Category: releases

News about material goods you can acquire.

Whose timeline is it anyway
The Terminator fever dream coming to fruition? The need for fantasy? Magic? Faith? Hope/lessness and the foreverness of things.

There are photos of me as a gangly nine year old wearing a reduce reuse recycle shirt, with illustrations of a 1990s multi-culti lineup of cool girl friends, and me with a big gap-tooth smile on my face holding up peace signs in both hands.

Now that my unemployment compensation is about to exhaust itself (a crime given how much money goes to wars, we know we know), I’m gathering myself from this long, necessary, blessed period of recuperation and work work working on a fully Mar-tian, Uranus re-entering Gemini-tinged foray into working for myself. Which is to say, I am back on my vending bullshit and making new things (as if I ever stopped tbh). There will be promo at the bottom of this missive.

Last Saturday I vended at the Clark Park Bizarre, an recurring market entity that sprang up after L&I began threatening operations of a post-pandemic, organically formed DIY vendor market that had been happening alongside the Saturday farmer’s markets. This past week I worked nonstop, tweaking my setup, designing, laying out, and assembling new gear, experimenting with new-to-me spiral binding formats and cold lamination equipment that I’ve cluttered my office with… And I produced…a zine version of

SERVICE APPRECIATION

Here is the intro:

A couple years before the pandemic, I started an Instagram page called @serviceappreciation, an old fashioned internet shrine for service expressed through disposable items, mostly bags. I’d developed an attachment to single-use bags, keen on their designs and manufacture, with that Hagakure quote in the back of my head…

“In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunch box they use for a single day when flower viewing.

Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. As might be expected, this is one of my recollections of the capital (Kyoto).

The end is important in all things.”

After WWII, there was all this emphasis on plastics and better living through chemistry. Single-use plastic grocery bags were promoted in the 1980s as a tree-saving alternative to paper bags. Now the whole world seems to be choking on the stuff.

Plastic, we can concieve of it as man-made, and yet I often think how petroleum too is of the earth. How the civilizations of today plunder the riches below.

I want to express my appreciation to the bags.

((
Sidebar: I was thrilled when Telfar came out with its Plastic Bag, whose marketing I fucking love as a weirdo whose made their livelihood in the industry of persuasion.

“This bag literally costs more to make than the Telfar shopping bag, but is designed to look like the cheapest bag on earth. On purpose. Fucking genius? Or fucking stupid? You decide.”

“I still have that inner child. There’s parts of me that will never go away. Much…like… plastics”
– source

“When we read ‘Thank You for Shopping.’ Whom is thanking whom?
Is it the store owner thanking us for the patronage?
No, I don’t believe so.
It is the _bag_ thanking us…
…for giving _it_ purpose.
The bag seems to scream out: Re-use me… Abuse me.
Squeeze me.
Leave me and run back.
Put your hand around my body and make me crinkle.
Just like that.
Stuff me.
Stretch me.
I’m yours forever.
Plastic is forever.
– source

))

Plastic. Yeah, it’s on my mind with the inagural edition of service appreciation zine, and clearly the Telfar marketing has me by the brain too. But it’s also on my mind when I’m unpacking and debagging groceries, cutting open plastic seals and tossing them in the bin, thinking to myself we’re going to hell for this … And honestly I would reckon at times that we are in hell for this. We being us humans treading an earth where technobaron warlords vie for control of resources. It’s real.

Plastic was on my mind back in my heavy research days for ALL THAT’S LEFT, going down rabbit holes of superfund site databases and industrial waste longterm exposure research papers and sex hormone disorders and the effects of xenoestrogen disruption (commonly found in plasticcccs like BPA, phthalates, parabens, etc) on prepubescent development.

It’s on my mind when I wear my black plastic slides around the house and the bottoms of my feet get sweaty in them. What do our bodies absorb.

There’s that scene from maybe the third book of Butler’s Xenogenesis triology where the young Oankali child finds a piece of plastic and puts it in their mouth, quickly poisoned and horrified to know such a material ever existed on planet earth.

Follow this thread with me.

A couple weekends ago I went to a climate resistance workshop held by Deep Space Mind 215 and got to talk with neighbors and people connected to city offices about my climate concerns (one consensus: stop letting developers cut down the fucking mature trees). Afterwards, I stood lingering on the steps with another attendee who grew food with students, who asked me how long do I think we have? I asked, for what? System collapse. I told them, I think it’s upon us already. The water is already hot (see: boiling frogs metaphor).

IMAGINED TIMELINES

I’ve written before how a sci-fi wordsmith of my ilk does not especially enjoy seeing the horrors of imagined worlds take material form. In my old ALL THAT’S LEFT stories (circa 2012), background characters suffer from nerve disorders, pain ticks, mobility issues, killer mold, et cetera, while the main characters gain mobility by reluctantly entering an exploitative program where they receive prosthetic bodies in exchange for doing land surveys in what are essentially post- climate disaster/infrastructure collapse superfund sites.

Over the years, springtime in Philly has become more like mold season for me, where my aging 150+ year old, post-industrial era house comes alive to try and knock me and my immune system down 2-3 notches. The summers become bad air season, and the meds I’m on to function have changed my once lizard-like heat tolerance to someone who just cannot take the heat like that anymore. I become one the background characters in my own stories (for now).

Meanwhile, I experience the current state of artificial intelligence as a surreal media environment. In 2017, I wrote Romance of the Colony for Mask Magazine (RIP), talking at one point about water asset managers and rhetorical-asking how one gets a job like that. In the same essay I mention an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex where protestors are shouting ‘give water to war orphans’ outside a building where two corporations toast champagne glasses of drinking water–needed for cybernetics manufacturing, in an era where cyborg soldiers have become status quo. There has been so so much written about AI (and I even contributed an essay for CLOG magazine’s AI issue about assuming they will adhere to human conceptions of being), yet I remain beside myself for the fact that bastards erect this 21st century machine revolution using the energy standards of the 19th.

