Back

His contention is that he and his wife are being pursued by an online hate mob. The incomplete history of this argument found here seems accurate:
https://chaos.social/@discatte@digipres.club/115600254017360927

Also see this user's account of their harassment by ptorrone:
https://chaos.social/@discatte@digipres.club/115588660455115116

As well as this account by another target:
https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599251535775251

These have nothing to do with me, however. Let's move on to his grievance with me.

Here is the post that he made about me on Bluesky which I suspect led, in part, to his account suspension. I don't know because I've never used Bluesky. I've erased an instance of deadnaming/incorrect pronouns for another user.

His accusations are as follows:
1) I have "resurfaced" after 4 years
2) This was "triggered" by an article about Arduino's acquisition about Qualcomm
3) He asked me to "Pause"
4) I registered His and His Wife's names ("our") and created a "Hate Site" to dunk on both of them ("limor and I")

He also posts an artfully cropped and edited screenshot of an email exchange. If only I had received a complete archive of my SparkFun inbox when I was laid off.

To address his first accusation: I have no idea what happened 4 years ago, or from where I "resurfaced." I gather, from other people's comments, that 4 years ago was when Phil made an ill-considered NFT joke and received a lot of backlash for it. The timing would be right for NFTs. I assume this is a reference to his grievance with a user called "Linotype Pilgrim"

The last time I had any interaction with Phil, and the incident referred to in the email, was in 2017. Not 4, but 8 years ago.

As for assertions 2 and 3, I had no part in reporting his first two accounts. I have begun to block and report his subsequent attempts to subvert the blocks.

I'm not sure why he thinks I would have a problem with his coverage of the Qualcomm acquisition or the change to Arduino's TOS. I suspect we largely agree, on principle. If you'd like to read my thoughts on Arduino, you can find them here:

https://chaos.social/@North/115597292166378834

Finally, let's explore what he means by "...he registered our names and built a little hate site while at SparkFun to dunk on limor and i."

This will actually require a look at Twitter history, because I couldn't remember for the life of me what was going on at the time. If only I had downloaded a complete archive of my Twitter history before leaving the platform:

In 2017, Phil appeared to be on the warpath about the actions of one Brett Hagman. Phil alleged that Brett had lied about his involvement with Arduino (2017 being the year of the Arduino Split: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#Trademark_dispute) and had parked a number of Arduino-related domain names.

Ultimately, I don't know what was proven with regards to Brett or what ever happened to him. What I do know is that Phil was tweeting from his own account as well as the Adafruit account, making unsubstantiated claims, legal threats, and generally acting unhinged.

A major contention during this tweet-storm was that it was illegal for Brett to register domain names with the word "Arduino" in them. At one point during the exchange, I decided to throw my hat in the ring...

I sent this tweet:

"@adafruit @BrettHagman @ShawnHymel @ptorrone @arduino Yeah, @BrettHagman, you can't just buy domain names with other people's names in them!!! https://t.co/5Gv2oey0lb"

and the twitter link expanded to:
http://www.ptorrone-privateeye.com/

I bought the domain for $10 on namecheap and hosted a single image there. I have spent the last 10 hours checking all of my HDDs and anywhere I may have hosted it but I cannot find the image. You will have to take my word for what it was.

In a subsequent email thread, I would describe the image like this:

"... satirize you as an obsessive Dick Tracy-esque gumshoe..."

To the best of my recollection, it was an edit of the Charlie Day "Pepe Silvia" meme from "It's Always Sunny" with Phil's head on it and pictures of Nate Seidle (SFE), Massimo Banzi (Arduino), Frederico Musto (Arduino), and Brett Hagman (Wiring) with red yarn pinned between them along with the caption "THIS GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP!"

It's also possible that it wasn't Charlie Day and it was actually just a photoshop of the conspiracy board without Phil's face. I recall wanting to use the Always Sunny meme but not being able to make the photos visible on the corkboard.

At any rate, I quickly received an email at my work email address with the subject line "$10 trolling?" he also emailed my manager, the founder, and the CEO.

You can read our entire exchange at this gist, if you're so inclined:

https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505c99

This was, as far as I knew, the end of it. Take notice that the screenshot of the email that he is posting around has been edited. I can't speculate about his motivation to do this, but it does lack context and timestamps.

So why did he start to post about me recently? After not interacting in any way for the better part of a decade, I saw @discatte posting about how they were being harassed. I read through what was posted there and it felt familiar. It felt like familiar behavior. He wasn't tagged in this thread, I should add. It was not my intention to interact directly with him in any way. But I did share my experience with his overreaction to internet arguments.

Is this a mean thing to say? Yeah, for sure. He's a being a jerk, to put it mildly, and so I was mean about him on the internet. Harassment? Bullying? Libel? No.

Should I have done this after apologizing 8 years ago? I don't know, maybe not, but my feelings about that interaction really changed when Phil became an unreliable narrator. At the time, I thought perhaps I had actually unwittingly joined a chorus of hate. Now I've seen how he operates and it certainly colors things differently.

So that's the offense. That's it, those two toots, you're looking at them. For that, I woke up the next morning to an email addressed to: SparkFun Founder, SparkFun CEO, SparkFun CTO, SparkFun CMO, and the shared public outreach email for my Fiance's place of work (a Public library makerspace)

You can read that email exchange here (I have removed the attached images of his adorable newborn)

https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b49ae

Our final email exchange took place when I was copied on his appeal to fosstodon.org to reinstate his account. I'm only posting it because he has explicitly asked me to in the replies to this thread (I have subsequently blocked the account) He believes this shows me in a poor light. I will let you judge for yourself:

https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b58a7

This is the entirety of my history with Phil as I remember it. I don't have perfect recall of the past 8 years, admittedly, but all I can do is appeal to you to find any evidence of the wrongdoing that he alleges I'm "leaving out" of this account.

It feels entirely possible that I've mentioned him in relevant public conversation in the intervening time, but I genuinely don't remember.

I would like to draw attention to a few things before I close this out.

Gaslighting:
In our last email exchange, he decided to broach the subject of my mental health. Something that I did not bring up, and have not done to him thus far:

"you exclusively talk about your mental illness on all your socials, do you think it's possible that you have a problem?"

"you need to take a break. this back and forth isn’t healthy for what you are describing with conditions you have."

Deflection:

He has continued to accuse me of bullying "Him and Limor," which is observably false. At no time have I ever bullied, attacked, taken jabs at, or otherwise interacted with Limor. I certainly never did anything mean-spirited towards her! I've been a big fan of hers for years, before I even worked for SparkFun. I've often commented on her unbelievable work ethic, having heard rumors that she does most of the engineering at Adafruit.

He also continues to invoke his wife and daughters in his abusive emails:

"...nick jumped in with takes about sparkfun, me, and limor, again."

"if i ever did any of this to a woman in tech, limor would leave me..."

"...you behave like this toward me, limor, and adafruit?"

"leave me, limor, and our kids alone."

"limor and i had a baby eight days ago, and you still went out of your way to make things harder for us."