RIP jynx
--------

With great sadness, I further relay the news previously reported by
iolfree[1] and joneworlds[2]: Nathaniel Leveck, better known to
Gopherspace as jynx, admin of the Raspberry Pi of Death, aka RPoD,
passed away on March 1st of this year.  This is a great loss for our
community, and one I feel keenly, although I think joneworlds put
it very well indeed in saying that whatever those of us in this
weird little corner of the internet have lost, his family have
obviously lost so much more.  Jynx wasn't just a long-time phlogger,
he was a husband, a father, and as of 2024 a grandfather.  He was
also a musician[3,4], and presumably had a lot of other facets to
his person that none of us here have any inclination of, because
none of us share our full selves in this space.  Nevertheless,
there was some real sense in which many of us knew him.  He was out
there, on the other side of our displays somewhere (well, in Wyoming),
and now he's not.

That's hard.

Jynx began his phlog in 2017, three months to the day after I did, and
when I think of those exciting early years of the vibrant SDF
phlogging community, his name is always one of the first ones that
comes to my mind.  I still remember clearly the thrill of firing up a
gopher client on my laptop on the couch before breakfast the morning
after writing an especially long and meaningful post - definitely not
something I did routinely then or now, but I was so eager to hear
what, if anything, anybody had thought about it - and finding that
jynx had already read it and left a thoughtful response.  I thought it
would be easy to pin down exactly which pair of posts these were, by
grepping through my own phlog posts and my local mirrors of his (I'm
so glad I started archiving smolnet content recently!).  But actually,
it's hard, because we referenced each other's posts an awful lot in
those formative days.  Both of us posted less and less often as the
years rolled on, like so many of the 2017 crew, but the strong
impressions of closeness from those early years never came close to
full fading.  I was always pleased to see an update from jynx pop up
on my moku-pona feed, and found the drug experience posts he took to
writing in later years especially interesting.  I wish I'd taken the
time to tell him that.

The news of his passing is all the sadder because literally just a
few days before it happened, cat and I were talking excitedly (face
to face!) about the looming ten year anniversary of 2017 and what it
might bring, and of course we mentioned jynx.  I was and am looking
forward to celebrating, and it fucking sucks that jynx won't be there
to join in, because he sure as hell would have belonged.

God speed, you cromagnon.

[1] gopher://tilde.club/0/~iolfree/phlog/rpod.txt
[2] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~joneworlds/rpod.txt
[3] https://namtaraum.bandcamp.com
[4] https://natanas.bandcamp.com