WHERE IS THE IMAGINATION?

slash

Too bad monopolizers-of-the-past set us so far back free-energy-wise, huh.

Robotech/Macross had fighter jets powered by stable, mini nuclear reactor cores gleaned from alien technology. Space cowboy anime depict intergalactic travel with bus-sized craft that can top up their fuel reserves at the nearest station. Other sci-fis and fantasies of the past 50-100 years show humans harnessing energy from crystals (hello Sailor Moon?!), from stars, from plants, from waste, et cetera. But warmonger bastards with no imagination are dropping bombs for oil-dependent combustion engines. In the twenty-first motherfucking century. To “have AI” in this moment of time is a fucking joke.

The way AI, tech, and war company CEOs are in these paranoia bro circle jerks, dropping billions in investment dollars for shit that there is literally not enough resources on EARTH to build, is…rich, let’s put it that way. My Irish ancestors remind me of the famine slaughter the British enacted so they could have land to graze cows and their gentry could eat more beef. We all see how plainly willing these warmongers are to rip any and everything away from us. They lack imagination to do better. To be clever. Only conniving. Misleading. Deceptive. It’s a bad magic.

Somewhere there are wicked new weapons waiting to be deployed on human populations. Laser vaporizers and brain-disabling microwave pistols. Robo war dogs. Remote drone pilots now completely de-rigeur (have you ever seen that 1992 Robin Williams movie, TOYS?). And god knows what else. Back when Biden was running for the 2020 presidential election, I joked that if Biden won we would get a Demolition Man timeline, where everything is neoliberal-polite, sanitized, and ordained under the guise of well-meaning benevolent (corrupt) leadership… and if Trump won we would get The Running Man timeline, where jailed dissenters are used for entertainment on survival gauntlet kill shows with a live studio audience. But I realized, what we’re in is a Terminator timeline. Where autonomous machines have been given the ability to kill people. Where Sarah Connor (like many 70s babies, it seems) has nightmares of nuclear holocaust.

For astrology heads, I continue to take heed that we’re some months into a 2.5 year cycle of Saturn in Aries. Rushing to build systems that fundamentally lack good foundation just because it can be done. Rush. Haste. Misguided passions. Belief that what can be built this fast can last. People in positions of power jumping to ill-begot conclusions. People confidently taking on more than they can handle, ignoring the reality of what’s going on around them and within them. Take heed, take heed. Slow it down. Slow down. The warmongers make haste for their shit dreams of winner-takes-all enclosure, but we do not have to operate on their terms, though they suffocate us at every turn.

And though I’m sensing this human timeline on par with Terminator futures, I’m not convinced of its successful fruition. Where the fuck are tech warmongers securing the materials and energy to power these death machines-to-be when yet more global supply chain disruptions and newer paranoia/divestment over US- (and China) controlled software suites, online platforms, device manufacturers, etc, going on? (And it’s not even hurricane season yet!) There’s a lot to critique about 1980s/1990s cyberpunk depictions, and a lot to glean from Ghost in the Shell cyberwarfare depictions, but I hold on to the hacker as fool disruptor trope in the top-down war machine. Those of us underfoot of giants do not need all the right resources to make our will manifest in this world. Take heed.

There is a zine I offer when I vend in person, a transcription of Murray Bookchin’s speech called Utopia, Not Futurism, which he gave in 1978 at something called the Toward Tomorrow Fair in Amherst, Massachusetts. Earth Day had kicked off in 1970, and organizing around it saw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for cleaning superfunds and regulating further industrial pollution. The 1970s were notable for a number of energy crises, shortages and wild price hikes on gas, conlficts over Iranian oil and war with Israel.

Over sixty years have passed and the hungry ghosts of wars past continue to possess those in power. They do not carry their own dreams, they do not know themselves unattached to their power. Drastic, dramatic changes heave up in hidden waves and sudden bursts. For those of us sick, under resourced, over worked, driven mad, incapacitated, scattered to the wind what can we do? Have we been put on this earth only to react to the awful injustices of this reckless terminator timeline? No, I don’t believe so.

As a child, I collected litter, wore my layaway recycle shirts, and celebrated Earth Day, driven by an innocent love for protecting our planet. Today, I go out on my crutches with my extendo-claw and spare plastic bag and pick up the trash left behind by litterers and our city’s outdated trash trucks. There is more litter the next day. I pick it up.

In astrology, the outer planets which cannot be seen with the naked eye, are considered planets of generations. Meaning their influences do not so much speak to ones everyday interpersonal happenings as more the backdrops of generational eras within which we belong. Their revolutions around the sun take many decades, some take longer than a human life to return more than twice or even once. Before the invention of the telescope, Saturn was considered the final planet, a boundary between the known and unknown, the one that enclosed all the others with its orbit, its revolution taking 29.5 earth years. And some of Saturn’s significations, which frankly I cherish, are that things will move at the pace they will move… not all is within one’s control… and setbacks are to be expected, even incorporated into one’s conceptions of production/progress… in fact, progress-oriented linear time itself is not the best framework to cling to in this life.

When I write my newsletters I feel often I repeat myself from last time, and yet I have discovered that often, understanding difficult things demands repetition. We have to be told the same thing over and over and over, because often our media-hijacked, production-formed minds are shouting at our hearts to react to the moment, to act immediately, to not wait because there is no time… when what would benefit ourselves and those around us, would be to Respond. On our own time. And where does one’s own time dwell?

