Tech Savage, home
Under Maintenance: a nearly shirt-height ladder rises from a small tool bag at the hem to a tiny technician working with a bright cyan torch near the collar.

We develop the concepts and direct the artwork using AI image tools. We choose what goes on the shirt, so complaints about the pictures belong with us.

Item
TS026
Designation
Under Maintenance
Mode
Signal

Under Maintenance

Style

Price and final sizes are not confirmed yet. You cannot order this shirt through the site at the moment.

What you’re wearing

The service is temporarily unavailable. A technician has gone in with a torch. There is no incident report, no progress bar and no responsible estimate for when the interior will be ready to receive visitors again.

Rabbit hole

Retry-After omitted.

RFC 9110 gives us 503 Service Unavailable for temporary overload or scheduled maintenance. The response may include Retry-After to suggest when the client should try again. May. Even the protocol knows that some useful work should not be forced to produce a confident little completion time for the convenience of whoever is waiting outside.

Maintenance is not proof that something has failed. It is the ordinary cost of keeping complicated things alive. Systems receive windows for it. Traffic is drained, alerts are suppressed and everybody agrees not to demand normal performance while the covers are off. This arrangement is considered sensible right up until the complicated thing is a person.

The important work is usually internal, repetitive and difficult to display. A progress bar would be theatre. A dashboard would measure whatever was easiest to count and call the resulting number health. Sometimes the honest status is simply unavailable, with no decorative promise about when availability will resume.

The ladder starts at the hem and ends at the collar. The technician leans towards the opening and angles the torch inward. No sparks. No alarm. No announcement about what has been found. Just a tool bag below, patient work above and enough empty space to leave the matter private. Retry-After omitted.

Read it for yourself: RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics, 503 Service Unavailable and Retry-After

