Terry Davis
It is all too easy to forget that though someone else’s mind works differently and in a way we aren’t used to, that they aren’t still in many ways similar to ourselves, and furthermore have a unique perspective worth time and appreciation.
There is hardly a better example of this than Terry Davis, an unusual paranoid schizophrenic who went to inexplicable lengths documenting their life on video, and who died unexpectedly just this August. While at first glance his work appears to be the product of unnatural obsession, and his personality is at first startling to many. However, without going into technical details, in his hidden brilliance he managed to build an entire operating system of his own design from scratch over the span of 10 years all on his own that aimed for and accomplished being an entirely unique take on how to use a computer. Despite his abrasive manner of expressing his views, in many ways a symptom of his condition, he managed to expand discussions and concepts in ways no one had seriously considered in depth before, if at all.
In the last video he published before his death, one off-handed comment at the very end shines through, “I think maybe I’m like just a bizarre little person who walks back and forth… whatever, you know” (Davis). A unintentional, morbid obituary and his final words to the camera.