Our resistence to terminators is the work of generations.

Happy Earth Day.

@};—}—;————

Monk

NEW at CYBORG MEMOIRS DISTRO
- service appreciation zine
- head mini prompt journal
- clear covers for A5 planners
  (if you already ordered a planner, use my distro contact form to hmu, and I can send you a cover for the cost of shipping!
- new !! stickers for cyborgs
- sliding scale natal chart readings, remediation protocols, & event elections (best dates for when I should~) at messengerastro.com
JOIN THE CYBORG MEMOIRS MAIL CLUB

A Patreon situation where your support results in receving seasonal mail packages of all my releases straight to your literal door. With a sprinkle of magic and frivolous fun. =)
April 22, 2026
EVENT – Apr 2 The Way Disabled People Love Each Other Philadelphia Book Launch w/author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
HOW ARE YOU

We made it to spring, y’all. Congratulations to us all.

I’m in the midst of burning the midnight oil, printing zines and planners, preparing for the slow but steady lineup of events I’m vending this spring (still unemployed, still looking for work).

I’m weening myself off crutches for the third time. Sigh.

The year 2 exam for my astrology studies has kicked off and after this weekend I’m going to be AFK till its submitted. I’m offering what I’m calling student astro readings over at Messenger Astrology, sliding scale ofc.

My small but dedicated patreon mail club got its first package of the year, which included a new short story that’s *not* ALL THAT’S LEFT, something more supernatural dream working class fantasy that I’ve been calling 100 EAST. (I’m still contemplating how I want to release new works on this AI bot-scraping internet.)

My background television default these days is all the paranormal stations on Roku’s Live TV jawn, and I stopped smoking la mota for Lent (after having not observed it for years, making the sudden decision to do so on Fat Tuesday, the same day as a solar eclipse in my 6H), and now I’m remembering parts of dreams in the middle of the day, whereas previously…nothing.

EVENTS

If all this talk of planners and new stories has enticed you, I’m vending this tonight:::
- What: AFROBEAST w/DuiJi 13 & Courtnee Owens ~ Highlife Afrobeat House Funk Dance Party & Vinyl Pop Up
- When: MAR 21 Saturday 7pm-12a
- Where: @ Studio 34 > 4522 Baltimore Ave, Phila 19143
- Cost: $5~20 sliding scale (portion of proceeds goes to Juntos)
- Access: really steep stairs, 2 flights
Official blurb: We will celebrate intergenerational Afrocentric beats with our whole bodies. We will dance, gather and sway, as we honor both our ancestors and descendants in this intersection of now. We’re also bringing out some records to sell for our fellow crate diggers. Join us as we elevate together and bring in the renewing energies of this Spring Equinox!

Some of what you’ll hear:

Fela Kuti, Tony Allen, Ebo Taylor, Marijata, Orlando Julius, Osibisa, Manu Dibango, K. Frimpong

Kokoroko, Antibalas, Ezra Collective, Masters At Work, Abase, Seun Kuti, Burna Boy, Tems, Tala

—

Leah joked that this would be my yearly reading at the Shoe, but actually! Come join what will no doubt be a packed house, experience me doing what I do best, and hear a legend read from their latest book
- What: The Way Disabled People Love Each Other Philadelphia Book Launch w/author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ~ disabled grief portal ~ altar installation ~ community & love
- When: APR 2 Saturday 7pm-9pm
- Where: @ Wooden Shoe Books > 704 South St Phila 19147
- Cost: no cost
- Access: Masks REQUIRED!! ADA except the bathroom
Official blurb: Come celebrate this long awaited 5th book of poetry by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, a fierce crip reckoning.

C U NEXT TUESDAY

I’m getting serious about stationery, y’all. For ALL THESE YEARS that I have publicly been a wordsmith petulant working class bastard artist, I privately made my living working as an underpaid and undervalued magic maker for an indie boutique that sold, among other things, stationery. That soul sucking security is all gone now, but my flaming desire to make precious paper goods for interesting people has emerged unabated.

*ahem*

The zodiacal solar year planners started this week!! We’re officially in Aries season aka the Sun has made its ingress into the sign. I made a whole entire VIDEO about these planners, ~~altho my Virgo sensibilities are already sighing with critiques and I certainly will be redoing the thumbnail… but ignore that and~~ give it a looksie if you’re about that paper hyuck hyuck >;)

Now lemme do some obligatory spam and send you on your merry way, precious soul you are.

PICK UP A PLANNER

sTaY cOoL & dOn’T lEt tHe BaStArDs GrInD yOu DoWn!

<3 Monk

@}-}-;——————
March 21, 2026
ZODIACAL C U Next Tuesday
get yours

WHAT’s up, party people.

Trust and believe that the cyborg scifi smut magic survivor memoir audio tales and writings you know and appreciate me for have not been forgone for my C U NEXT TUESDAY planner project — it’s just that I am unemployed, having trouble finding work, and making these planners is my main means of income!

I came here to brag/announce that on this Mercury’s day (yes she’s stationary and in fall but I am their child) that my much-anticipated solar ZODIACAL year planners are now available. Fuck Gregorian calendar time, M I RITE?! Full specs are below.

It’s truly been a saga materializing this thing from out of my brain and into physical form. Those who have been checking my rare and infrequent Instagram stories have been getting an earful of the pitfalls of data merge and the untold roadblocks of the past two months I have experienced trying to lay this thing out in an automated fashion. YES I had to resort to doing it all by hand, please have a moment of silence for my overworked and inflamed arm tendons.

Anyway, I’m really proud of this baby and hope that many others find it useful for their own spacetime orientation.

