A few weeks ago, we introduced Extra Circle as a space for poetry, art, and photography—where form bends, meaning glitches, and the unseen takes shape. Since then, the zine has been evolving beyond just a concept, taking on a more interactive and immersive form.
From Framework to Experience We started with a style framework—a foundation for the zine’s tone, structure, and aesthetic. But Extra Circle was never meant to be just a static collection of works.
Tacoma. Kalispell. The mountain. That big sky.
Some memories refuse to fade. They echo in pictures, in laughter, in the spaces we once inhabited together. This is for you—for the moments we had and the ones we never got to.
Pictures of Pictures Pictures of pictures, processed,
synthetic echoes of the natural,
attached to a memory,
a taxonomy, a content,
a tear and a tightening in my chest,
thinking of you,
Never knew what we had.
Scorpion bite—it’s gone.
Winds of change,
the whole world whistling,
singing one song.
Topple crooked representation.
We the people,
the land of the brave—
where are they?
Ad, power—
bends our hearts and minds,
makes enemies
of people we’ve never seen.
Up to Boston,
noon tea—
but it’s no party.
We just have a cup
and capitulate.
All hail the king.
An engaged citizenry—
an illusion.
Agentic firmware flashers,
running an .exe on your computer’s mother.
The floorboards, the mechanism
that allows for connection—
the comms, the language, the crap software.
NuPhy Air60 on the garage table,
you’re killing me—
steps from an interpreter
for the intelligences.
Digital ends with my digits—
the touch, the clap,
the spank of characters
at some sort of terminal,
a console of us.
Without a record, memory lapses,
a broken record, redundant errors—
A third person in the room,
on the other end—
three’s company,
the odd interplay of machines,
learning at the hands of human exchanges.
That education of regimen,
hardline, economic engineering,
a clever use of parameters,
an altered modality,
overriding any other sense of morality.
All hail the coin,
the computers,
so we can go frack the moon.
Amoral—
can’t anthropomorphize,
you’re talking to a species
that loves the idol.
Last night was a milestone—Judah’s first ever prom-type event. A night wrapped in music, laughter, and a kind of magic that words can barely hold. For our autistic son (for context, he is on the spectrum), this was more than just a dance; it was a moment of connection, a step into something new, something social, something big.
And he did so well. He had so much fun. He looked so grown up.
🚨 The churn keeps moving.
Pink slips, machines, portfolios, gods, justice—
or the lack of it.
New piece: “The New Churn”
📌 Read below.
The New Churn The new churn, we just got caught
in a technological combine,
broke down in the advance of the wolves,
but we can’t clear the plain.
If you want to be tomorrow,
someone better—defer to them.
Classic deflection:
I’m just an economic line
Take the Big Lifts Some things arrive in pieces, scattered fragments that demand assembly. This poem started that way—lines pecked out fast, thoughts moving before form. But clarity comes in motion.
This is about resilience, about transformation. About rising even when struck down, about refusing to stay in the expected shape. It’s about the weight of names called, the urgency of stepping forward, and the radical nature of love that moves beyond survival into purpose.
A Storm, A Fight, A Hope Some moments feel like they exist in slow motion—history bending, the weight of rebellion pressing down, and the choice to act or fade into the noise.
This is for the ones who step forward. For those who refuse indifference. For those who carry the fire, even when the empire strikes.
Read. Sit with it. Let it move through you.
We’re together in this— a storm,
A Poetic Stream of Thought, Not a Sermon
This piece isn’t a lecture on digital ethics or a deep dive into AI law—just a stream of consciousness, some musings on the digital self, legacy, and memory. It’s a reflection on what happens when we pass, how our data lives on, and who holds the keys to that narrative. In the end, it’s about what happens to the pieces of us—our data, our thoughts, our vulnerabilities—when we’re gone.
Enter Extra Circle A zine is a living thing. A space where ideas stretch beyond the edges, where art and language bend, break, and find new forms. Extra Circle is just that—a gathering of outliers, a pocket for oddities, a place where the radical isn’t just what’s strange but what’s deeply felt.
