Marco Rogers

@polotek.bsky.social

23357 Followers 441 Following

Web developer, movie buff, and pretty much the best guy you know.

A short video. It shows my hand holding an object that looks like a stack of poker chips. On the face it reads Las Vegas $1000. I turn it to the side and there's the word "slide" written there. Then, with a quick twist of my thumb, the front face twists to the side and activates a flame that comes out of a spout on the top. It turns out it's lighter. Obviously some kitschy souvenir I picked up.
A photo of a striking art piece. A beautiful Black woman surrounded a colorful surrealist canvas. Artist Nettrice Gaskins.
Photo of a light gray T-shirt spread out on a surface. On the front is a #staywoke, an infamous hashtag from the time when twitter pretended to care about DEI. The T-shirt is not widely available. It was a limited run made by the diversity-focused employee group inside Twitter.
Meme image of a police captain at a press conference. The caption reads "We investigated ourselves and cleared ourselves of any wrong doing."
A picture of the infamous botched restoration of the Jesus Fresco painting. It shows the original fresco and the cartoonish parody side by side.
A screenshot of a bluesky post by me. It reads "What if you just kept these thoughts inside your head? That's always an option. Think about it." It's a reply to a post that we can't see because I've been blocked. This implies that the person did not receive my comment in the spirit that it was given.
Famous meme photo of a balding white man staring into the camera. "The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point".
A screenshot of the interface in the replit mobile app. It shows a pop-up message that says "You've reached your Starter usage limit." There is a big "Upgrade Now" button prominently displayed.
Screenshot of an app that tracks solar energy generation. It shows a chart for the energy generation in 2025. The total production was 8.42 megawatt-hours.
Selfie of me wearing the Bose Open wireless earbuds. They clip onto my outer ear, hooking around the back. The buds are black with a gold accent. Very stylish.
Screenshot of a graph. It shows that 97% of all images I've posted have alt text. It also says this is 144% above the average. (I don't have context on how that number is calculated).
Quote from the article: "I really loved my time at Meta and took a lot of pride in my work and the community I built. I served as the global lead for the Black@Pride ERG and assisted with its developer advocacy team for a brief period. I truly believed I'd stay forever."
Quote: "Slightly larger in area than the United Kingdom, with only 2.1 million people, the state will fund universal child care — estimated to cost $600 million annually — largely with interest from its Early Childhood Education and Care Fund. The fund has grown to around $10 billion primarily from oil and gas taxes since it was set up in 2020. The sector generates about half of total state revenue."
A short video showing the inside of a fancy gaming PC. The components are lighting up with RGB colors.
Photo of the inside of a PC case. Many components have been installed. A medium sized GPU card, a fancy-looking pump on top of the CPU, RAM sticks, etc.
A photo of a large table. There is an empty PC case standing up on the table. And there are PC parts and instruction manuals strewn all across the table.
Screenshot of a reply on bluesky to an unidentified person. "Asking you to make a statement about white people the same way you made a statement about Black people is whataboutism? Daniel I want you to think real hard about what your goal is here."
A screenshot of my phone. It says "The Smart One".
Screenshot of a post by Mina Markham. It shows her post "I'm on Black Sky's PDS and use my same custom domain." Her handle is the custom domain minamarkh.am. Underneath her profile photo is a label that says "blacksky.app".
A coffee cup and a glazed donut sitting on a small table outside in the sunshine.
Mirror selfie of me. I'm wearing jeans and a cream-colored shirt. The shirt has a large illustration on it. It looks like a large steampunk structure.
Screenshot of a tweet by me. I'm responding to a post that says capital punishment seems to be the solution for those truly unrepentant of their actions. My tweet says the following: "This never works. The problem with every form of punitive punishment is that we have no way of ensuring that only the reasonable people are allowed to decide. The evil people themselves will always end up wielding it at some point. We have to let it go." The post is dated Oct 2020.
Keanu Reeves in John Wick. Battered and bruised, holding a gun in his signature style, pointed towards the camera.
Photo of the keyboard tray on my desk. On top is a split keyboard with rainbow lights underneath the keys. It's got an unusual design with big buttons sticking out where the spacebar usually sits. Sitting under the keyboard is a long rectangle device that is hard to identify. (It's my mouse. Ask me about it.)
Interviewer: So some people have described CECOT as basically a black hole. Is that accurate? Dada: I think it is a good description. No one can enter this prison. Relatives of the prisoners cannot visit them. They are not allowed to receive anything from outside. According to President Bukele, they don’t see the light of the sun ever.
Gif of a scene from the movie Deep Blue Sea. Samuel L Jackson is giving a rallying speech when he is suddenly and violently grabbed by a shark and pulled into the water.
Screenshot of a tweet by me: "This was a revelation for me as well, so I don't mean to be condescending here. But we all need to educate ourselves on how white supremacy works. It's not magic. It is a concrete ideology. It is a promise to white people of how they will prosper. It is *compelling*."
Photo of me taking a mirror selfie. I'm wearing dark jeans and a long sleeve turquoise shirt. Accessorized with a nice silver and gold watch, gold-rimmed sunglasses and a silver chain.
Photo of me taking a mirror selfie. I'm wearing dark jeans and a bright patterned shirt. Purples, blues and greens in watercolor type splotches on white.
Photo of me taking a mirror selfie. I'm wearing olive green slacks and a patterned shirt with blues and browns. Brown walking shoes gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses.