What’s next? Well, since I had so many setbacks along the way, I’m here releasing this thing in a Mercury station/retrograde, in the middle of eclipse season, which seems somehow significantly right on time (…I will have to report back on that later). Right now the A5 NARROW version is available, and I will be getting the A5 full size edition together in the coming week or so. After that, I have my sights on releasing a B6 size undated jawn, something in between a guided prompt journal/daily diary/commonplace notebook.

I also have regular degular 2026 planners available in both A5 and A5 NARROW sizes, in Weeks+Note and Months+Review formats.

SO that’s my update. Tell your homies, invite me to your vendor markets and pop-up spaces, etc etc etc. I TRULY hope your spirit is strong as the pysop disinformation distribution manipulation hungry ghost-possessed warmonger pedo cabal cyberpunk dystopia continues to materialize, and I send my cunning trickster love your way.

full specs

A new experiment in visualizing time, the ZODIACAL version of the C U NEXT TUESDAY weekly planner arranges its months and days according to astrological seasons.

Instead of Gregorian months (such as March, April, May), time is ordered according to the Sun’s passage through the zodiacal wheel.

Will this humble Mercurial tool be able to wrest you away from the grip of urgent capitalist time? Perhaps it’s ~time~ to find out. ^_~/

KEY POINTS
- One solar year over 2 books, 6 months per book
- Runs March 20, 2026 ~ March 19, 2027
- Monday-start, with ZODIACAL solar “months” (aka Aries ~ Pisces seasons)
- A5 NARROW size has the same features of the full A5 size (most pages, writing space) in a more compact form.
- Fits a TRAVELER’S notebook~ =)
IT HAS
- Weeks + Note
- Months
- Past Month Review
- Next Month Dream
- Planetary Attune w/fillable Natal Chart (whole sign)
- Yearly Plan
- Annual Mission
- Archive
- Habit Tracker
- Daily Moon Phase
- Zodiacal Season
- Lunations & Eclipses
- Transits & Ingresses
- Planetary Retrogrades & Direct Stations
- Some Holidays =)
PAPER TYPE

Kokuyo Business Paper (white) = smooth, light & recommended if you write with fine tip gel and fountain pens [limited print run]

COVER TYPE

Cardstock Paper. I highly recommend reinforcing this with clear contact paper, a proper slip cover, or some carefully applied layers of good ole clear packing tape.

SIZE

A5 NARROW = 4.5″ × 8.3″

SHIPPING

Ships USPS 1st Class Mail

International shipping: Use this site’s contact form to send me your addy + a name & phone number for shipping, your desired payment amount for the goods, and I can get back to you with price & payment options

Philly locals can opt to pickup from a location near Overbrook High School~

A collaboration with MESSENGER ASTRO
February 25, 2026
C U Next Tuesday 2026 Planners
get yours

2018 was the last year I made my then-short-lived CUNT planner for the public.

Now, unemployed and after six weeks straight of fairly grueling design and spreadsheet work and learning curves on new software, I present to you… CUNT 2026!

I’m proud of this one, ya’ll. I think it came out good. Thank you to everyone who expressed interest ahead of release. =)

I want to say, this is the culmination of damn near 18 years working at a boutique design and stationery store, to the point I became the creative director, where constant, necessary exposure to so much of the planner and stationery community made me well-attuned to the features, needs, and trends that paper planner users appreciate.

But I’ve been a stationery and planner freak long before that job (shout out to my now retired stepdad who worked as a master level paper bindery operator and would always be bringing home scratch pads he bound), and I’ve been someone who’s customized my notebooks with all sorts of DIY treatments (shout out to my mom always with the crafting and art supplies at hand). So I could say this planner is the culmination of being a paper freak DIYer who now has the skills to make something of this level.

Can I tell you that designing and producing a planner has not been easy work? There are so many factors like where to get good paper, how will you print it, how will you bind, and the meticulous work of designing the actual layout itself. This is the production of a tool, and should therefore be well-constructed (says the wordsmith whose tools include pen and paper). I laid this one out using Affinity by Canva, which is free, and that was a simultaneous fabulous/aggravating learning curve. So it’s now my fifth or sixth go-round with designing/printing/binding/distributing a planner, and I’m settling into the patience needed for the practice.

2018 weeks

2016 months

2018 weeks & months

2017 months

2017 months

2017 months

I knew a lot of punks in the late 2000s who carried the Slingshot organizer, and I remember being excited to help a friend at the time hot glue-bind them with a hand-crank machine in a West Philly studio once… a binding machine not too uncommon or hard to get. Do you know what it takes to consistently get every single page evenly covered in that binding glue, though? I was not prepared.

When I watch bookbinder youtube, I see people going to great and meditative lengths over long hours and many days to prepare and sew and press signatures of paper into gorgeous books that lay open with ease. I tell myself now that I don’t have an interest in going there, but it has been good to learn a few techniques for making more crisp and intentional printed matter.

Back in high school I would be in the Morning Glory store near 5th and Godfrey buying mini binder refill papers and cute memo pads for making origami notes to pass in the halls. I’d have my little address book from the Sanrio store in Chinatown. I owned a single notebook at a time and would fill it up to almost the end, and then feel like I needed a different type of notebook to stoke my desire to write anew.

these were the notebooks of my adolescence, my hardest years. i scanned their covers, kept a few pages. but i burned these notebooks.

