(December 22, 2018 at 10:14 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: I'm subscribed to Fredrik Knudsen, who creates a series of documentaries on weird subjects, usually related to internet personalities, and here's one that I'm surprised hasn't come up at all here: TempleOS.
The man behind it is Terry A. Davis. He was a computer programmer who learned computer programming on a Commodore 64, and he managed to develop an entire Operating System from scratch. He also suffered from schizophrenia and was convinced that he was in direct contact with God (who apparently wanted it to have 640x480 resolution and 16 colours) and was convinced he was being targeted by the CIA (and apparently he ran over someone he thought was an agent on September 9, 1999). Did I mention that the earliest version of the OS was released to the public while Microsoft was working on Windows 7 and its first release as TempleOS was the same year as Windows 8.1? And that he was convinced that it was the true incarnation of the Third Temple?
Seriously, how the fuck did we miss this?
My first job out of college was going out into communities and working with clients with severe mental illnesses. A lot of them have schizophrenia. What he went through is pretty "normal" for someone experiencing it. A lot of the things he was trying to say probably made perfect sense to him, and I can imagine the search for conflict was for validation. It's also a disease that makes it hard to medicate people experiencing it. The side effects of the meds are often worse to them than what they are experiencing without them, so they elect to just deal with the schizophrenia. Sometimes they were court ordered and that made it all the more difficult. That's why it was always important to have an idea how to deescalate an encounter. Loved the clients I worked with but it was always a mixed bag on what to expect.
