Hats off to the captain
I remember first running into Steven Den Beste while hanging out in the alt.cellular.sprintpcs Usenet group. He was the ex-CDMA engineer engaged both in fascinating technical discussion and battling trolls. I set a filter on him so that anything he wrote came in highlighted, so I wouldn't miss it. After a while, his postings on there stopped.
I found that he had a website on which he wrote about political topics. It was an incredible read. Nearly every day he had a surprisingly long essay that tied together politics and science and economics, and a wide range of other subjects. His mastery of all of these was evident, and I was (and still am) in awe of his skill.
In fact, you can see my attempts to write like him. Take my entry “Bigger problems”. Start with a note about the design of a system's security architecture, and show how it applies to politics. But producing that entry only illustrated to me how good he was. Here, I took hours to come up with that idea and turn it into an entry, and here he was doing work much longer on a much more consistent basis. It was amazing.
Then, about August, he stopped posting, with no explanation. Now we found out why.
I don't really know how to say thanks to him for everything he's done. About the only thing I can think of is to keep writing myself, and maybe, some day, approach the quality of work he did.
Thank you, Steven.