I share these memory capsules to say that this project gave me a bit of magic back to myself and I’m very happy to share it with y’all. I set about to make the 2026 C U Next Tuesday planners look and perform as good as possible while still making them on pedestrian equipment in my house, and I look forward to forging future iterations. Now onto the specs:

Sizes

× A5 = 5.8″ × 8.3″
× A5 NARROW = 4.5″ × 8.3″ [coming next week]

Time Frames

× by GREGORIAN months (aka January ~ December)
× by ZODIAC solar “months” (aka Aries ~ Pisces seasons) [coming by end of Capricorn season]

Paper Types

× Kokuyo Business Paper (white) = smoother & recommended if you write with fine tip gel pens [limited print run]
× Color Copy Paper (varies) = scratchier for aforementioned pens & not recommended if you use really inky rollerball or felt tip pens like Le Pen. Takes a ballpoint pen and a pencil great, tho. [coming soon]

Formats

WEEKS +NOTE
- One year over 2 books, 6 months per book
- Monday-start
- Has most pages and space for writing & appointments
It has
Weeks + Note

Months

Past Month Review

Next Month Dream
Yearly Plan

Annual Mission

Archive

Habit Tracker

Memo Pages (just 2)
Daily Moon Phase

Zodiacal Season

Lunations & Eclipses

Planetary Retrogrades & Direct Stations

Some Holidays =)
MONTHS +REVIEW
- One year in one book, one month per two pages
- Monday-start
- Just the months, plus some reflective prompted writing space
It has
Months

Yearly Plan

Annual Mission

Past Month Review

Next Month Dream
Memo Pages (just 4)

Archive

Habit Tracker

Daily Moon Phase

Zodiacal Season
Lunations & Eclipses

Planetary Retrogrades & Direct Stations

Some Holidays =)
MONTHS
- One year in one book, one month per two pages
- Monday-start
- Just the months
It has
Months

Yearly Plan

Annual Mission

Memo Pages (just 4)
Archive

Habit Tracker

Daily Moon Phase

Zodiacal Season
Lunations & Eclipses

Planetary Retrogrades & Direct Stations

Some Holidays =)
January 5, 2026
All That’s Left [Failed Novel Experiment] ch1: The Rain

Dear Braga…

A living story about dispossessed cyborgs and their many borders.. begins again.

TRANS CITY SCI-FI CLIMATE FANTASY HUMAN ANIMAL

Kay finds help amidst a storm.

Full story AUDIO released in 2022, 1st time in print.

Get YouRS

This story got a cameo mention in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s newsletter: two cute things and a extra essay about white utopianism vs disabled BIPOC [working class] realism in sci-fi

Double Layer Light Compression

July 14, 2024
Bookmarks for Cyborgs

I’d been wanting to design more bookmarks ever since I made some to accompany mine and Metropolarity’s previous books in 2021. This new set commemorates the release of my latest, featuring the slogans BEAR WITNESS / DEVOTION / THRESHOLD / REMEMBER. If you order a book from me, you’ll get one. And if you just LOVE bookmarks, You can also order a 4-pack by itself. =)

4 DESIGNS

REMEMBER
BEAR WITNESS
THRESHOLD
DEVOTION

buy bookmarks 4 cyborgs

ephemera for freaks

bookmarks 4 cyborgs

February 4, 2024
Desire Hope Despair Tee

Part of my 2023 Cyborg Memoirs Revival plan was to produce some new merch, as well as attempt a pre-order model to print tees (usually a much larger upfront cost than when producing printed objects).

I’d been sitting on drafts of designs and notes of fun stuff I’d like to make for too long, so I signed myself up to vend two December markets to put the pressure on. I reprinted a ton of old zines, got a new book to the printers, designed some sick new stickers, a set of bookmarks, and reissued a(n apparently) cult classic tee. Then I burnt myself out doing too much SAD BUT TRUE but hey.

Fans of my DESIRE HOPE DESPAIR era gear production have been asking me when I would do a re-release ever since I made the last one several years ago. Now that so much more time’s been swallowed in the pandemic timejump, people have been telling me their tees have become shredded or lost to lovers and so on. So. I really had to bring it back.

PUFF PAINT REDUX

garment dye

shrink free

7.5oz cotton

sizes 5X thru S

get yours

get your DHD TEE

sizing info at shop link above
see past DHD fits here
missed out on the drop? [subscribe] above to my newsletter

February 4, 2024
Stickers for Cyborgs

lineup

01 – DESIRE HOPE DESPAIR 2024 (holo)

02 – HEAVILY CYBORG 2.0

03 – MY OTHER BODY IS IN THE SHOP (black on white)

04 – MY OTHER BODY IS IN THE SHOP (white on clear)

05 – THRESHOLD

06 – MEAN SCARY FEMME APPRECIATION CLUB (holo)

07 – REMEMBER

08 – MAD PHILLY ~ [AVAILABLE 4 CUSTOM SETS]

09 – MEANINGLESS & FORGETTABLE (white on clear)

10 – CACKLING BITCH redux

11 – TRANS TIMES 2.0

12 – MAD PHILLY HOLO ~ [sold separately]

buy stickers for cyborgs

“new for 2024”

Available in custom sets & predetermined packs.

I don’t think I evvvvver posted this stuff here when I was first doing it, but somewhere in the mid-late 2010s I started getting vinyl stickers made to accompany the small array of other wares I took to zine fests and indie publishing fares and maker markets. Patches, pins, zines, and books, and the occasional shirt or tote bag. Being my Tumblr hey-day I promoted heavily there, on socials as @gear4cyborgs, and sold online as well. I was trying to “make stuff” under the now defunct DHD215 / Desire Hope Despair Heavy Industries moniker (what a mouthful), hoping I could get a regular something going (a side hustle is the term nowadays) with seasonal designs and visions of brand building, but I couldn’t get the means together and was really just doing too much.

