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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, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 26 2019, @08:26AM (4 children)
I am now cursed/blessed with not ever being able to forget him:
> OH YEAH - Michael Crawford cycled through his Kuro5hin.org usernames regularly (he was good at getting himself banned). one of these was "Zombie Jesus Christ", which inspired me to name my kuro5hin.org account 'TaxiCabJesus':
Because my current hobby project has a system account called "Zombie Jesus" (it is an account with godlike powers that's not associated with a living entity - hence Zombie Jesus - and it's even the most important account as it's the only account that exists at installation/bootstrap, and which permits you to grant permissions to other accounts that you create, etc.)
One principle I've held as an extremely basic ethical tenet, is that it should be a fundamental human right to decide when to end ones own life, as to deny that right is to tangibly punish someone who needs no further punishment. I just hope that MDC's ridding himself of the physical and mental punishment it seems befell him most days was done in a way that was satisfactory to him.
And I can just hope that the SoylentNews banter improved MDC's quality of life - it's the least we could have done.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 26 2019, @03:26PM (2 children)
I didn't foe him (nor have I foed anyone), but I do regret now that I once called him a troll. (Only once.) I had occasional good-humored exchanges with him, but mostly he seemed to ignore my comments. Then one day I went through about four back-and-forth exchanges with him on a thread, and every time he ignored what I said, took some random three-word quotation from my post as the new subject line, and then started talking about something else that was only vaguely related to the thread but seemed to be trying to provoke some negative reaction. Or so I interpreted it, because I couldn't figure out why someone would act so apparently obtuse.
After that, I mostly skimmed past his posts unless they seemed on-topic. I see now from so many positive posts about him here, and I'm not sure I understood how real and difficult things were for him.
Because, honestly, he was a very confusing person here, and I regret not trying to learn more about him. (I understood his posts more back in the /. days.) Admittedly, we do have some people here who seem to post weird crap just for the sake of weird crap, and I was never quite sure whether MDC was legitimately a bit mentally off, or whether he was just playing with people sometimes. Some of his posts always just seemed so over-the-top, that I just assumed he was exaggerating (as other folks are known to do here).
And now I'm sorry that led me to ignore what he had to say sometimes. I too sincerely hope that this forum was helpful to him in some way.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Wednesday March 27 2019, @07:20AM (1 child)
> ...I couldn't figure out why someone would act so apparently obtuse.
He was super brilliant. He was messing with you. Ever watch the TV show "House (MD)"? Or "Elementary"? You were honored in that he interacted / responded.
> And now I'm sorry that led me to ignore what he had to say sometimes.
Oh I think it's okay. I wish I had the time to read much of the discussions here. We can't all respond to everyone else or the discussions would expand exponentially. And MDC's writings are all still here for everyone to read.
> I too sincerely hope that this forum was helpful to him in some way.
I think of SN as a think-tank. I think he considered SN and us as his family, certainly as friends. His openness here is proof, and what he left to SN in his Will is further proof and a great honor and we should honor his contribution, glean and use the wisdom and knowledge he gave us.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 29 2019, @12:56AM
No offense to MDC, or to you, but I know a lot of "brilliant" people. I, unlike MDC, haven't made much of my biography known here, as I don't like to plaster personal info around the internet. And I have known brilliant people who are fantastic as human beings, brilliant people who are incredibly weird, and brilliant people who are jerks (sometimes unintentionally, because they often have social interaction issues).
Anyhow, again, no offense to him, but I in no way feel "honored" that he would deign to interact with me just to "mess" with me. That's juvenile bullshit, if that's what it was. House and that jerk on Elementary are asses. Entertaining, I'll agree. But asses nonetheless. If I had real-world colleagues like that, I wouldn't stand for the bullshit -- you can be brilliant and also a reasonable human. I've known many such people.
And if what you said was true, I'll retract my apology for calling him a troll, because then that was what he was. I was instead willing to believe he acted out that way because he was a bit mentally off, but you're trying to claim he was trolling me. I will never approve of such behavior, even in a thread honoring a dead person.
(Score: 1) by visiblink on Wednesday March 27 2019, @03:12AM
I remember you both from Kuro5hin.org. I never really followed anything to do with him, but knew that he was a controversial figure there. I seem to recall you posting some stuff that ended up on the front page. Sadly, rusty must have no-robots'd everything, since there's no internet archive of it.
In any case, I was only ever there for the McGrew posts. The Paxil Diaries still represent the high point of internet culture for me, such as it is (or rather, was).
I hope he went out in the sublime, if you know what I mean. Sounds like he was an inspired and tormented soul. But then, most of us are.