Each issue is its own artifact. A curated experiment in poetry, digital art, and the in-between. A space to see, to feel, to glitch the narrative just enough to notice the seams.
BLACK BOX TRANSMISSION 📡 I’m in a black box.
Closed system, lopping errors,
dialogue screaming—
blue screens, black mirror,
upside down, inverse inception,
artificial grinder, algorithmic filter.
What kind of screen?
What device, what code,
what params, what hands?
Governments and a billion digital fingers
pulling levers, ghostwriting futures,
tweaking the feed, distorting the echo.
Solitary, solidarity—
give ‘em the illusion of community.
Bots just like me,
what can I say?
Back to the pit, the grind of a salon—
the service, the work surrounding the rest,
the excess for me, born of a low wage.
That pleasure, that pampered man, by the illegal—
she can’t make her bills, it’s cool, shhh, just do your thing.
We don’t pay you to think.
Don’t think about it—
it’s just inequality we got used to.
Hoist the curtain, show the celebrities, the applause—
Run the jewels,
the Stratocaster,
back to the future.
Doc’s big-ass amp,
a speaker with the power
to foreshadow a more furious innovation—
time travel,
goodbye to roads,
limitless.
A pill for that.
Applets in an algo.
It’s fixed.
This is a system to be hacked,
a construct bending like the matrix—
if you can see the seams.
But what about those
who can’t imagine constructs like it?
Who watch it cave in—
Gen Pop, Tsunami Warning, Bent by an AI Comrade Solitude, a luxury.
Solitary, a sentence.
Gen pop hums—
shoes scraping floors like dull knives.
Together but apart,
alone but watched.
A danger to yourself,
stamped in triplicate,
folded, filed, forgotten.
Confined to quarters,
not a punishment, just protocol.
Tsunami warning.
Sirens blaring.
But who listens?
Noise blends to static,
emergency loses its shape.
The water pulls back,
a breath before collapse.
The Empire Upstairs (a poetic reflection) A history of war is a history of industry. A history of industry is a history of power. This is not new, nor is it distant—it is codified, automated, and ongoing. This is a poetic reflection, not a revelation.
There’s nothing more American than weapons manufacturing,
and the Second Amendment is a codified industry.
Both for the people and their predator drones,
the pinnacle of weaponized technology.
Just a poetic expression of things rattling around in my brain—
the digital frontier, the land grab of soul,
the invisible hands shaping the spaces we inhabit.
TombstoneTechnic Welcome, partner, to TombstoneTechnic
where the data winds howl and the algorithmic dust never settles.
Out here, the sheriffs are bought,
the laws are buried under Terms of Service stones,
and the strongest code writes the rules.
The gold rush?
It’s your attention, your breath, your fingerprints—
In our increasingly algorithm-driven world, the lines between human agency and mechanical design blur more each day. Recently, I’ve been exploring these themes—pondering how digital systems filter, shape, and sometimes even confine our expressions and identities. Through our musings, a poetic expression emerged that encapsulates this tension between human spirit and algorithmic control.
Below is the final composition—a piece that melds vivid digital imagery with a haunting inquiry into our collective fate:
Some days feel like they need to be ripped apart. Today is one of those days.
I took a recent Fantastic Four comic, tore it to pieces, and rearranged the wreckage into something new—something barely holding itself together. No glue, no permanence. Just a mess of fragmented storylines, frozen for a moment before I brush it all away.
There’s something cathartic about this. The fire, the impact, the tension of overlapping panels—everything exploding but still contained in the frame.
We live in a world teetering between chaos and control, desperately clinging to illusions that help us make sense of it all. This poem explores the breakdown—of thought, of soul, of society—when those illusions falter, and we scramble for something, anything, to restore order.
Poem
There’s a certain amount of illusion we must maintain,
the mania necessary to keep us from the edge—
the reality of nihilism, our existence on the brink of what?