In early 2023 I announced my Cyborg Memoirs Revival plan, an effort to revive and restructure the grown-disjointed facets of my online presence and artistic output. There was a lot to do. Update my website design and its outdated copy, rewrite artist statements & abouts (still going)/update CVs, rebuild my online shop to a new platform, plot out production schedules for the grip of items I was hoping to produce, get a whole new book edited and published, apply to a couple award/opportunities even tho the process sets off bad inflammation flareups (and I’m thisclose to requesting disability accommodations for these things)…

Anyway, here, my production efforts materialized in time to vend the Philly Zine Fest and Trans Art Mart, two events I hadn’t done in years but that people would routinely ask if I’d be at. I guess I mention this because since the pandemic lockdowns I feel like I isolated myself from the public eye in a way, and yet there are people all the time reminding me that they remember me and are even waiting to see what I’ve got going on next.

I initially thought I would scheme all this stuff into being and be able to promo it online back to back with vending IRL this past December, as if that’s all I do with my time and don’t also work a demanding full-time job, but the lessons and constrictions at this era of my life dictate that I do things little by little when I can and not when I think they should be done (i.e. I physically cannot handle burning myself out anymore, the recuperation grows longer and longer etc etc etc).

This is all to say, here’s some new and updated sticker designs, please enjoy.

buy stickers for cyborgs

February 4, 2024
Cyborg Memoirs 2012~2019: An exercise in printing cyberspace

it started as a “tumblr archive zine” and then…

I published another book.

something that began as a tumblr archive zine

this is a tome about anger and angst

what started as a 2023 transiting mars in gemini x venus in leo reflection for the fools and ghouls the youngsters and the lurkers

culture shock – on feeling played and salty

what’s considered rude and classy – on talking shit and sour grapes

what a friend once referred to as my whiteness studies

a sci-fi writer’s research chronicle

and the intense identity politicking times where so many webs of things were perceived and learned and discoursed and discussed and flaunted and played with quickly rapidly hyperly

when the image based internet overtook the text based one, and a new visual level of identity and experience based political discourse online seemed to take offfffffff

buy a copy

This was a project I intended to bust out quick like an errand, something to encapsulate all these essays and rants and reposts from my tumblr, materialize them on paper before too much time passed and another internet archive vanished to censorship or bankruptcy or new owners trashing the place.

It took me like, months and maybe a couple years to get this thing from notes to a printed book. Looking thru one’s own archive and choosing what to print and in what order and tapestry takes time, I chronically forget this. And I knew I needed to give the collection context. And I work too much. And it just took time.

So putting this book together taught me to embrace work at a Saturnian pace. In a Saturn-ruled profection year—for my astro heads—I made myself plans. Set deadlines and produced things. Got into my planner shit. Got myself pharmaceutically juiced a few months ago and so I’m feeling capable, reflecting on what is and what was. I’m sitting. The run-away is reintegrating. Come together. We’re cyberpunk. Rising inflection?

Cyborg Memoirs has been my domain name since 2003, and before that was the title of maaaaaany mid and late 90s internet free-bandwidth diary sites. In all this time of making bags and zines and books and planners and stickers and all this shit, I don’t think I used the CM name for any of it. I don’t know why, I kept making new titles instead, making separate entities. I used literary pen names and legible monikers for “real life” projects. Maybe I was keeping that name safe in cyberspace. I mean, Cyborg Memoirs has always had my poetry and prose and fanfiction and smut and ranting on it, has always been a network and a node, MY CYBER SPACE. It’s where I’ve hosted my stories, long before and since becoming an awarded artist and published sci-fi author official—I started doing this shit in 1995!!!! I was a pre-teen. I’ve spoken about this before, right?

For those of us who started out on the 1990s internet, I think it’s important to chronicle our experiences of those times, as well as the ones that followed. Nostalgia, sure. But for me, it’s remembering what life felt like—————the orientation of the senses, what the machine interface design and flow was like, who were the other people there and why, how big and how small and ethereal and almost taboo it was to be “online”, and the promises vs the realities vs the academic accounts and state legislation and commerce that followed—————before the amazon web services driven spectacle of internet shopping slash social media conglomeration infoflood livestream genocide times of today. In those nascent years online, what were we physically going through.(i don’t trust words can express it all either)

Record scratch—This book is the first time I’ve ever physically printed anything under the name Cyborg Memoirs. I think now it’s time. It contains a handful of interviews and a whole lotta posts from an era of tumblr begun nearly a decade ago. As part of my Cyborg Memoirs Revival plan, it heralds the closing of a chapter and the beginning of a new one. Cross the threshold for the imperial calendar year 2024 and dissolve the primacy of a singular pen name for a network handle instead. Recount some of what was and we enter what is.

As usual, I did layout design and copyediting of my own work, asked a few homies for feedback throughout the process, and got the books printed at my faves, 48hrbooks.com out in Ohio.

5 color pages

124 pages total

pub date: NOV 2023

interviews
essays
rants
reposts
“non-fiction”

wholesale OK!

4FREE PDF OTW

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trans memoir internet race philly working class

another excerpt 4 U below

what was tumblr like?

It took me till 2023 to realize that I was a diarist as much as a sci-fi smut writer. I was taking a look back on the past ten years, finding myself in an altered reality from December 2019, before the pandemic. Some people made hella art during the covid-19 lockdown times, but I grew angry and distracted and secluded, and MOST OF ALL ― GRIEVOUS.

Writers of dystopian tales don’t particularly enjoy seeing foretold horrors come to fruition. I had been writing my book manuscript when lockdown hit and to date haven’t finished it. So much in my life was severed from its previous trajectory, as I’m sure you may have experienced for yourself.
So I have been reviewing what it was I was on about in the years fresh after Occupy Wall Street and into the Trump era. This era began in the midst of my Saturn return and encompassed my time as a very minor queer internet celebrity, primarily cemented in the nascent Tumblr networks of 2013~2016… Basically until Trump was elected and the anti sex worker SESTA/FOSTA bills were passed, completely shuttering longtime bastions of the internet and ushering in an era of content censorship and surveillance on every fucking digital platform.

