled a moment in Aberdeen. Back when he was but a wee lad (which means anywhere between twenty and fifty to the average Scottish male). He was in a hall, the music played loud and he there within stood before a very firmly shaped and brusquely posed lady, her hand in his as her legs were wrapped 'round one another, her long hair flowing down her back and following her spine almost all the way to her rump. A fact that had his attention and had made him hard, though his concentration was upon the next move. He strode forward, and the two of them holding each other, as the music continued, spun and until she'd landed once again to greet his face. Those watching them dance, paused to realize that they were seeing a true performance. And some of the other dancers even stopped to applaud. A fact to which he shook his head in disgust, like one who applauds too early in a performance, as if anticipating premature ejaculation as dance is an audience audience as is orgasm to an applause.


He was suddenly whisked back to his bed before he'd had a chance to admire his partner's luscious lips, and the rounded whites of her eyes. Joy and ecstasy was a sight to behold, and now his vision held instead the rump of his male nurse.


"Up and at 'em. You've got visitors, James!" the day nurse said to him.


"I cain't! I'm not even dressed you know!" James responded frantically, still imagining himself in his outfit back in Aberdeen all those years ago, a wee lad (twenty to fifty) in all of his glory.


"Do you want me to tell them to leave as in leave?" the nurse asked him, knowing which buttons to press and he did.


"No! Don't! Don't leave! Don't!" James yelled as the day nurse turned him over onto his stomach and shoved a rectal thermometer, which had been warmed a little bit too long in the heater, into his posterior.


"Ahhh!" he  stifled his scream as the hot thermometer... thermometered him?


"This will just take a moment..." the day nurse responded, knowing that James would find the situation reminiscent of an earlier indignity to which he'd been subjected in the same facility a week earlier.


The guests, two of them. A young man, (between twenty and fifty) and a woman (between sixteen and ninety) arrived in the ward, and were stopped just short of entering James' segment.


"He's just undergoing a delicate procedure that will only take a moment longer..." the ward nurse, a woman advised them.


There arose the sound of struggling beyond, and then the sound of someone "kicking" and then the dignified voice of a Scottish man declaring: "Keep your effing hands off of me ladd!" and then after the clatter of a tray hitting the floor, a short silence again before the same Scottish man spoke.


"Sorry lad. Did that hit ya?" the voice spoke.


At that point, the man and the woman who'd been waiting for access to the resident whom they were visiting stepped forward into the ward without the permission of the ward nurse. The patient's nurse who'd been attending to the patient then struggled to roll the patient over back onto his back, after having grabbed a thermometer from his posterior, which he quickly hid behind his back.


"How's James tonight?" the woman asked, stepping forward confidently as the patient's nurse stepped backward.


"He tried to skewer me, he did!" James exclaimed, trying to right himself on his bed and to shove the sheets under his rump.


"I was taking his temperature," the nurse exclaimed, checking the thermometer.


"I take it he's alright?" the woman asked.


"He's fine for a short visit only," the patient's nurse responded, pocketing the thermometer and exiting the section of the ward.


"And how is James today?" asked the man.


"I'm telling you, they're trying to skewer me, to harp me, to warp me, there to any kind of send me off without myself!" James exclaimed to him.


"Oh, it can't be that bad?" asked the woman.


"Oh, yes it can. Why dune't you try it?" he responded.


"Ahhh, such are the travels near the end of the journey," the woman responded.


"You're journey maybe, but nain't mine," James replied, trying to get his way out of the bed and find the floor.


When his feet found the linoleum, he began to run, much like a dog whose feet had found the water in a swimming pool and had begun to prematurely swim. 


His feet quickly outpaced his upper body and he fell onto his back, the patient nurse quickly hitting an alarm and signaling the ward's goon squad to come running and to heft the poor old man back up onto the bed.


By that time, the ward nurse had insisted that the visitors leave, though they both noticed the same nurse with the rectal thermometer attempting to insert it into the old man's posterior before he was fully overturned.


The ward nurse turned to them and spoke: "If you think that was funny, wait until the punch line," she said to them, quickly abandoning them to assist the patient nurse.


The responding security quickly ushered the man and the woman out of the ward and into the reception area of the hospital.


As much so as the visitors exited James' final moments of life, his only joy rushed out long before he could appreciate their presence, finally subsiding, knowing that his final years had been been nothing more than a ploy to rob him of everything he'd possessed in life, that could not exit with him in death.


His system paused, and then stopped as his body ceased to function. He craned his head in the direction of his departing guests, catching their last glance as he ceased.


The woman paused, frantically pointing in James' direction as the goons forced her further along towards the exit. The man struggled against them, but by that time James was already gone.


His last moments, as had been his last years, a torture to secure from him anything that couldn't pass that line. The line of the final moments of death.


The gold of that which couldn't be carried. The wealth of that which could not be bore.


They took it all from him before he died. Those things that had no visible tenure.


No weight. No colour beyond the symbol the thieves had given it.


