Kyle Brickman

@kylebrickman.bsky.social

62 Followers 64 Following

UI Engineer at Netflix (all opinions are mine) out of Brentwood, CA. Has far too much Lego and knows far too much about Star Trek.

A photo of the moon, shot artistically, where it appears to be on the cusp of the blue atmosphere against the black of space. There are clouds below. Or, it is all a conspiracy theory fueled by the collective silence of millions. Whichever is easier to believe.
A screenshot of the AT&T customer support chat, which wouldn’t have been possible before designers invented rounded corners during Web 2.0. I ask the following question: “The phone associated with [OMITTED] has been broken beyond repair. I am trying to set up an eSIM for that number on the replacement phone. However, it is texting a verification code to the broken phone.” The response from Andi, AT&T’s AI assistant, is prefaced with an ominous “Some responses may be generated by AI.” warning. It proceeds to point me to their “battery and power help page”, offer me a link to “improve the battery life of [my] device”, and suggests to start an insurance claim for a “damaged or defective battery” if I’m covered by “AT&T Protect Advantage”, which sounds like a scam antimalware malware from 2004. It concludes by reminding me that Apple no longer ships chargers with their devices, but you can buy one from AT&T.
A painting of everyone’s favorite purple gumdrop, Grimace, frolicking next to a waterfall and stream, balancing four McDonald’s cups on a hand held out like a T-Rex. He’s kind of doing a back-kick with one leg. Behind him is an Apple Pie Tree, deciduous, bearing seven apple pies as fruit (though, curiously, each apple pie also appears to be attached to a very round apple, instead of the apples being separate from the pies like many depictions of the handsome creatures). Also, the Apple Pie Tree is clearly checking out Grimace’s ass, Grimace clearly knows it, and Grimace clearly likes it.
Ice-T is interrogating some rando in a room made of cinder blocks and a panel with chicken wire or something on it, and there’s a blond woman behind him who is wearing a flannel shirt but the sleeves are all bunched up below her elbows because fashion. There’s a caption poorly positioned over a black box that covers the real caption, and it uses the Courier font so that it looks like a caption, and it says “SNORTING BEANIE BABY BEADS AND GLUE, KIDS ARE CALLING IT “A MEGA BUMP OF FLOAM.””
A banner ad showing an animated monkey going back and forth across the screen. A red boxing glove is shown (“back in the day” it moved with your mouse pointer). Text on the screen compels you to “punch the monkey and win a free iPod”.
An advertisement in PDX, one of a few things in Portland that is definitively better than its Seattle equivalent, but still inexplicably has a chip on its shoulder. The advertisement is for Tillamook dairy products, suggesting that I can “sign up for email for a chance to: win a year of free Tillamook® products.” Also, the picture depicts the famous green PDX carpet, but not THE famous green PDX carpet, which they have been studiously removing due to the inexorable march of time (and, uh, travelers I guess) - it still exists as a rug beneath the grand piano very near where this picture was taken, at the Tillamook stand.
A motion-blurred, noisy, sepia-ish frame from the music video of 2005 Nickelback “classic” Photograph. You probably know the one. Chad Kroeger (“Chad”) holds up a terrible photograph of himself and someone else in the shittiest frame a production assistant could find at Goodwill, the sort of photograph you’d probably never frame. Chad (the one holding the photograph, not the one in the photograph) is in his early 30s, but dressed like he’s failing out of his freshman year of college because he parties too much.
A Hewlett-Packard Pavilion PC case from ~2000, featuring the “fuck it here’s some translucent plastic since everyone loves iMacs” and “we’ve put a custom round bubble plastic button over the optical and floppy drive buttons so that you’ll never be able to replace them successfully” design aesthetic of the time. A badge proudly declares that it was designed for Windows Me, and includes a Pentium III processor. The case is also covered in stickers declaring its features and functionality like it’s a store display unit but it almost certainly came out of a factory-sealed box looking like this. Apparently “record[ing] your own music CD’s” is “Fun and Easy!”, and kids today will never know how much that sentence is a lie. Also if I worked on this particular one there’s probably trace DNA from when it cut the back of my hand open or something.
Phoebe Buffet saying, “Well if you must know, I have written fourteen books, and as I am the only one who has read them, I can tell you that they have all been very well received.”
