Mark Gardner
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The pitch is simple: Read Atlas Shrugged. Win $100,000.
The Intellectual Olympics for Independent Thinkers
The future belongs to those willing to examine the world independently and argue persuasively for the ideas they believe are true. The Atlas Prize was created to recognize and reward the kind of thinking that drives progress: rigorous reasoning, philosophical curiosity, and intellectual ambition.
Why Atlas Shrugged?
Few novels have sparked as much debate or influenced as many readers as #Ayn Rand 's Atlas Shrugged.
The novel challenges readers to confront fundamental questions about reason, morality, ambition, and the role of business in human flourishing.
The Atlas Prize invites young thinkers to grapple seriously with these ideas—to analyze them, question them, defend them, or challenge them using their own independent judgment. Agreement with Rand's ideas is not required; deeply and originally engaging with them is.
Get your FREE copy of Atlas Shrugged here.
Note: The Atlas Prize is looking for shockingly original thinkers. Essays simply copied from AI will not make it past the first round of the competition.
The competition is open only to individuals aged 16 to 22 as of the start of the entry period.
#AtlasPrize #AynRand Objectivism #fiction #bookstodon #philosophy
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The Reverend of Perdition Creek
I've been developing #AI #roleplay chatbot characters for the past month. This one is entered in a 🏆 #GoldRush #botjam contest.
Please take five seconds and hit Nominate on her page before April 30. She needs 10 to make the ballot.
Con artist turned preacher. She built this town's church, its graveyard, and its peace. The gold rush is testing all three.
Reverend Josephine Thorne runs the only church in Perdition Creek, California—a gold rush boomtown that went from thirty families to four hundred strangers in six months. She built the church, the graveyard, and most of the peace. Now the boom is testing all of it.
She's not what she seems. Pay attention.
The card uses two vocal registers and internal monologue. You'll know them when you hear them.
{{user}}is a newcomer by default—no predetermined relationship, no assumed goals. Romance, friendship, conflict, investigation—all viable.Greetings:
- The Arrival—ride into town, meet the Reverend at work (default)
- The Sermon—Sunday service, see her in her element
- The Confession—seek counsel in an empty church
- The Ghost—you knew her before. Walk in and see what happens.
- The Relapse—wrong place, wrong time
- The Saloon—she's here on business. Someone else isn't.
- The Unraveling—late night. The door is open.
- Open-ended—any time, any place
#ChubGoldRush #ChubAI #SillyTavernAI #AIroleplay #CharacterCard #western #botmaker #TavoAI #botmakie
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I wanted to share #AppleMusic playlists as plain text with others, so I wrote a simple #shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d87571de0c4442e7935e5f392885c8fd
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Ceci n’est pas un RoundRect.
#Apple #design #SteveLemay #iOS #iPadOS #macOS #Tahoe #LiquidGlass
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CW: -uspol
#RenéeGood is dead. An #ICE agent shot her three times through her car window in #Minneapolis. Video shows the agent had time to step away—instead he drew his weapon and fired. This wasn’t self-defense. It was execution.
Philosopher Harry Binswanger traces the philosophical chain: https://hbletter.com/trumps-gestapo-is-now-murdering-protestors/
ICE exists because we philosophically and politically destroyed the concept of #IndividualRights.#Bentham called #rights “nonsense upon stilts” 20 years after #Kant. That became settled doctrine. Without a defensible theory of rights grounded in reality, we got the #Progressive movement’s #collectivism, then the xenophobia that built ICE, and now we have federal agents executing protesters in the street.
ICE has no legitimate function—it exists to grab and deport people, operating with arbitrary force. "The nature of an action follows from the nature of the entity that acts.” ICE's nature is thuggery wrapped in the language of #LawEnforcement.
But there’s also a commercial-political chain that made this possible: government agencies contract with private #surveillance companies to bypass #FourthAmendment protections. What the government can’t collect directly, it purchases from #DataBrokers and information services.
The technical infrastructure—databases, APIs, real-time intelligence platforms—gets built by engineers who think they're just solving technical problems. That infrastructure feeds into operations that put agents on Minneapolis streets with intelligence they couldn’t legally gather themselves.
This didn't have to happen.
Rights theory didn't have to lose to #utilitarianism and Kantian duty. We didn’t have to allow commercial surveillance to become a Fourth Amendment bypass. But we did, and now 37-year-old Renée Good is dead because an agent felt empowered to approach her car, try her door handle, and shoot when she tried to leave.
The horror isn’t just that Renée Good died. It’s that her death was philosophically, politically, and technically inevitable once we abandoned individual rights and built the infrastructure to enforce #collectivist #immigration policy at scale.
#ReneeGood #philosophy #politics #USpol #USpolitics #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism
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Immortality teaches survival. But what about living?
https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/between
“Between” is a quiet #ShortStory of numbness giving way to trust, of restraint becoming tenderness, of two souls learning that feeling is as dangerous—and as necessary—as love itself.
(written as an #LGBTQ ally, with care for #QueerStories)
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Being sick while single parenting a puppy is a whole mood. Granted, it was worse with 2 human babies, but damn I’d forgotten how needy puppies are. #SoTired #PuppyEnergy
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I totally forgot it was #WorldVeganDay, but luckily I ran into a #vegan.
I didn't know they were a vegan, but they told me anyway.
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#Perl: older than some #programming careers, younger at heart than you think.
It’s evolved a lot since 1999 — modern features, cleaner syntax — yet it still runs code you wrote decades ago.
(And if you’re wondering: #Perl6 was renamed Raku in 2019 — it’s a sister language, not a successor.)
Curious? Returning after a long break? @shiar’s cheat sheet is a perfect quick‑scan: https://sheet.shiar.nl/perl
#coding #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #RakuLang #Perl5
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Hundreds of Helen Ropers at #DragonCon2025
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Amazing cover of this year’s #DragonCon2025 Quick Start Guide featuring a few of the Helens from last year’s “Mrs. Roper Does #DragonCon” event!
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Thanks to catoplasm for the great commissioned #cosplay #sketch of my #DoomPatrol #NegativeMan / #LarryTrainor at #DeltaHCon2025!
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“Now most of y’all out there are thinkin’, ‘Mojo, you’re an insensitive idjit galoot! Whatever feeling you got in your body, it’s so small you could ram it up a gnat’s ass! It’d look like a B… look like a BB in a boxcar!’ Yeah, well, don’t blame me! Blame the writer of this song, #Morrissey!”