11 ms·

_why's Estate

191 points by Jeremysr 17y ago

plaes 17y ago
Does anyone know what happened to him? To me it seems like a digital suicide :(
- markmywords 17y ago
  I too would like to know. His work was just plain awesome!
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/ http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/
    - michael_dorfman 17y ago
      An alternate view: http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-19.html http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-19.html
      - unalone 17y ago
        Zed's an idiot. He made up a fantasy about what he thought _why might be doing, and proceeded to insult _why and generally be a jackass without knowing what he was doing. At the time I commented here saying Zed and _why were foils in many ways. I still believe that. _why was all about encouraging creative expression and absolute artistic freedom, and about making people excited about things. For all that he had a vibrant personality, his work was never about himself. It was about the people he wanted to excite. Zed, meanwhile, is a similarly hard worker, but in Zed's world everything is about Zed and there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and Zed is the one who decides. _why was fine with the fact that not everybody wanted to do things his way. Zed's most famous for yelling and belittling other people, this article included. While I respect Zed's intellect and like that he's working for one of my favorite companies, he's juvenile and embodies a lot of the parts of this scene that I despise.
        jacoblyles 17y ago
        It took a non-negligible amount of work to recreate _why's work in the wake of his disappearance. There's something very much against the engineering ethos in that. It's like burning books or destroying art because you're having a bad day. Sure, Zed has worse marketing than _why's "happy fuzzy" persona, but I agree with him in this case. From the comments on the github page, it looks like tryruby was rewritten, the code was never recovered. It is a bit ironic that the hardest artifacts of _why to recover were the projects aimed at teaching Ruby to children (tryruby and some of the books).
        deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
        unalone 17y ago
        The difference between Zed and _why is that _why never believed in an engineering ethos. I wasn't happy that tryruby is so annihilated. The version they recovered still has issues. I tried using it to get my 14-year-old brother into Ruby, and there was too many bugs for him to smoothly guide through it. But at the same time, I know nothing of _why's decision to remove it, and I won't pretend like I know one so that I can bash him. If one day he returns and explains himself and I find him wanting, then I'll criticize him, but I'm not going to spew hate in his direction even if I do. I'm simply grateful for all the things he gave the community, no strings attached. If the day he'd gone we never saw any of his work again, he'd still have made me a better person, inspired me to try things I'd never done. Beyond that he never had a responsibility to me and so I'm not angry. Hell, I'm still discovering new things of his — the music from his old band is playing through on iTunes now, and it's inspired stuff. (I could further the comparison by saying that Zed writes a lot about practicing guitar, but the music he's made is derivative; _why's music is haphazard and amateur but it evokes something. But that's not fair to Zed.) As I said, I respect some things about Zed, and if he didn't spend his time being an arse to other people I'd respect him a lot more. But all the time he spends being negative really irks me, especially when it's targeted towards one of the most positive people in the community he left so violently.
        17y ago
- camccann 17y 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.
  - eli 17y 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?
    - camccann 17y ago
      I don't know if direct contact was made, but they were definitely aware that the internet private eye squad had found their online presences. Names and locations were also found. Like I said, it was kinda creepy. I wouldn't even have been reading about it but... well, I wanted to know if _why was okay. And yes, I realize that even if I didn't actively participate, watching others do it doesn't necessarily make me blameless. Make of that what you will, but I do encourage everyone to not pursue the matter further. He's fine, don't worry about that, let's show him some respect.
    - randallsquared 17y ago
      It was only painfully obvious after someone had done the detective work to verify that he hadn't suddenly died in real life. Obvious in retrospect is easy...
      - eli 17y ago
        It's rather poetic to think that when you die in real life, all your digital work vanishes too. But were there people who really thought that's what happened? I hadn't heard about this detective work until just now, but there was never a great mystery in my mind. Not to be a jerk, but I think it was obvious at the time that this was just a person who really valued his privacy.
- burke 17y ago
  Pseudocide, if you will.
richardburton 17y ago
This guy got me into Ruby. For that I will be forever grateful.
oscardelben 17y ago
Really happy to see this collection of links and articles, it's useful.
steveklabnik 17y ago
This is awesome. Good job. Interesting timing... I'm just working on the new site for Hackety Hack right now...
azharcs 17y 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 17y ago
I sincerely hope he will re-emerge some day soon as _justbecause. Creative, challenging minds like that make us all better.
_pius 17y ago
When people talk about "being passionate" _why is the type of person they should be talking about.
unalone 17y 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).
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - unalone 17y ago
    That's such an asshole attitude to take. We'll ignore that, yes, of course it was edgier when Borges did it, Borges was one of the greatest inventors in the entirety of literature, and that Borges did it for a major literary piece instead of a free online ebook, and that the execution of this one was quite a bit subtler and not at all pertinent to the main part of the book. Just: Who the fuck cares about edgy? What matters is that it made somebody's day, made them think, and appealed to them enough that they were willing to write a story about it later. Isn't that enough? Your sort of deconstructive critical snark was vastly edgier when I did it at the age of thirteen on gaming forums. But I don't stalk you on Hacker News reminding you of that when other people tell you they like your comments.
judofyr 17y ago
I'm still wondering what "andrea" was: http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.png http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.pn...
Miky 17y 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 17y ago
Try Ruby is down :-(
- jordyhoyt 17y 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