I experienced my time on Tumblr as delicious learning, vortex, discourse, new lingering and underground aesthetics finally having a place to go hard. No other websites or platforms up till then allowed you to upload so many free images, text, links, all in a mish-mash tableaux that you could then customize the appearance of. You didn’t need to know a LICK of code. Me, a web 1.0 denizen original surfer of the web head, took to it like a fish to water.

Tumblr was the place I felt like I finally got visual confirmation of the overlaps between chronically online anime nerds, city kids, club kids, fashion queers, rural freaks, disabled hotties, gender non-conforming thinkers of all stripes (shout out GHE20G0TH1K, House of Ladosha, howtobeafuckinglady, Mark Aguhar RIP, etc etc etc)…liiiike the aesthetics of people’s ~/archive page!!! The usernames! The endless pagination scroll of mental visual audio stimulation, the hella fucking intellectual long reading to be had and riffed on, a rigorous and jaunty education better than college. You could slap it (being anything) all together, and a CORPUS would emerge that richly textured an individual’s inner worlds OUTWARD into something perceptible beyond the mortal flesh. Not to mention the untold creative scenes and artistic and political movements that emanated from our glass screens and into the streets.

So it was different than its predecessor LiveJournal, where I dwelled throughout the 00s, for going beyond the boundaries (and bandwidth limitations) of text-only posts and images one had to hard-code into the not-rich-text editor (which one had to also first host on 3rd party sites like imgur or flickr).

It was different. A riveting time, before the turn of clandestine world events and warmonger strategies churned us towards this current era of once-obscure-now-proliferating-fascism, the Internet-as-censored-marketplace and online-presence-as-personal-brand-broadcast, of “please upload a picture of your government issued ID to verify your identity”, of one-sided FOLLOWING (akin to how “citizens” became “consumers” and “users”, online we used to have FRIENDS).

What a timeline. After Tumblr made its disastrous purge of “adult content” in 2018, which in the SESTA/FOSTA name of ‘protecting the children’ went so far as removing posts of anything vaguely erotic or just gay (transgirls wearing clothes, fat queers in crop tops having their back rolls somehow flagged as nudity) and censoring images of shit like Renaissance nudes (imagine you’re a niche art history tumblr), so many people left and never posted again or left and then came back a few years later (after some of the censorship lightened up) to make a couple more posts, only to realize that the old networks had been dried up.

This volume is but a paltry slice of that time, maybe not even a sliver. Tumblr called itself a microblogging platform, but it was certainly a glorious anonymous rhizomatic cyberspace, perhaps the last one that someone of my generation would freely enjoy.

May we all find the welcome places to explore ourselves and be.

start: 21 september 2023

end: 22 november 2023

January 8, 2024
Bookmarked

“This pandemic blows.”

I’ve been saying this as a sign off or greeting in many of my short communications lately.

Well—lemme get to the news part of this: All orders of my short story collection Transitional Times Transitional Body will now come with this handsome bookmark, designed for the new year and 4th printing of the book.

Four printings? Wow sounds like a lot. Mmm. As with Metropolarity’s Style of Attack Report, each print run has numbered somewhere between 125–150 books per, as that is the limit of what I have been able to afford & realistically pay off—promoting, selling, packing, and distributing everything out of my residence. With Metropolarity, we’ve sold over 1000 copies. With my book, about 300 to date. The first zine printing was 50 or 75-count. I forget.

Any time I get myself back into the game of getting material goods made for selling, I start daydreaming about shit like owning and operating a press of some kind. Philly’s own Harriet’s Bookshop was started in part with funding from winning a Leeway award (from what I understand). I too won a Leeway award some years ago at this point, so when I heard that about Harriet’s I was like damn what am I doing? I could INVEST! When I went to pick up my bookmarks from Fireball Press over by Frankford and Lehigh aves, I stared into their lobby space and through the door that opened to their production floor. So much equipment. So much “start-up capital” needed. The self-defeating thoughts flood in.

The pandemic short-circuited my 2020, a year I was to dedicate to completing the goddamn first draft of my long-in-the-making All That’s Left novel. I left my job, I had moved in with my partner to lessen expenses, I was all set. At the end of January 2021, I’m back at my old job, my partner and I broke up but still live together, and maybe I’m halfway there on my draft still. Visions of fatalistic futures have mired my motivation to produce work. It’s been rough. I’m still writing, though. The work will get done. What will the world be like when it’s ready? I’m not sure.

Until then, you are more than welcome to indulge me by purchasing a book for yourself or a loved one.

Tales from the crossroads of desire, hope, and despair. A sci-fi survivor memoir that has no princes, cops, or chosen people, that does not promote the colony or romanticize the empire. The short stories in this freshly expanded collection make apt companions for travelers, underworlders, heartbroken hope seekers, and of course fellow cyborgs.

Hope you are faring well out there. This pandemic blows.

January 31, 2021
Key Concepts of Message Perception + Futurism & Languages of Manipulation

In the summer of 2020 I put together two zines (PDFs & audio below) concerned with discerning propaganda and strengthening media literacy skills ~ how to call bullshit and pick apart media messages by peeping how and why they’re made, in other words. The impetus must’ve been from watching the media spin spin spin what was happening during the uprisings of June 2020.

you have to forge yourself into a weapon

I first wrote this as a personal spell, then a shared spell, then we published it in Metropolarity’s STYLE OF ATTACK REPORT (which is again down to the last 8-10 copies—would anyone miss it if we didn’t reprint? it can’t go out of print just yet can it?).

