The Screeps detail seems like something that could be fairly easily pursued... there can't have been that many players of that game to begin with, let alone those that would care so much about it that they would journal their thoughts about it. A quick check of the GitHub repo doesn't show he contributed code, but might he have opened an issue, contributed to docs? Might there be someone who was active in the community somehow (maybe showing up on leaderboards) until 2017?
I've spent a few days looking into this and haven't been able to find anything. There's also a big thing about "algae pools" "stock markets", etc, which didn't seem to be about Screeps.
I tried to find games that had these mechanics, and ended up spending a bunch of time looking through Spacestation 13 forums, but I'm leaning toward these references being about a game that he wanted to invent.
Algae pool, in the context of a list that contains "balanced nutri*nt? foods", is probably a food based in Spirulina. A green algae used in aquaculture. This seems to me like a check list [1] to assure that he didn't forgot anything after leaving a zone.
Is relevant because the man has been most probably poisoned. It was not a fast poison and it was painful but not too alarming. Not a bee, a wasp or a Bothrops. A plant or fungus, yes, could fit.
Is not suicide and terminal illness in my opinion. Nobody dies by starvation in presence of food.
But there is a third category that I was missing. Your own food. A too old Spirulina package can be contaminated and lead to slow poisoning. Emaciated in the context of plenty of food around and plenty of money means that he was deliberately refusing to eat while resting in the tent, this is a common effect of food poisoning.
[1] Speculating "Roach motel" can be an humorous surname for their tent. Nanites could be some kind of "armour", clothes or boots maybe.
OP, based on the Screeps thread, we have a purported Steam profile for MH. Did that yield anything?
Edit: I know that folks thought this was a red herring. Checked the steam profile, power player badge was unlocked on 10/23 but Recently Played shows nothing (might be privacy settings) and last review was 3 years ago. Do badges ever auto-unlock, or could this person have shared a steam account?
The screeps community spent alot of time on this and we got nowhere.
Unfortunately the Screeps dev team is Russian based, so they declined to provide helps with their data.
The journalist contacted players who were active in 2017 and earlier individually (I was one of those) in hope of getting some leads. But from what I knew, even though we had some suspected players, it ended up not getting the lead we wanted.
If someone wants to check, I'd bet he at least forked or starred the github repo. A script to pull the list of those people, minus anyone whos been active since april 2017, would probably show his account.
Looking at https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF
The code that he writes is a blend of languages. The arrow operators -> is indicative of C/C++ but C/C++ doesn't use nil or function. It's like he thinks in C/C++ first which puts him at about my age mid-40s. Anyone younger than 40 would be using dots '.' due to Java/Javascript/Python instead of '->'. Does anyone else get that vibe?
This seems like this would be the way to go. Steam shows less than 200 players for March and April of 2017 and if there are logs that far back, the Screeps team can likely provide some data about users who dropped out in March or April of that year as well
I wish we had better images of the notebook. I noticed a few constants `*_ENERGY_TARGET` which might be searchable if I could make out the first part. It seems that if any code exists for this stuff, it might be those constants come from real code.
A post on this topic is the top post on the screeps subreddit, but with no clear answers. Some posters found players who stopped playing unexpectedly during the appropriate timeframe, along with the group that player collaborated with. However, I don't know if there was any follow-up there, or if it was a dead end.
They seem to be a novice programmer with big ideas. Some notepads might be missing (see pg 11). I really wish the scans were better.
1-2: Ideas for a screeps AI. (Screeps seems interesting! From a brief look, it's an open-source online MMO/RTS for programmers. It's seems kind of like an AI tournament akin to Battlecode, but persistent. You write your AI in JavaScript or WebAssembly.)
3-5 (top half): Unclear. Maybe from a game idea? Maybe part of the screeps AI?
5 (bottom half) - 6 (top half): CPU time calculation for screeps?
6 (bottom half) - 10: More screeps notes.
11: A table of contents for the notepad(s). Not clear what "3s" refers to. t I think it's the name of a game he wants to make. Seems like some of those notepads might be missing?