A photograph of a screen displaying the bottom of a page on GitHub. The site footer includes all the usual nonsense that is Very Important To Legal, and a link to their discussion forums that probably demonstrated a 0.1% lift in Qualified Engagement or some other metric. Preceding all of that nonsense is what they call, excitedly, a “ProTip!”, which suggests “Exclude your own issues with -author:kbrickman.” Oh, and if you visit my GitHub I think you’ll see one random repo for something back when I worked at LinkedIn and nothing else because I’m not one of those cool people who has the mental fortitude to code *outside* of work, I’m too busy “falling asleep on the couch” or “talking to cats like they are people.”
A screenshot from the Apple Mail app, showing a verified email domain of rs.email.nextdoor.com, and my name as the recipient. The text of the email opens with Nextdoor’s modern and boring logo, an eraser-sized picture that seems to depict a middle aged couple at the beach but that’s so tiny that I doubt it will cause an issue, and the greeting “Hello Mark and Heidi,” when I am notably not named “Mark” nor “Heidi”. It then goes on to talk about how they are updating all their legal nonsense that probably says you owe them your child ala Rumplestiltskin if they could get away with it, effective January 1, 2026. Not pictured? Mark and Heidi’s PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS named as the “intended recipient” in the footer.
A screenshot of a LinkedIn message. It has redactions because bots were at least LESS common back then and I don’t want to risk potentially outing a human since who knows what their circumstances were and are and besides the point is to call out LinkedIn not someone who may just be trying to exist in our capitalist hellscape. The message reads: Hi Kyle! I help people connect with their authentic self so they can have a fulfilling sex life. I saw your profile and thought I'd reach out to learn more about you. Are you open to connecting here in messenger around tantra and intimacy? Cheers, REDACTED
A screenshot of an email from the Apple Store about an order change being successful. Inexplicably for one of the most brand-forward companies in existence, the email is entirely plaintext and in a monospace font. The text of the email reads: “Apple Store Order Change Order Number: [REDACTED] Hello Kyle Brickman, Thank you for shopping at the Apple Online Store. Your order was successfully updated and your changes are reflected below. If you requested additional changes, you will receive a separate email confirmation for each. To check the current status of your order, please visit our Order Status website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus. Thank you for shopping with Apple. The Apple Store Team”
A photo of my Apple Watch on my left wrist. On the screen is a a notification titled “November Challenge”, followed by the description. “Kyle, close your Exercise Ring in 1 day and earn this award. You’ve got this.” Fucking ice cold, Apple.
A photograph of a bag of MUNCHOS brand potato “crisps”, which are like Pringles but in bag form and one of those products that the manufacturer must make for mere pennies since they print the price on the bag in big bold text. Next to it is a carefully-anonymized (important since I am clearly keeping my identity on here a big secret) receipt from FoodMaxx, saying that I purchased “MUNCHO POT CRISPS” for $2.79.
A screenshot of the post being quoted, which quoted a different post, in which @radleybalko.bsky.social says “Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.”, but the post _it_ quotes is omitted. The horror it cites is Florida obliterating child vaccination requirements, but it could be anything! COVID, SNAP, immigration, bodily autonomy, renewable energy, retirement, labor rights, Earth being a geoid. Basically anything good.
A screenshot of an email from LinkedIn.com, a social network that is ostensibly for hosting your resume, but has somehow become a place where financial advisors slide into your DMs and people post the most unhinged hyper-capitalist bootlicking imaginable. Anyway, the subject is “Senior User Interface Engineer job trends from the past week.” Apparently two such roles were hired in an indictment of current US economic policies and an asinine fixation on trying to replace human beings with fancy autocomplete. Then the title “Companies hiring for your role”, followed by “Netflix”, which on a casual read suggests that I have been replaced. That Is, as they say, The Joke. “Companies hiring for roles like yours” would be better in basically every way, but that would wrap even on the giant iPhone screens the designer of this email is probably targeting, so gotta reduce the character count there. As far as I know, Netflix is still enduring my bullshit.
We join Kelvin-style Chekov (RIP Anton Yelchin) during an emergency already in progress as he rushes through Engineering, which looks suspiciously like a Budweiser bottling plant. The subtitle reads “everything is fucked and also something is on fire”, which probably could have been an actual line in early Discovery seasons, let’s be honest.
