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Mike Crawford Is Dead, Contributed to Mac System 7.5.X and Activist
Some of you might know him on the west coast. He worked for Apple fixing/debugging System 7.5.X and attended Cal Tech. He was an activist for the mentally ill and homeless. He was openly bisexual and open about his schizoaffective disorder. His Facebook page.
I had helped him with his project Soggy Jobs which is unfinished. It was his project he needed a business model for.
He was on CNN about the taking away of tax credit from software engineers.
He was a member here at Hacker News.
He had serious physical illnesses that made him suffer and he took his own life.
I was an online friend of his, and I too suffer from schizoaffective disorder.
His wish was not to be forgotten to be remembered through his works. To at least have a Wikipedia article written on him or some other Wiki. Wikipedia named him non-notable about ten years ago. But if you met him, he'd always show you respect and even if he disagreed with you he was nice about it.
takyon: Here is MDC's last post on Warp Life, and Last Will And Testament. User page. Twitter.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday March 26 2019, @07:49PM (2 children)
"Life will be a very great deal less weird without you!"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:04PM (1 child)
Yep, yours is the best post I want to stick a reply on, that was my feeling exactly.
Never met MDC, never knew him, interacted with him here through a handful of comments and replies, read far more of his comments and posts, often knowing the user before even looking at the user ID. To me he was just a bit weird, that's all. Maybe subconsciously I cut him more slack because I have two kids with mental illness / disabilities, my world is already weird and I am frequently reminded that neurotypical is just the typical human being, nowhere near all of us.
But here's the thing: if I did that I did it because I already knew of him and of his mental health issues from way before this site existed. Discussing physical health issues is (relatively) easy, discussing mental health issues of others (in my case, my kids) is much harder, putting your own mental health issues out there on the internet under your real name must be harder still. Maybe, just maybe, his condition made it easier, but I don't think so, I've seen in my kids how difficult it can be to talk even in private, in confidence, to a professional about this stuff. I think what he did took guts, more than I have and more than many of us here who post from behind pseudonyms, I respect him for that.
A weird but vibrant part of life's rich tapestry just left us, I hope he is free now from the demons that made it too hard to stay with us.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @10:35AM
Crazy or not, that is why so many of us, love or hate him, read, replied to, or drew lines in the sand with him. He often provided insights, anecdotes, or simply life stories that made all of our lives a little more interesting. The OG internet just died a little more today.