Forging oneself into a weapon is for the purpose of wielding yourself skillfully.

“[It] occurs to me that when something of great volume is forced through a small opening it generates great pressure—and that pressure creates force, and force is power. I’m reminded of the scene from DUNE where the Fremen learn the Weirding Way—that their focused voices have the power to shatter stone. I can understand why you would be filled with rage at this deplorable world. I hope that you can focus that anger through your powerful voice and shatter something as hard and seemingly impenetrable as stone. I’ll protect my eyes and laugh like a fool.”

My man wrote this to me in 2013, in a letter made of 3.5×5.5 index cards contained with a binder clip. I thought it was so romantic. Later, he compared my beauty to a sword.

And how are swords made? We may share a popular image of a man bent over a raw glowing blade, hammering away, tempering it through alchemical process. The material is combined, melted, cooled, heated, folded and then battered down in on itself, blow after cadenced blow.

Understand that as you wield yourself, you are also the one who forges. The Wielder, the Forger, the Weapon. Or the Tool, if you prefer. (There’s a lil holy trinity for you to meditate on.) With the experience material in their body, the Forger full of discipline and dedication, tempers the amorphous into something clearly shaped, clearly defined. Shape Change, Olamina commanded.

On to the zines.

Key Concepts of Message Perception

Download READING PDF
Download BOOKLET PDF (2 sheets of paper)
and
Listen to its HOW-TO-USE AUDIO OVERVIEW (30 min)

<a href="https://cyborgmemoirs.bandcamp.com/album/key-concepts-of-message-perception">Key Concepts of Message Perception by M Téllez</a>

Some weeks ago I taught a workshop called PROP WERX:

Learn to read between the lines, hear what’s not said & more in this propaganda dissection workshop. We’ll pick apart ads, movies, headlines, conversations, and other content with a simple repeatable technique.

The audio is a walk-through and brief discussion of the techniques in the zine and how to use them. The audio is meant to supplement the zine itself. View the zine as images below, or download PDF versions via the Dropbox above(dismiss any account creation prompts, no account required).

Futurism & Languages of Manipulation

Download READING PDF
Download BOOKLET PDF (8 sheets of paper)
or
Listen to THE SPEECH ITSELF (45 min)

The other day Philly writer, beat maker, and area podcast celebrity John Morrison tweeted this to the timeline

And I read through that whole thread and retweeted its morsels to my own timeline, and then I was like damn I need to read the whole thing, a transcription of Murray Bookchin’s 1978 speech made at the Toward Tomorrow (renewable energy) Fair in Amherst, MA. And at the bottom of the whole article was a comment from a reader saying, the transcription was good but the original speech had a lot of interesting contextual points otherwise left out. So I listened to that next. And from there I decided I would transcribe the missing parts of the speech, combine it with the Uneven Earth one, and make a free zine out of the whole thing cause I liked it so damn much.

I fuck with this speech. Here is the printable. I added food for thought exercises at the end.

What is futurism? Futurism is the present as it exists today, projected, one hundred years from now. That’s what futurism is. If you have a population of X billions of people, how are you going to have food, how are you going to do this… nothing has changed. All they do is they make everything either bigger, or they change the size—you’ll live in thirty story buildings, you’ll live in sixty-story buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright was going to build an office building that was one mile high. That was futurism.

The simple fact is, I just don’t believe that we have to extend the present into the future. We have to change the present so that the future looks very, very different from what it is today. This is a terribly important notion to convey. So a lot of people are walking around today who sound very idealistic. And what do they want to do? They want multinational corporations to become multi-cosmic corporations [laughter from the audience]—literally!

They want to bring them up in space, they want to colonize the Moon, they can’t wait to go to Jupiter, much less Mars. They’re all very busy, they’re coming around, they even have long hair and they even have beards, and they come around and they say ‘Oh, I can’t wait to get into my first space shuttle!’—that is the future.

This is regarded as ecology and it’s not ecology. It’s futurism! It’s what Exxon wants to do. It’s what Chase Manhattan wants to do. It’s what all the corporations want to do. But it is not utopia, it is pure futurism. It is the present extended into the future.

A mass society, and how do we keep in touch with each other? We don’t even have to look at each other. We’ll look at television screens. I’ll press a button, I’ll see you on the television screen, you’ll be on Mars, for all I know, and we’ll have a wonderful conversation with each other, and we’ll say ‘Gee whiz! We’ve got an alternate technology!’ The point is it isn’t a liberatory technology.

This content was originally shared as an edition of my newsletter.

August 29, 2020
Transitional Times Transitional Body: Expanded

My first order of business for 2020 was to redesign and expand my 2019 short story collection, which started out as a zine and quickly became a 125-count book that sold out by the end of the year. I changed the dimensions, margins, cover color, header fonts, finessed the images to render a bit better in black and white, and wham. Here we have it:

Tales from the crossroads of desire, hope, and despair. A sci-fi survivor memoir that has no princes, cops, or chosen people, that does not promote the colony or romanticize the empire. The short stories in this freshly expanded collection make apt companions for travelers, underworlders, heartbroken hope seekers, and of course fellow cyborgs.

Once a zine, now a book with 6 stories:
• Heat Death of Western Human Arrogance
• About A Woman and A Kid
• Adolescence
• The Romance of the Colony
• Monk’s Dream
• Real Work You Deserve

Set in OpenDyslexic typeface.

106 pages.

3rd edition for 2020.
ISBN: 978-0-9981138-3-8
Ships media mail.

Bulk orders (10 copies) available. US only. Use Contact Form to inquire.

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February 21, 2020