And his pain was evident in his last moments, as it had been for the years before he died.


And then he was gone. His last moments a lesson in cruelty.


Not the cruelty of medicine or Doctors. But the cruelty of grave robbers.


Those who'd arrived before the one to be departed had made their final journey.


The cruelty of the young to the departing old.


This was what was known as the Campbell Paradox.


To be continued...

Written by Brian Joseph Johns

Thank you to Germind, whose music will appear in a future episode, assuming that Shhhh! Digital Media is akin to the fuel rather than the exhaust... ;-)

Stay tuned for Grand Tapestry of Moments Episode 04

Credits and attribution:



Thank you both the Deepai.org and Photopea.com, without whom the title art would not have been possible.

Special Thanks To Rocket Fuel Lakeshore Blvd West, perhaps the best place in history to get a coffee, circa 2001-2004. Miss you all very much.

Artwork: Amy Wong, Wendy Pusey, Ghastly, Birdman, Brian Joseph Johns, Daz3D, Unreal Engine...

Tools: Daz3D, Corel Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Blender, Stable Diffusion (Easy Diffusion distribution), InstantID, Sadtalker, Google Colaboratory, Microsoft Copilot (Windows 11), Hitfilm, PhotoPea (a great web based Photoshop stand-in if you're on a low budget or in a pinch), Deepai.org, Google AI Studio, Borderline Obsession...

DeepSeek AI for suggestions on exercises to improve aspects of describing scene and settings with a more sensory focused grammar.

InstantID by: Wang, Qixun and Bai, Xu and Wang, Haofan and Qin, Zekui and Chen, Anthony. Research Paper Title: InstantID - Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds.

Sadtalker by: Zhang, Wenxuan and Cun, Xiaodong and Wang, Xuan and Zhang, Yong and Shen, Xi and Guo, Yu and Shan, Ying and Wang, Fei.
Research Paper Title: SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation.

Gratitude: Our Mentors, Senseis, Sifus, Sebomnims, lifetime inspirations, family, friends, the Nomads (ask Stanton about that one), the Music, the Movies, the Theatre, the Arts, ASMR, (both YouTube and Bilibili and the many other creators on those platforms), the Gaming and Developer communities and of course, the audience.

Martial Arts (in the words of real experts and at least one comedian): https://brucelee.com (home of the real Dragon and an entire family of inspirations), http://iwco.online International Wing Chun Organization (International presence of a very scalable intensity martial art, protected and developed by Shaolin Nun Ng Mui) and the alma mater of Jinn Hua's own specialized variation thereof, https://iogkf.com International Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karatedo Federation (even Hanshi had his teachers), https://itftkd.sport International Taekwondo Federation (Here there be Taegers), https://tangsoodoworld.com Tang Soo Do World (the path of Grandmaster Chuck Norris), https://www.aikido-international.org International Aikido Federation (how else would Navy Chef Steven Seagal liberate a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier from a team of hijackers?), https://www.stqitoronto.com Shaolin Temple Quanfa Institute (The City Of Toronto's own Shaolin Temple), https://www.enterthedojoshow.com Master Ken's Ameri-Te-Do presence (If we can't laugh at ourselves, then we can at least laugh the loudest at others, and other Zen)

Magic (performance, illusion and perhaps the real thing): Magic Week Archive (I'm currently growing this section so stay tuned)

Special thanks to Aitrepreneur, Mickmumpitz, Hugging Face and the YouTube educational content producers, including those catering to the AI content production pipeline and of course AlphaSignal.

Shi Heng Yi Shaolin Training For Self Mastery 
A reknowned Sifu under whose tutelage you can study the theory and practical applications of the Shaolin Arts for health, physical and mental wellbeing in every day life

Shi Heng Yi Shaolin Training For Self Mastery 
A reknowned Sifu under whose tutelage you can study the theory and practical applications of the Shaolin Arts for health, physical and mental wellbeing in every day life

Jesse Enkamp: Karate Nerd
Jesse, a reknowned Sensei who runs his own dojo, explores the world of Martial Arts, traveling to many exotic locations to meet practitioners of a variety of different arts

Sensei Rokas: Martial Arts Journey
A reknowned Sensei of Aikido who in seeking to understand the roots of Aikido and its applications, seeks to stress test its effectiveness in a number of real world situations while studying its history

Seamus O'Dowd
An extensive growing archive Katas, Techniques and Waza (mostly Shotokan)

Iaido: Train For Katana Mastery Like Samurai 
The original weapons focused curriculum under which Samurai became masters of their art

Tapp Brothers Exercise For Better Motion 
Extensive courses for calisthenics and body strength, stamina and flexibility

Special thanks to Canva for inspiring other creators and giving them the tools

Special thanks to Captain Crunch and his wonderful sister!

Special thanks to Bandcamp for giving indie music artists a home under one roof

Something to give you perspective: The very first teacher had no formal education, didn't graduate and was self taught, but only because they had no other choice. We do.

This content is entirely produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701 under the Shhhh! Digital Media banner.

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