
_why's Estate - Jeremysr
http://viewsourcecode.org/why
======
unalone
This, from one of the eulogies, made me grin:

 _In chapter 1, the narrator tells a story to "get you in the mood" for the
Poignant Guide. "Here's something poignant to get you started." It's a story
about a dog who he found and adopted, named Bigelow, only to lose him right
away._

 _In chapter 5, the narrator reveals that he is a Preeventualist.
Preeventualism seems like a fairly new philosophical doctrine, asserting that
the nature of all predictive thought is optimistic -- even dystopian futures
are "optimistically" predicted to come true. Therefore preeventualists just
"focus... on the understanding that hope will always prevail in any sort of
thought". I'd never heard of preeventualism before, but it made sense that
someone on the cutting edge of Internet programming would also be on the
cutting edge of philosophical discourse. And it was cutting edge -- no
wikipedia articles, no podcasts, nothing. Just one page of actual information
on the preeventualist homepage, and that shout-out in the Poignant Guide._

 _But it's a pretty compelling philosophy on the face of it, and they have a
preeventualist youth group responsible for maintaining the web page (which is
probably why it went down with such frequency). You can see other examples of
preeventualist thought if you know what you're looking for: Anathem is pretty
preeventualist, and if you start to think seriously about Long-Now style
timescales I bet you'll become somewhat preeventualist yourself. (You'll start
to mix up words like "molding" and "embroidery".) And of course there's always
Ashley Raymond's blog, which sadly doesn't get updated at all. In fact,
there's only the one entry, in which Ashley Raymond talks about his time with
his dog, whom he called Biggles, whose "accusatory gaze often hinted at how
wrong my pronounciation must have been"._

 _Wait. Biggles? Bigelow?_

 _So I did a whois on preeventualist.net, and sure enough, it was registered
to _why the Lucky Stiff. Conclusion: the dude FABRICATED AN ENTIRE PHILOSOPHY
FOR A THROWAWAY JOKE IN HIS STUPID BOOK. And it wouldn't be so stunning except
that I BECAME a preeventualist in the time between discovering the philosophy
and discovering that it was "fake" (if such a thing can be said of an idea)._

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richardburton
This guy got me into Ruby. For that I will be forever grateful.

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rufugee
I sincerely hope he will re-emerge some day soon as _justbecause. Creative,
challenging minds like that make us all better.

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_pius
When people talk about "being passionate" _why is the type of person they
should be talking about.

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plaes
Does anyone know what happened to him?

To me it seems like a digital suicide :(

~~~
camccann
A few people did some internet stalking back when he first disappeared and
tracked down some of his real-life friends and family. Creepy, yes, but also
enough to determine that the man behind the pseudonym is alive and well.

And, since one of the suspected reasons for why he chose to disappear as he
did was "people prying into his real-life non-_why identity", it's probably
best if we leave it at that.

~~~
eli
Wow, what kind of jerk would call up his family when it's painfully obvious
that that was exactly the sort of thing he was trying to get away from?

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1gor
Actually, when a person has touched lives of so many people in a very good and
profound way, he cannot escape a bit of attention back. The enquiry "are you
ok?" is human and not evil.

~~~
eli
I understand the impulse, but stalking _why's family has much more to do with
selfish, lurid curiosity than any legitimate concern for _why's safety.

~~~
unalone
Stalking _why online doesn't turn into Internet stalking. If I hunt a guy down
in real life, but all I do with his family is talk to them and see if he was
okay, I'm not stalking them. I'm just contacting them.

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azharcs
wow, I am actually amazed by the projects he has created, I actually knew him
only for his 'Poignant Guide' and the 'Shoes'. He has created tons of amazing
projects, Now I really miss him :)

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steveklabnik
This is awesome. Good job.

Interesting timing... I'm just working on the new site for Hackety Hack right
now...

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oscardelben
Really happy to see this collection of links and articles, it's useful.

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Miky
All of what _why has accomplished fills me with awe. He was so prolific, and
everything he made was amazing, and along with it he was one of the coolest
people I've seen online. He was humble, didn't take anything too seriously (up
until his disappearance, I suppose), and encouraged me to rethink a lot of my
attitudes.

His disappearance definitely wasn't a very considerate thing to do, but at
least we still have most of his amazing work.

This page is full of links to awesomeness.

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judofyr
I'm still wondering what "andrea" was:

[http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.pn...](http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.png)

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lovskogen
Try Ruby is down :-(

~~~
jordyhoyt
Does anyone have some info on how we could get involved in bringing Try Ruby
back up? (And without the bugs I experienced the last time I tried it)