Screenshot of 2 tweets by me: "The people we are battling right now are not unique. Their ideas are not new. The depths of their evil and violence is not an unknown. This has all happened before. In this same way. In this same place. This is history in an unbroken line that we can actually see with our eyes. Now I’m not saying that everybody should already know this. Learning history is hard. And we know that America is dedicated to not teaching it. We all have to be educated. But the difference between me and Nate is that the education is visited upon my body. I cannot deny it."
Tweet by me. Dated August of 2013. “I’m not gonna lie. I wanna buy a Tesla car more now, just to help Elon Musk continue his crazy disruption experiments.”
Screenshot of a tweet by me. It paraphrases a text conversation between Elon Musk and Larry Ellison that was made public during the Twitter v Musk trial. Musk asking other billionaires to help fund the twitter takeover.
A photo I took of my notebook. It's opened, and on the left is the last lined page. On the right is a blank page with no lines. And I've written on it "The End".
Screenshot of a tweet from me: "I want to put this together with my previous thread. What's the difference between surface level and "substantive" change? For me it's this. As long as people who clearly seek to maintain white supremacy get to wield power, we didn't change anything."
Screenshot of an email from the New York Times. The subject reads "For You: D.E.I. Will Not Be Missed".
Picture of me. Smiling with a brick wall as a backdrop. Looks like a semi professional headshot.
Post this and anyone can DM you something they've wanted to tell you. One rule: You are absolutely not allowed to reply!
Classic meme from the show Flava of love. Black woman holding a knife while smiling in a threatening way.
Screenshot of a tweet from me: "You know what is bothering the shit out of me these days? How many tech people who were mad at me for criticizing crypto are dead silent right now. I thought you were an advocate and believed in educating people. Where you at?"
Unfortunately it's the basic stuff people keep talking about. Drink way more water, get better and more consistent sleep. But also I think the biggest changes for me were these. I stopped drinking. Too many calories. And I think it was keeping me low key depressed. I stopped eating spicy foods. Turns out it was almost single-handedly responsible for most of my inflammation and GI problems. Brought my blood pressure down by taking meds. Haven't worked full time in more than a year. Highly recommend if you can afford it.
An image produced by DALL-E. The image shows a diagram with boxes with labels and lines that connect various concepts. However on closer inspection, much of the content is nonsensical or even illegible. There are many misspellings such as ADPLICATIONS instead of applications.
Screenshot of a Bluesky post. It shows a link to translate at the bottom.
A screenshot of a popup in the Bluesky app. It says "Celebrating 10M users! #33,799". It certifies that I was in the first 1% of Bluesky users.
Screenshot of settings screen in google calendar mobile app. It shows a section labeled "Default notifications". Underneath is a notification for 10 minutes before and another for 1 minute before. It also shows an action to "Add another notification".
A screenshot of one of my recent posts. The post is a meme of James Franco being hung on the gallows. He wears a smile and asks the other man "First time?". The screenshot shows the post has been moderated and labeled with a tag that says it shows a "corpse".
James Franco hanging meme. Two men at a gallows wearing nooses around their necks. Franco wears a knowing smile and says "First time?". Incredulous look from the other man who says "huh?".
An image of someone standing over a huge mountain of clothes. Almost as tall as they are. They are rubbing their temples and looking distressed. The caption says "Cleaning out my closet...".
Screenshot of a tweet by me. "I think about the scope of white supremacy quite a lot. Like the sheer magnitude of the project. Think about what it takes to convince someone so thoroughly that white men own literally everything good in the world. How thorough the brainwashing has to be."
Still frame from Jurassic Park. Actress Ariana Richards paused from eating Jello with a terrified expression.
Screenshot of a tweet by me. "I’m making a prediction. Facebook and Twitter won’t exist in 20 years. We will have cannibalized everything that was good about these products and reimagined them in ways that aren’t terrible and don’t give rich white nerds unlimited power."
Screenshot of a tweet by me. "Congress learned a lot about Facebook destabilizing foreign governments a few years ago. They don't understand TikTok. But they do understand that there is now an equally powerful machine that is not aligned with American interests. They're gonna pay attention to that."
Screenshot of a tweet by me. "How many people will try the new thing? A lot. We have to keep perspective. Facebook has a bad rep among a lot of people. Millions even. But they count their user base in billions. They will easily capture enough people for a new platform to be viable."
Screenshot of one of my tweets. Text as follows: "Don't leaders tell people what to do?" Do you do what I tell you to do? "Well, not always. But that's because..." Right. Imagine that, but everybody and all the time.
Screenshot of tweet by me. "This shit created a huge rift in the tech community. And some of y'all we're on the other side asking people to give it a chance. More than that, what you said is that you'd help people navigate so that they wouldn't get burned. And now you're mad quiet. What does that mean?"
Screenshot of recent tweet from Molly White. "i had barely even started talking about crypto when chris dixon blocked me, and never atted him or anything. i wonder how long his blocklist is."
Screenshot of an exchange between me and another user on mastodon. Part 1 of 2. Here's a link to the first reply in the exchange if you care to read the whole thing. https://fedi.monkee.ch/notes/9pypb2kkgerg00pw
Screenshot of a tweet by @polotek: "I've got good news for you then. People who make $400K in w-2 income already pay a fuck ton of taxes. That is already solved problem. Are people telling themselves that's not happening? Like you can stop paying taxes at $400K? Is that the problem?"
Screenshot of an old tweet by @polotek': "As near as I can tell from twitter, there's only a narrow window of salary that is acceptable. Anything below $50K is poverty level and anything above $150K means you're rich and we hate you. So, you know. Keep that in mind in your job search."