Last Post, Please Read

Tangential: A few years ago a coworker of mine suddenly died in a tragic accident at way too young of an age. Every once and a while when I see his name pop up in a git blame from code written many years ago I&#x27;ll click into his GitHub profile as it is frozen in time now. For the first year the worst part of this was watching the green contributions squares slowly retreat to the left until the wall was solid grey.<p>It makes me wonder how long all of our online presences will remain after we&#x27;re gone. Personal blogs&#x2F;websites will go down and large companies like GitHub &amp; social media will yield to newer competitors. Archive.org is probably the longest living publicly available archive of these profiles but who knows how long that will exist for either. Like countless other human lives, at some point there will be no evidence left that we were even here at all. &quot;All those [profiles] will be lost in time, like tears in rain.&quot;

Sad. But nice that the dad was able to access a logged in session on the blog to make a post I guess. I ponder how so many of our digital lives (and thus lives in general) would be locked forever should something untimely happen as no one would have access to anything unless we left some sort of giant password log book or mechanism in place.

It&#x27;s always heartbreaking to know parents had to deliver the news of a Childs passing. I hope they find peace and healing someday. Much love Jonathan (Zandar) Mott, you made the internet and the world better than you found it.

A bit off-topic - Reminds me of when I first stumbled upon Shamus Young&#x27;s blog [1]. Someone on HN linked to it, and due to me being a gamer I was immediately hooked. For the next couple of days I read every article which sounded intriguing and was really happy to finally find a blog which interests me.<p>But during all of this browsing I never visited the front-page. When I did, I saw the announcement about his death. Turns out he died a month before I found his blog. So far that has been the most tragic death of a person I don&#x27;t know personally, just because it was so abrupt and eerie.<p>RIP Jon, and Shamus.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shamusyoung.com&#x2F;twentysidedtale&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shamusyoung.com&#x2F;twentysidedtale&#x2F;</a>

I often wonder how my online friends would find out if I died. In some guilds usually people will go missing for 2 years and then somehow someone hears from their family that they passed away and shares it with the community.<p>I guess I should compile a list of email addresses that my sister should have access to.

A reminder to write down your passwords, if your want your family members to be able to access your devices in the event of your untimely end.<p>Also a reminder to <i>not</i> write down your passwords if you <i>don’t</i> want your family members to be able to access your devices.<p>Perhaps just have one device for family photos, and one device for Japanese tentacle porn.

The obituary referred to in this post can be found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.legacy.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;obituaries&#x2F;hickoryrecord&#x2F;name&#x2F;jonathan-mott-obituary?id=53606951" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.legacy.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;obituaries&#x2F;hickoryrecord&#x2F;name&#x2F;jona...</a>

Something similar happened when an buddy of mine died. I think it was his mom who posted on his LiveJournal... hard to remember, that was a long time ago (considering what platform the post was on, haha) ... It was jarring to see what I thought was a post from him, which was uhhh.. well... not. Even more jarring as I read on. Sad stuff. I&#x27;m glad there was even such a way to hear about it though. There&#x27;s no way his family would have gone through and emailed all his contacts or anything.

I took the time to read it. I had never heard of him, and likely would not have shared many of his viewpoints, but my sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.

I just find online events of this sort -- the announcement of a death, the nice words that typically follow -- a reminder of how awful we can be to each other while we still draw breath. Like you have to die before anyone can stop being awful to you.<p>Many years ago, I was part of an online community and some guy died who had been mistreated and banned and they were like &quot;We shall reinstate his account and do this other thing to memorialize him&quot; and I just felt like &quot;Wow, this guy was supposedly your friend. You couldn&#x27;t have been nicer to him while he was still alive?&quot;<p>In that case, he committed suicide. I couldn&#x27;t help but feel like he could have still been alive if they had been nice while he still drew breath and it just infuriated me.

For those thinking about lessons to take from this, check out the EOL DR checklist: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;potatoqualitee&#x2F;eol-dr">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;potatoqualitee&#x2F;eol-dr</a>

The world needs more people like Jonathan David Mott.

who is this?

Reminds me of fight club, in death he has a name.

Things like this remind of Get Your Shit Together…

to the end

While sad and I feel for the family, this is an insane amount of politics on this blog (and post).<p>I say that, not knowing the now deceased blogger and if he was in some way connected to this community or to tech?