"And all this time…"

A christening for the thresholds we have now crossed.

Greetings dear reader. It’s Monk, your guide, storyteller, 3-of-Hearts/Piccolo Daimou raising kid Gohan, stoic Philadelphia cyborg. How you doin??

Please enjoy this audio edition of the newsletter. It’s different from the ones before, in that it’s not a transcription of what you are reading here now. You can find the accompanying text for this edition right here.

I haven’t been gathering lately, and I don’t want to synthesize reality. I’ve already done a lot of that, to the extent that I created the surrogate experience that awaits you in this audio newsletter.

So many things have happened, as we all can surely agree on. I hope everyone is well underway in tempering their abilities to discern the messages being delivered all around us. There are no neutral messages. Remember—people create messages, for a purpose, and how and why is it that they find their way to you?

a few things

I was published in natbrut’s 14th issue this past autumn. Shout out to Tony Wei Ling and editing crew for inviting/making space for this work of mine.

I went back to my old job and that is sort of why you didn’t hear from me till now.

I updated the typography on my teenaged URL, cyborg memoirs. Do you like it? What do you think?

There is an ~incrediblee~ online typography guidebook, Practical Typography, designed for the browser, by a very fastidious typographer and programmer. The book includes valuable info like which keyboard shortcuts can generate characters that exist but don’t have dedicated keys (like ellipses […] and em-dashes [—]), and other shit like some old-fashioned steadfast rules on laying out type, and just even what typography is for as a tool. I love it. A Gemini/Mercury dominant bitch loves it. Check it out. Shout out to Petra for linking me.

A friend is fundraising for Prison Health News, which for many incarcerated people is their only source of health information right now.

Algorithms from get-rich-quick venture capitalists and grifter start-ups are—surprise—making struggling people’s lives worse, and here is an article Cutty sent me on just some of how this is happening. This article in particular hits bc it made me go ohh yeah wow that random -66 point hit on my credit score, that was some algorithm shit.

Not until they were standing in the courtroom in the middle of a hearing did the witness representing the state reveal that the government had just adopted a new algorithm. The witness, a nurse, couldn’t explain anything about it. “Of course not—they bought it off the shelf,” Gilman says. “She’s a nurse, not a computer scientist. She couldn’t answer what factors go into it. How is it weighted? What are the outcomes that you’re looking for? So there I am with my student attorney, who’s in my clinic with me, and it’s like, ‘Oh, am I going to cross-examine an algorithm?’”

This may seem like “more bad news” but baby… It’s time to get real. Love you.

Now, when you’re done with my audio, put on this incredible covers edition of Panorama Heaven, one of the many nice radio shows on NTS. The show has a mind-blowingly good 80s bossa Brazilian cover of Human Nature, and I guess…with the way the world is turning, I have a better appreciation of pure 80s vibes.

So. Thanks for being here still. It’s almost 5am and I have been up for hours working on getting this damn audio finished, and omg I have work in the morning.

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If you want to be put on to mutual aid & reparation efforts in Philly, healers of different modalities, and maybe see my face from time to time, you can follow my stories on IG @cyborgmemoirs.

If you also want a taste of half the wild shit I’m reading about, follow me on Twitter @cyborgmemoirs

If you want to hang out on a Holodeck Resort discord server I tend, drop me a line.

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Please take care of yourself. Till next time,

Monk@}-}-;——-

Get full access to CYBORG MEMOIRS at cyborgmemoirs.substack.com/subscribe