For years, I knew that there was someone meticulously cataloging every online Tom the Dancing Bug comic, starting when it first appeared on Salon.com in 1995, collecting links on a simple page he called "Tom the Dancing Bug: The Complete Archive Listing."
Well, that now-defunct page just happened to come up today in a Google search, but this time the search result attached the page's author's name to the result, and that name leaped out at me: Aaron Swartz.
This is the young man who was a programmer/hacker/activist prodigy and the subject of the documentary "The Internet's Own Boy." He committed suicide in 2013, in the midst of a criminal prosecution for systematically downloading academic journal articles.
When he died, I recognized the name in articles about him from a few Twitter exchanges we'd had, and the fact that he was a member of the INNER HIVE. I realized who my internet acquaintance was, what he had accomplished, and tragically, how he died.
But until this moment, I had no idea just what a devoted reader of Tom the Dancing Bug he was.
I'm saddened all over again. I wish I had met him.