191 points by Jeremysr 17y ago

plaes 17y ago

Does anyone know what happened to him? To me it seems like a digital suicide :(

markmywords 17y ago
I too would like to know. His work was just plain awesome!
- jacobolus 17y ago
  http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/ http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/
  - michael_dorfman 17y ago
    An alternate view: http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-19.html http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-19.html
    - unalone 17y ago
      Zed's an idiot. He made up a fantasy about what he thought _why might be doing, and proceeded to insult _why and generally be a jackass without knowing what he was doing. At the time I commented here saying Zed and _why were foils in many ways. I still believe that. _why was all about encouraging creative expression and absolute artistic freedom, and about making people excited about things. For all that he had a vibrant personality, his work was never about himself. It was about the people he wanted to excite. Zed, meanwhile, is a similarly hard worker, but in Zed's world everything is about Zed and there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and Zed is the one who decides. _why was fine with the fact that not everybody wanted to do things his way. Zed's most famous for yelling and belittling other people, this article included. While I respect Zed's intellect and like that he's working for one of my favorite companies, he's juvenile and embodies a lot of the parts of this scene that I despise.
      - jacoblyles 17y ago
        It took a non-negligible amount of work to recreate _why's work in the wake of his disappearance. There's something very much against the engineering ethos in that. It's like burning books or destroying art because you're having a bad day. Sure, Zed has worse marketing than _why's "happy fuzzy" persona, but I agree with him in this case. From the comments on the github page, it looks like tryruby was rewritten, the code was never recovered. It is a bit ironic that the hardest artifacts of _why to recover were the projects aimed at teaching Ruby to children (tryruby and some of the books).
        deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
        unalone 17y ago
        The difference between Zed and _why is that _why never believed in an engineering ethos. I wasn't happy that tryruby is so annihilated. The version they recovered still has issues. I tried using it to get my 14-year-old brother into Ruby, and there was too many bugs for him to smoothly guide through it. But at the same time, I know nothing of _why's decision to remove it, and I won't pretend like I know one so that I can bash him. If one day he returns and explains himself and I find him wanting, then I'll criticize him, but I'm not going to spew hate in his direction even if I do. I'm simply grateful for all the things he gave the community, no strings attached. If the day he'd gone we never saw any of his work again, he'd still have made me a better person, inspired me to try things I'd never done. Beyond that he never had a responsibility to me and so I'm not angry. Hell, I'm still discovering new things of his — the music from his old band is playing through on iTunes now, and it's inspired stuff. (I could further the comparison by saying that Zed writes a lot about practicing guitar, but the music he's made is derivative; _why's music is haphazard and amateur but it evokes something. But that's not fair to Zed.) As I said, I respect some things about Zed, and if he didn't spend his time being an arse to other people I'd respect him a lot more. But all the time he spends being negative really irks me, especially when it's targeted towards one of the most positive people in the community he left so violently.
        17y ago
camccann 17y 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.
- eli 17y 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?
  - camccann 17y ago
    I don't know if direct contact was made, but they were definitely aware that the internet private eye squad had found their online presences. Names and locations were also found. Like I said, it was kinda creepy. I wouldn't even have been reading about it but... well, I wanted to know if _why was okay. And yes, I realize that even if I didn't actively participate, watching others do it doesn't necessarily make me blameless. Make of that what you will, but I do encourage everyone to not pursue the matter further. He's fine, don't worry about that, let's show him some respect.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    It was only painfully obvious after someone had done the detective work to verify that he hadn't suddenly died in real life. Obvious in retrospect is easy...
    - eli 17y ago
      It's rather poetic to think that when you die in real life, all your digital work vanishes too. But were there people who really thought that's what happened? I hadn't heard about this detective work until just now, but there was never a great mystery in my mind. Not to be a jerk, but I think it was obvious at the time that this was just a person who really valued his privacy.
burke 17y ago
Pseudocide, if you will.

richardburton 17y ago

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

oscardelben 17y ago

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

steveklabnik 17y ago

This is awesome. Good job. Interesting timing... I'm just working on the new site for Hackety Hack right now...

azharcs 17y 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 17y ago

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

_pius 17y ago

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

unalone 17y 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).

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- unalone 17y ago
  That's such an asshole attitude to take. We'll ignore that, yes, of course it was edgier when Borges did it, Borges was one of the greatest inventors in the entirety of literature, and that Borges did it for a major literary piece instead of a free online ebook, and that the execution of this one was quite a bit subtler and not at all pertinent to the main part of the book. Just: Who the fuck cares about edgy? What matters is that it made somebody's day, made them think, and appealed to them enough that they were willing to write a story about it later. Isn't that enough? Your sort of deconstructive critical snark was vastly edgier when I did it at the age of thirteen on gaming forums. But I don't stalk you on Hacker News reminding you of that when other people tell you they like your comments.

judofyr 17y ago

I'm still wondering what "andrea" was: http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.png http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.pn...

Miky 17y 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 17y ago

Try Ruby is down :-(

jordyhoyt 17y 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)