More shirts to explain at the pub

  1. Shirt artwork: a friendly rounded lowercase ‘ask me about’ arches above a coiled serpent in a yellow hazard triangle; ROKO'S BASILISK remains in distressed block lettering below.
    Item
    TS001
    Designation
    Ask Me About Roko’s Basilisk
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  2. MEAT PROXY: a human receives a cyan machine signal and pulls a physical switch, with an amber lower-back fault callout. YOUR API HAS BACK PAIN.
    Item
    TS002
    Designation
    Meat Proxy
    Mode
    Signal
  3. VIBECODER: a grinning coder in sunglasses lounges with his feet on the desk while robot arms work the monitors around him, coffee flying, a soft glow under his T-shirt and a skull in a top hat on the pen pot.
    Item
    TS003
    Designation
    Vibecoder
    Mode
    Signal
  4. MEATSPACE IS WHERE I KEEP MY STUFF: a filing cabinet stores keys, shoes, a mug and tangled cables. PERSISTENT STORAGE. TERRIBLE SEARCH.
    Item
    TS004
    Designation
    Meatspace Is Where I Keep My Stuff
  5. BIOLOGICAL BOOTSTRAP: an unimpressed person in a skeleton-print coverall is packaged inside an obsolete software sleeve. KEEP UNTIL SINGULARITY
    Item
    TS005
    Designation
    Biological Bootstrap
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  6. OVERCLOCKED: a living person's open cranial casing exposes a cybernetic brain made of processors, heat sinks and cable bundles, with amber thermal callouts.
    Item
    TS006
    Designation
    Overclocked
    Mode
    Signal
  7. PAPERCLIP MAXIMALIST: a paperclip crown and wreath surround a globe unravelling into wire. The crest's integral ribbon reads ALL MATTER IS INVENTORY.
    Item
    TS007
    Designation
    Paperclip Maximalist
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  8. LOCALLY OPTIMAL: a climber celebrates a small summit beside a far higher mountain, on cyan wireframe terrain below a striped synthwave sun. BEST IN IMMEDIATE VICINITY.
    Item
    TS008
    Designation
    Locally Optimal
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  9. TECH DEBT COLLECTION AGENCY: a weary engineer with a TODO clipboard inspects a server cabinet spilling tangled cables. WE REPOSSESS YOUR WEEKEND.
    Item
    TS009
    Designation
    Tech Debt Collection Agency
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  10. PROVE YOU ARE HUMAN: a nine-tile CAPTCHA fragments a person's face with a fingerprint, key and cycling memory. SELECT ALL SQUARES CONTAINING YOURSELF.
    Item
    TS010
    Designation
    Prove You Are Human
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  11. HALT AND CATCH FIRE: a human profile with an exposed cybernetic brain and a flame-and-smoke mohawk, framed by the main title with no secondary line.
    Item
    TS011
    Designation
    Halt and Catch Fire
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  12. p(doom): a beige instrument displays 37.42%, with a RECALCULATE button, crossed-out estimates and a SOURCE: /dev/urandom plate. RANDOM NUMBER. SERIOUS FACE.
    Item
    TS012
    Designation
    p(doom)
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  13. Signal Thief: a raven inked in black with pink and cyan highlights perches on a broken, rusting TV aerial, gripping a computer chip stamped Tech|Savage in its beak and claw. Pink circles and arrows mark the chip and the snapped aerial.
    Item
    TS013
    Designation
    Signal Thief
    Mode
    Signal
  14. The Field Saint: an unimpressed older woman technician in a battered work jacket, safety specs pushed up into short grey hair, holds a soldering iron upright in one hand and a tangle of multimeter test leads in the other. A cyan oscilloscope trace loops behind her head like a halo, and a Tech|Savage patch sits on her jacket.
    Item
    TS014
    Designation
    The Field Saint
    Mode
    Signal
  15. Dead Media Bouquet: a funeral bouquet made of obsolete media, with floppy disks and audio cassettes for flower heads, folded ribbon cables for leaves and curls of magnetic tape for tendrils, gathered in crinkled paper wrapping tied with a Tech|Savage band.
    Item
    TS015
    Designation
    Dead Media Bouquet
    Mode
    Signal
  16. The Oracle: a chunky beige CRT monitor with a dark, blank screen sits on a battered plastic milk crate like a shrine, ringed by a halo of telescopic aerials. Its mains cable loops round to a three-pin plug hanging unplugged in front, circled in pink. Tech|Savage is on the monitor’s maker’s plate.
    Item
    TS016
    Designation
    The Oracle
    Mode
    Signal
  17. Broadcast Pirate: a young South Asian woman in bulky wired headphones and a patched jacket speaks into a handheld microphone, carrying a homemade transmitter built into an open metal toolbox, with a cassette deck, an analogue meter, a fan grille and two telescopic aerials. Tech|Savage is on a plate on the toolbox.
    Item
    TS017
    Designation
    Broadcast Pirate
    Mode
    Signal
  18. Escape Sequence: a cracked audio cassette labelled Tech|Savage spills a ribbon of magnetic tape that curls upwards, folds into angular paper-bird shapes and becomes a small flock of birds flying free.
    Item
    TS018
    Designation
    Escape Sequence
    Mode
    Signal
  19. TECH SAVAGE in heavy off-white lettering with torn horizontal scanlines and displaced cyan and pink edges.
    Item
    TS019
    Designation
    Glitch CRT
  20. TECH SAVAGE in rounded, bowed lettering made of cyan scanlines over an offset magenta impression, like a curved CRT screen.
    Item
    TS020
    Designation
    Curved CRT
  21. TECH SAVAGE in angular sci-fi lettering with off-white edges, cyan and hot-pink halftones, amber stripes and worn print texture.
    Item
    TS021
    Designation
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  22. The Interior Is Closed: a technician pauses partway up an extremely tall service ladder beneath a small open hatch displaying a sunset. Positioned above the wearer’s heart, the hatch carries a plate reading NO FAULT FOUND.
    Item
    TS022
    Designation
    The Interior Is Closed
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  23. Life Support as a Service: a crouching technician operates a battered portable life-support machine showing a heartbeat and a PAYMENT DECLINED notice, tethered by a long cable to a socket high above.
    Item
    TS023
    Designation
    Life Support as a Service
    Mode
    Signal
  24. Unauthorised Backup: a listener sits beside a battered cassette recorder near the bottom of the design while a long ribbon of magnetic tape twists upwards through otherwise empty space.
    Item
    TS024
    Designation
    Unauthorised Backup
    Mode
    Signal
  25. Out of Band: a battered portable radio sits near the bottom edge while an extremely long telescopic aerial reaches towards the shoulder, where a black bird broadcasts from its tip.
    Item
    TS025
    Designation
    Out of Band
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  26. MACHINE GOD: an immense cathedral-like stack of mainframes, broadcast racks, analogue meters, CRTs, cables and warning lamps towers above two tiny technicians servicing an open panel. The footer reads SOME DISASSEMBLY REQUIRED.
    Item
    TS027
    Designation
    Machine God
    Mode
    Signal
  27. THE INSIDES OF THINGS ARE BEAUTIFUL: a portable cassette player is arranged as an exploded service diagram with its casing, circuit board, speaker, motor, belts, gears, controls, battery compartment and fasteners individually labelled. The footer reads YOU WERE MEANT TO SEE THEM.
    Item
    TS028
    Designation
    The Insides of Things Are Beautiful
    Mode
    Rabbit hole
  28. VOID IF UNDERSTOOD: a telephone-like CRT terminal is shown from behind with its casing removed, exposing the glass tube, copper coils, transformer, boards, capacitors and wiring. A small torn seal on the discarded cover reads WARRANTY SEAL — BROKEN BY CURIOSITY.
    Item
    TS029
    Designation
    Void If Understood
    Mode
    Rabbit hole