2005?: i was a very cute little nerdlet and stumbled upon the poignant guide and didn’t get it at all. i just wanted to learn ruby ok.
200somewhere in the interim: i got it. i took it on its own terms, and somehow fell in love with this silly book about maple donuts and chunky bacon. and, by extension, i fell i love with him. i carried a trady blix avatar around for a number of years!
and it’s hard to understate how much of an influence he was on me. he taught me to counterbalance my nerdy side with my creative side. he taught me that emotion mattered just as much as reason, as i was engrossed in a world which only cared about the latter. and he did it all by just being himself.
funnily enough, i never really used ruby, nor any of his libraries or code. but i did read the bobby wolves a lot, and i still believe that “His words strode forth like policemen” might be the best simile ever composed.
august 19, 2009: and then he disappeared. i remember being upset. i remember blogging about it. i forget what i wrote, but i’d bet money it was a plea to come back.
… four years …
… his site comes online, and tells us to wait …
april 18, 2013: he releases a bunch of text documents, later fan-named “closure,” as sort of a way of justifying his departure before leaving forever for real. ok.
still, i remember being positively pumped for this day. i pulled every image and converted them to pdf, and i think i still might have some of these “original copies.”
april 19, 2013: after the very last page leaves the printer queue, he reformats his site to a geocities-esque kickstarter, complete with a paypal link. give him [$20], and he’ll send you something special.
i totally did.
after the donation drive ran for a few hours, he closed it off and told us that we’d be receiving silver combs. a few hours after that, people started getting refunds. and then he disappeared again.
…
march 1, 2014?: and http://whytheluckystiff.net/ is back. and yes it’s totally him. it can’t not be.
and now, time for my story…
july 2013: the lioness kickstarter is a resounding success. i introduce zak to the cult of _why. i am an enabler.
august 2013: finished writing a video game that i had spent a year on. sent it to a few people in my little indie scene. later posted it on a forum. met a friend there.
spring 2014: left i think basically all forums i was a part of.
december 2014: wrote a big thing about a video game. sent it to a friend, who sent it to an irc channel, and etc etc it got around ok. this terrified me.
march 2015: abandoned the rest of my online friends in an act of silent self-destruction. ever an aspirant, atashi.
august 14, 2015: for reasons unknown, i met haruki murakami in a dream and, for reasons unknown, asked him how to not get swallowed by time. he kinda stammered, and in the end came up with: “find a community and give back to it.”