A gif of Chanandler Bong from F*R*I*E*N*D*S saying “Now there’s two reasons,” sassily, as Chandler does. In the episode, he said this in response to Joey lamenting that Chandler closing his banking account will mean they will no longer be “bank buddies”. In the context of this quote post, it suggests there is now another reason to vote for Mamdani, but really, there are so many good reasons to vote for Mamdani.
A scene from The Big Lebowski, where The Dude (Jeff Bridges) sits casually in a brightly lit bowling alley, his hands folded behind his head, saying “Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Donny (Steve Buscemi) looks on from behind, exuding raw sex appeal. Walter (John Goodman) sits to the side with his hands in his lap, NOT holding a gun as he appears in most memes.
A mostly-black image, with mysterious characters and the text “View all soups” peeking through in staticky snow. (Also I wanted to use Zalgo text but I wasn’t sure if that would just obliterate Bluesky and/or be awful for screen readers)
A photo of a (slightly dusty) 10246 Detective’s Office modular building, focusing on the main upper floor of the building, a “POOL” neon sign reflected on the window labeled “ACE BRICKMAN PRIVATE DETECTIVE.”
An image of the East Wing of the LEGO White House, a gaping hole cut into the side of the building, pieces strewn in front of it.
A photo of a guy holding the LEGO White House over a millennial greige floor viewed from the West Wing. In the background, the East Wing is on the floor, shattered and broken after having fallen.
A screenshot of the SimCity 2000 transit advisor, exclaiming in all caps, “YOU CAN’T CUT BACK ON RETICULATING SPLINES! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!”
A screenshot of the iOS status bar and top navigation of the Phone app. It depicts a Filter button with a blue notification icon, claiming that there are three buried treasures inside.
Barclay sitting in his genius throne after it has become even smarter. This means it looks like he’s in a Laser Tag arena with black lights and fluorescent paint and a laser shooting into his head. The chair also gets a lot of blinking lights, and the quilted fabric of the seat really stands out for some reason.
A screenshot of my work fixing someone’s laptop. A file deletion dialog, the Services panel, and Task Manager are running. Notable highlights include an estimate of 12 hours to delete 4.27GB worth of data, the deletion process taking more than a quarter of the system’s resources between the COM surrogate and Windows Explorer, the BYOD enterprise security agent using more than half a gigabyte of RAM and Microsoft Teams being one of the top five processes for memory usage, though somehow being topped by Windows’ WIDGET ENGINE.
A photograph of a Lego guy wearing a cactus costume, attached to a keychain. He seems very happy. He is missing his legs and left arm.
An image macro (“meme” to those born after 1992 or so) featuring a Sears Portrait Studio style picture of Quark. The text reads “CAPITALISM IS WORKING AS DESIGN AND IT NEEDS TO BE CHERISHED”.
An overly-compressed image with a McDonalds red background, yellow text in a Legally Distinct From Comic Sans typeface stating “corporate brand identity is my passion”, right-aligned in the text box but left-aligned to the image and wrapping after “brand” and “identity”, and a further overly-compressed illustration of ca. 2000 Ronald McDonald with a white background.
It is An Art. It sort of looks like a vase, but is not functional as such due to a lack of a hole to put flowers in. It’s sort of hourglass-shaped, with the bottom thicker than the top, and it all comes to a point, that’s flat, at the top. There’s teal link-looking lines on it that look suspiciously like the An Art from the quote post. It’s also very prominently placed in its own little corner with a dedicated quarter-round end table made with 00’s chic veneer and a ceiling spotlight.
A bot named Maria, who follows 3400 people and has incredibly generic life-laugh-love style platitudes in its header. Its most recent post, pictures of a panini press sandwich. Then, a fitness influencer style mirror photo in a gym. That’s followed by pictures of the ostensible Maria using a treadmill. And finally, a repost of a news article titled “Three Dead, One Injured In Early Morning Fiery Cybertruck Crash In Piedmont”.
A photograph of a hotel desk. From left to right, a phone, a placard telling people not to smoke or vape tobacco or the devil’s lettuce, a pad of paper and pen branded with the hotel’s logo, the base of a lamp with a toggle switch and two inevitably-loose plugs, an envelope suggesting a tip for housekeeping instead of paying a living wage, and a mysterious laminated piece of paper…
Gravis details alternative software for the so-1999-is-the-year-of-Desktop-Linux-it-hurts Empeg car MP3 player. Right clicking on a track reveals Open, Cut, Copy, Paste, and Deep Paste, an action with results I can likely surmise based on being a software engineer but named like an eldritch warning.
