_why's Estate

http://viewsourcecode.org/why

by Jeremysr • 17 years ago

191 57 17 years ago

viewsourcecode.org

plaes• 17 years ago

Does anyone know what happened to him?

To me it seems like a digital suicide :(

markmywords• 17 years ago

I too would like to know. His work was just plain awesome!

jacobolus• 17 years ago

http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/

camccann3• 17 years ago

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.

eli4• 17 years ago

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?

iamwil• 17 years ago

Too bad it's not like the Dread Pirate Roberts. I wonder if any of the students of the wandering professor will take up his name in the future.

octover• 17 years ago

I know I'm not alone in knowing the real _why, knowing that he was okay, passing that message on and I trying to stop the stalking/detective work. While I'm not sure he wanted people who know him to do so, I think it was the lesser of two evils to tracking down everyone who might know him and exposing them and bothering them.

burke• 17 years ago

Pseudocide, if you will.

richardburton• 17 years ago

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

oscardelben• 17 years ago

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

steveklabnik2• 17 years ago

This is awesome. Good job.

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

azharcs• 17 years ago

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 :)

rufugee• 17 years ago

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

_pius• 17 years ago

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

unalone8• 17 years ago

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).

judofyr• 17 years ago

I'm still wondering what "andrea" was:

http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.pn...

Miky• 17 years ago

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.

lovskogen• 17 years ago

Try Ruby is down :-(

jordyhoyt2• 17 years ago

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)

_why's Estate

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