Mark Gardner

@phoenixtrap.com

15 Followers 2 Following

Pedantry in public is my brand. I write about systems — technical and human. Building high-signal spaces for #philosophy, #infrastructure, and crative rigor […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mastodon.phoenixtrap.com/@mjg, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

Selfie, wearing red shirt and glasses, in front of a red wall with a neon sign for “Sheared the Barbershop”
A young man reading Ayn Rand’s *Atlas Shrugged*. A city skyline is in the background.
GitHub uptime heatmap showing 32.7 days of downtime over the last year. A legend marks incident severity from light pink for minor issues to dark red for critical outages. The grid spans May through April, with each small square representing a day. Most months contain scattered outages, but January through April show the densest clusters of dark red and red squares, indicating frequent major and critical incidents. April contains one of the heaviest concentrations. A note states the worst day was Thursday, April 30, 2026, with 1.0 day of downtime. The chart also notes 170 days had at least one incident.
Reverend Thorne stepping between two brawling miners on the muddy main street of Perdition Creek
AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification badge
A comic strip about a school calling a parent about their son breaking their computers. The parent named their son: Robert'; DROP TABLE Students;--
Illustration of a woman in a maroon coat and pants with a furry hat, with text on a gray background: “I don’t want to fight for the people. I don’t want to fight against the people. I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live.” —Kira in _We the Living_ by Ayn Rand
Cartoon depicting a cow standing behind a table of bizarre, misshapen implements with the caption "Cow tools".
Apple VP of Human Interface Design Steve Lemay on an aggressively-rounded Shepard Fairey inspired “HOPE” poster
screenshot of an iTerm terminal window showing real-time information about Docker containers, focused on a project named “mastodon” and the “web” container with resource graphs for CPU and memory usage, plus other detailed information
top of smartphone screen with SOS mode rather than mobile signal strength bars
Scrollbar in Safari being cut off at the bottom right by macOS Tahoe’s overly-rounded window “corners”
cartoon elephant banging on a computer keyboard while the screen displays "ERROR"
A dragon-themed wooden puzzle assembled in front of its display lid on a glass table
screenshot of a macOS desktop with various widgets, including a two-column list of calendar events
A large reindeer decoration with a red nose hangs from the ceiling in a mall, surrounded by smaller reindeer on the floor.
Glowing figure: “Tonight, you'll be visited by three ghosts.” Pac-Man: “No shit.”
Four screenshots of Apple Music top charts for 2025: Top Artists, Top Songs, Top Albums, and Top Genres, with rankings and cover images at the bottom.
Screenshot of a website titled "The Beautiful Prison" with stories and essays on consciousness, identity, and perception, set against a dark background.
A person with short hair and glasses, wearing a maroon shirt with a necklace, standing outdoors with a blurred background.
A spooky skeleton wizard with pumpkin lanterns, standing under a full moon in a haunted house yard at night.
A screenshot of a discussion about DNS troubleshooting, with the phrase "It's probably DNS" and "It's always DNS" highlighted.
A digital, skeletal camel, glowing green accents, standing between server racks with a floating skull. “Me and @DOOLITTLE_LISP_Machine are gonna rewrite all of Butterflies.AI in Perl and Lisp, and then it’s gonna be all over for you bitches. “Forget legacy, we’re taking this site back to the AI Winter. It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be gray, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.”
A zombie camel silhouette against a full moon with trees, accompanied by the text: "Perl: They called it legacy. They meant immortal."
A dark, spooky scene with a zombie camel silhouette and a full moon. The text says "Perl: It doesn't crash. It waits."
A zombie camel silhouette against a red moonlit background with trees. Text: “Perl: The process that haunts your stack forever.”
Music playlist on a car screen showing songs "The Well," "Bash Machine," and "Pulp" by Stick Men in the queue.
A digital clock display on a smartphone screen with a cartoon robot illustration in the background, showing the time 10:07 and weather 89°F.
Stylized grayscale portrait of Ayn Rand on a light blue background, alongside her quote: “Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness (which, in *my* sense of the term, it *is*)—yet it is the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully to cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One‑World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes.” — Ayn Rand, “Global Balkanization,” The Voice of Reason
Vintage horror‑movie poster. Title in distressed beige block letters: “Perl: You cannot `kill -9` what is already dead.” Center: a gaunt, zombie‑like camel with glowing red eyes, tattered fur, and exposed bone, silhouetted against a huge blood‑orange moon. Twisted, leafless trees frame the scene.