A screenshot of an email in the iOS Mail application from LinkedIn, to me (Kyle Brickman). The subject line is “Kyle, follow Jordan Peterson - Co-Founder at Peterson Academy” the body shows the LinkedIn logo, my own face in case I forgot who I was, the title “Kyle, add interesting content to your feed. Here are a few recommendations to get started.” Following that is a picture of a man who only eats beef and salt, the name “Jordan Peterson”, the title “Professor Emeritus of Psychology at University of Toronto and Co-Founder of…”, a counter indicating there are 629,477 people (let’s be honest, mostly men) inexplicably needing advice to clean their rooms, and a Follow button that will NOT be tapped. I used to work for LinkedIn!
King of good hair days Christopher Pike is rolling up, wearing a formal green tunic and holding a tray of exotic looking hors d’oeuvres. As he approaches the camera, his warm smile is replaced by a look of quiet, creeping dread. He veers off sharply, as they don’t pay him enough for this. (Do they pay him at all? It’s uncertain! There’s plenty of references to Federation credits even into the 24th century, albeit outnumbered by the references to not needing money anymore. And they’re pretty clearly in the post-scarcity swing of things. Maybe they just give folks credits so that they can make deals with Cyrano Jones for tribbles or whatever)
A cropped screenshot of the new menu bar for iPadOS 26 in the Settings app. Clicking the app name results in a menu where the only option shows the settings gear icon and the label “Settings Settings…”. Pleasantly, it has a keyboard shortcut of “⌘,” which seems to work even when the menu is not visible and works in third-party apps with settings panels. In this case, it just drops you to the Apps pane in Settings, which I guess makes about as much sense as it could.
A meme of Buster from PBS’s Arthur with a thousand mile stare, as though he’s seen God and found Him wanting. The top text says “YOU REALLY THINK SOMEONE WOULD DO THAT?” in the Internet’s font, Impact Bold in white with black drop shadows. The bottom text says “JUST GO IN THE DOUGHNUT CORPORATION OF AMERICA’s “36 DELIGHTFUL RECIPES” AND TELL LIES”
A dialogue screenshot from the video game Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity. It features a pixel art drawing of Dr. Beverly Crusher, and the text “You have died of dysentery.” Did this screenshot actually occur in the game, or was it made on @foone.bsky.social’s deathgenerator.com? The world may never know.
A screenshot of one of the two best games released for the Nintendo 64, Mario Mart 64 (the other is Goldeneye, fight me you nerds). It shows the race introduction for Flower Cup’s Choco Mountain, and includes some rainbow text stating it as such. The players are lined up, ready to race, and there’s like eight brown polygons total on the screen and fog like film noir San Francisco. The racers, from last to first, appear to be Bowser, Yoshi, Donkey Kong (before he looked weird like on the Switch 2), Wario, Peach, Mario, Toad, and Luigi, but it’s hard to tell since their sprites are increasingly compressed into dots on the horizon, which is close due to the aforementioned fog.
Roast Beef of classic webcomic Achewood, laying in bed, seemingly in the dark, looking concerned. There’s a bubble over his head but without the little pointy tail thing for speech, so maybe it’s a thought? Anyway, the bubble reads “Oh no it’s today”.
A photograph of An Art. Specifically, it is a vertical arrangement of twelve linked teal loops. The loops are kind of lumpy/melty/misshapen, like you described that Dali painting to someone who had only ever experienced corporate hotel wall art. It is the color teal that you might have seen on the upholstery of a McDonalds or Taco Bell bench seat in 1993. Lest you think they are unique, each room has the exact same An Art, though some rooms orient them horizontally instead of vertically!
The classic “I;m thinking about thos Beans” meme, updated to utilize profile information from Saruman the White.
A GIF that I inexplicably had to convert to an MP4 to upload to Bluesky, in which Kirk is explaining to Saavik that starships have prefix codes so that if they are overtaken by an enemy who is learning how to operate the thing by yelling at Microsoft Clippy, their orders can be countermanded since they won’t know to rotate the codes.
