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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: 2) by Arik on Friday April 05 2019, @01:08AM (5 children)
I almost flamed you to a crisp for this several days ago, but I closed my browser and went to bed instead.
Glad I did, I don't think you meant anything ill here.
But it's an ignorant comment.
Many people attempt suicide more than once before succeeding. And for someone that's lived through the humiliating experience of attempting suicide and being returned, involuntarily, to the respawn point, minus some deeply missed skills and/or abilities, or simply for someone that's watched someone else endure an injury which is debilitating but not fatal, there is courage involved in even attempting it. Because you expect to fail. You expect to wake up in a few hours or days, in a hospital, in just as much pain as ever, with additional debt, additional humiliation, and additional social stigma.
No, pain alone cannot possibly explain MDCs absence.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday April 05 2019, @01:42AM (4 children)
See, I don't buy that. Lead to the brain has an extremely low failure rate and is readily available to pretty much anyone, so if you choose something less certain as your method it tells me you weren't fully committed to the idea.
Maybe, maybe not. I wasn't in his head, so I genuinely don't know. I do know he was explicitly talking about pain days before his death. Something about feeling like he was being electrocuted repeatedly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday April 05 2019, @09:31AM (3 children)
I don't know the rate precisely, but the consequences are pretty horrible. Imagine waking up afterwards, in a hospital bed, missing half your face but still very much alive.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday April 05 2019, @11:36AM (2 children)
Knew a guy who managed to fail because he was very, very drunk and just blew his jaw to shit. That's very much not the norm though. It's pretty difficult to miss your brain at point blank range, even for a novice. All you really need to do is make sure you're sober, aim deliberately, and use a .38 or larger caliber and success is all but assured.
I'm not saying this out of some macabre fascination or scorn, by the way. It's something that I put a lot of thought into at one time and I genuinely do not get why anyone serious about suicide would use a more painful or unpleasant method that carried a much higher risk of failure, so I assume they were not serious about it if they do.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday April 06 2019, @12:30AM (1 child)
While carrying out the most desperate action possible.
The very fact that you're trying to do it strongly suggests that, whether sober or not, you're not exactly calm and collected.
Pain can be just as disorienting as drugs or alcohol, all by itself, plus many people will use those things to alleviate the pain.
I expect that the vast majority of people would be shaky as hell when attempting this.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 06 2019, @01:46AM
Experience major depression sometime. That's precisely what you are. Living in depression is the sanest and most clear-headed you will ever be. You see life so much more clearly and you can't distract yourself away from it like normal people do. Which is why it's such a miserable thing to experience.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.