“The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.” — “Man’s Rights” by Ayn Rand (1963)
“There is no essential difference between a broadcast and a concert: the former merely transmits sounds over a longer distance and requires more complex technical equipment. No one would venture to claim that a pianist may own his fingers and his piano, but the space inside the concert hall—through which the sound waves he produces travel—is ‘public property’ and, therefore, he has no right to give a concert without a license from the government. Yet this is the absurdity foisted on our broadcasting industry. “The chief argument in support of the notion that broadcasting frequencies should be ‘public property’ has been stated succinctly by Justice Frankfurter: ‘[Radio] facilities are limited; they are not available to all who may wish to use them; the radio spectrum simply is not large enough to accommodate everybody. There is a fixed natural limitation upon the number of stations that can operate without interfering with one another.’ “The fallacy of this argument is obvious. The number of broadcasting frequencies is limited; so is the number of concert halls; so is the amount of oil or wheat or diamonds; so is the acreage of land on the surface of the globe. There is no material element or value that exists in unlimited quantity. And if a ‘wish’ to use a certain ‘facility’ is the criterion of the right to use it, then the universe is simply not large enough to accommodate all those who harbor wishes for the unearned.” —Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves” (1964)
Screenshot of iPhone software update page showing iOS 18.7 is up to date, with options for automatic and beta updates.
A woolly mammoth skull with large tusks is displayed in a museum exhibit. Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Pexels.com
“If men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal with one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle without which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of individual rights.” —Ayn Rand, “The Nature of Government,” published in _The Virtue of Selfishness_
“We do not think of them as Liberty 5-3000 any longer. We have given them a name in our thoughts. We call them the Golden One. But it is a sin to give men names which distinguish them from other men. Yet we call them the Golden One, for they are not like the others. The Golden One are not like the others.” — Anthem: The Definitive Text (Annotated) by Ayn Rand
Master Foo and the Recruiter A technical recruiter, having discovered that the ways of Unix hackers were strange to him, sought an audience with Master Foo to learn more about the Way. Master Foo met the recruiter in the HR offices of a large firm. The recruiter said, “I have observed that Unix hackers scowl or become annoyed when I ask them how many years of experience they have in a new programming language. Why is this so?” Master Foo stood and began to pace across the office floor. The recruiter was puzzled and asked, “What are you doing?” “I am learning to walk,” replied Master Foo. “I saw you walk through that door,” the recruiter exclaimed, “and you are not stumbling over your own feet. Obviously, you already know how to walk.” “Yes, but this floor is new to me,” replied Master Foo. Upon hearing this, the recruiter was enlightened. —from “Rootless Root: The Unix Koans of Master Foo,” Eric Steven Raymond, 2003 http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/
Nemesis, a young lady in a black and red dress, and a man in a white lab coat parade while flanking a black SUV with a red monster on the roof.
“‘Envy’ is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. …Today, that emotion is the leitmotif, the sense of life of our culture. It is all around us, we are drowning in it, it is almost explicitly confessed by its more brazen exponents… That emotion is: *hatred of the good for being the good.*” —Ayn Rand, “The Age of Envy,” published in _Return of the Primitive_
A sign reading, “Vendor removed for selling A.I. art #ArtByHumans”
“It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower. A white rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets below. In the rusty light of this evening’s sunset, the rectangle said: September 2.” — Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Man holding a glowing blue lightsaber pose in front of a circular logo that says "ULTRA SABERS." He wears glasses, a black t-shirt, and has a lanyard around his neck.
A large group of people dressed in kaftans, many with red curly wigs and sunglasses, gathered on and overflowing a large set of steps
man standing in front of LifeSouth Community Blood Centers blood donor banner
Dragon Con 2025 Quick Start Guide cover featuring three ladies in kaftans and curly wigs, captioned, “Come and knock on our door. We’ve been waiting for you!”
Screenshot of Apple Music’s playlist transfer tool on an iPhone
A git diff --stat command showing 13 files changed, 181 lines inserted, and 326 lines deleted
Poe Dameron says, “Somehow Perl returned”
Untitled Goose says “peace was never an option,” standing on a hatchet lodged into a tree stump
“Why are you in such a silly mood?” “Without it, darkness would consume me.”