A video depicting the Gulf of Mexico in Apple Maps, erroneously labeled as the Gulf of America by a company worth 3.5 trillion dollars that’s afraid of a man who can’t profitably operate a casino. A pin is dropped, the “Report Something Missing” feature is triggered, and “Apple’s Spine” is entered and submitted.
A square picture of Luigi Mario, wearing a green hat and shirt and blue overalls. His hat has a blue “L” on it. The image is drawn in a “Nintendo has yet to establish a formal style guide for illustrating its characters” style. He had a look on his face like he’s explaining the most basic shot in the world. To you.
In the foreground, it’s me, wearing a forest green tablecloth pattern shirt, with an unfortunate-but-better-than-nothing-trust-me beard and hair pulled back into a ponytail that’s cascading over one shoulder. Against my other shoulder is Moxie, who managed to fall asleep being held like she is an award-winning loaf of sourdough or something. Behind me is Lego, as is the case in most of my house.
A screenshot of my Apple Music Replay ‘24, revealing that the artist I listened to most every month of the year was the primary composer of the SimCity 3000 soundtrack, Jerry Martin. It also repeats his artist image eleven times, and his image is inexplicably the cover of the The Sims Hot Date soundtrack. It makes it look like I’m really into The Sims Hot Date (it was OK, I have mixed feelings about it because a romance focused The Sims expansion pack was not really what a desperately lonely nerd needed in high school).
A wide-angle portrait-aspect picture taken inside HomeGoods - for those unfamiliar, it’s like shopping from the garage of a hoarder who exclusively shops from department store endcaps. Anyway, this aisle’s stacked to the brim with wine glass box sets. Hanging from the acoustic tile ceiling is a sign declaring the aisle is devoted to WORKSPACE. (The joke is that one’s job may inspire one to drink! 🤭)
A screenshot of the Genmoji creation screen from the iOS 18.2 beta. “Ox and covered wagon” has been entered into the description box that’s all glowy and trendy and stuff. The screen shows three different emoji-style possibilities. EACH ONE is a half-ox, half-wagon abomination, as though this is the only reality Apple Intelligence can conceive of.
A screenshot of an Apple Health notification, titled “Sleep Goal Update.” The body text reads “In the last four days, you hit your sleep goal three times. Well done.” The background is of the moon, because we love the moon; it is good to us.
It’s a picture of Clippy! He’s kind of sorta-kinda winking at you, the viewer, with one eye. He either seems like he’s suspiciously of you or trying to flirt with you. His speech bubble says “It looks like you’re trying to reroute secondary EPS manifolds to the shields. Would you like help?” There’s a “yes” button and a “no” button.
Miles, a Russian Blue cat, is looking off-camera dramatically. His blue name tag, depicting SPACE, is prominent. Chloe, a gray tabby, is in the background, blurry. Miles is definitely not on Chloe’s Top 8.
A statue of Mothman. It’s silver and shiny, with ragged mothlike wings. Mothman is posed in the middle of what appears to be a town square, crouching slightly, as though he is about to leap into flight. Oh yeah, and he’s got a giant - figuratively and literally - sculpted ass.
A video depicting me trying, and failing, to interact with a standard HTML select element on the MDN web documentation site. The device is an unnamed-for-REASONS 15” automotive touchscreen mounted about six inches from bare dashboard with prominent open-pore wood accents.
A gray carpeted cat tower with sisal accents. There are three “pillars” that each could support a cat, and the center one is atop a small “hut” that a cat can enter. More importantly, there are three cats - one on the topmost tower, one on top of the hut, and one emerging from the hut. Miles is a Russian Blue, and is on top of the tower. He is also a very lazy fellow. His sister Moxie is on top of the hut, and we joke that her hips don’t lie. She is looking down at Chloe, a gray tabby, as she exits the hut, looking vaguely annoyed because Chloe always looks vaguely annoyed.
A timeline PSA on Twitter, stating “VOTE” with stars on the left side and stripes on the right. The following headline text states “Learn how to vote”, with a description “Find out how to register to vote in the United States elections.” The CTA button is labeled “Get started.”
An animated GIF advertising the free download of Microsoft Internet Explorer. It features an icon that looks like a bold blue “e” with a swooshy thing orbiting it, and the logo turning into a spinning globe, before looping back to the “e”. These were commonly used as links to download the browser, and to indicate that the site it appeared upon would work well in the browser.