12-15: Idea for a peer-to-peer backup/storage system.
16: "BLL", a programming/scripting language, probably short for "B... L... Language".
17-18: Nutritional wafer/bar notes. (Probably for an "all-in-one" hiking food.) The mention of "future" and "no allergies, minimum ingredients, natural ingredients" makes it unclear whether this was something he tested, or just an aspiration.
19-33: More Screeps AI notes.
34-40: "Nanites guild". Either a full game idea, or from a game he wants to make and that he provisionally titled "3s".
From reading the notebook he may be a game developer. Quite a few of the pages look like notes from algorithms on rendering a game, maybe an FPS or RTS game, and he talks about outputting to the console and sprites.
Yes, though I would say amateur game developer. Like the kid who always wanted to build a game but never did, got a "real job" doing some kind of much more boring programming.
There is one point where he is musing about mapping commands to hex values within a single byte which makes me think he started programming in the 8bit era.
This tool is good. We could also use Google Lens to extract text from the document, I tried on a few pages it captures a some more text than Handprint.
Having done a bit more reading through other sources. There should be more focus on his abdominal scar, reduced teste size and cachexia (wasting). This is a very common symptom pattern for cancer. A large portion of cancer patients die from cachexia. HIV, or a chronic disease of heart/liver/kidney are other possibilities but would have left other evidence that would have certainly been noted in the autopsy.
My guess is there are some oncologists and surgeons (probably in NY) who know who this person was, but cannot say anything due to confidentiality.
Don't they have a legal requirement to disclose the identity of this person to the police for identification purposes? I understand that they can not do a public reveal, but I think the state has an obligation to keep record on who is alive and dead.
Yes, is a pattern. You don't became cachectic by a acute poisoning. I checked the authopsy but did not claim obvious tumors, tymus anomalies, no obvious signs of kidney or liver diseases. And I didn't find anything about the heart that would support a heart attack, but is soon to discard that.
If it was a poison is not a haemotoxic one in my stupid opinion. (No petechias or inner bleeding, all correct in the circulatory system and most of all all apparently correct in the liver).
If it was a drug it did not appeared in the analytics, so either it does not leave trace after a while or is not a common one. There was not specific medication against cancer or hypotiroidism found in the backpack. Only ibuprophen and antihistaminics I think [1].
[1] I think that is reasonable to explore at least the possibility of an Ibuprophen overdose, just to discard options.
> My guess is there are some oncologists and surgeons (probably in NY) who know who this person was
Probably not helpful, but "Mostly Harmless" is also the title of Rob Rhinehart's personal blog[1]. Rhinehart's 2013 posts about his nutrition experiments under the "Mostly Harmless" title, led to the founding of Soylent.com and the modern meal replacement industry.
So just possibly MH was a fan of Soylent, or of DIY Soylent.
Edit: on this notebook page[2] are the words Algae Pool and Nutrigs (nutrients?)
The pages[3]-[4] seems devoted to planning or documenting an energy-bar recipe. Similar fascination with the nutritional details of artificial foods are expressed by hobbyists who dabble in DIY Soylent recipes, see for example [5], [6].
On this basis I think it at least credible that MH was aware of Soylent and DIY attempts at complete-nutrition foods, so might have learned the "Mostly Harmless" title from Rhinehart's blog.
Which is no help whatever in identifying him, but interesting.
Read an account somewhere that he got invited over to a fire if he didn't bite, or something like that, and replied that he was mostly harmless. It stuck from there.
My guess is his choice of phrasing was influenced by Adams, given he was reportedly an sf/f enthusiast, but it's a pretty standard sort of geeky small talk reply.
As noted elsewhere on the thread, it's originally a Hitchhiker's Guide joke, a description of humans. It was also used as the title for one of the later books in the series.
I wouldn't discount your explanation, but Rhinehart pulled that name from a very popular source.
I looked at this a year ago but unfortunately lost the note I kept.
There was a fellow named Ben Bellamy, who was a software developer, on LinkedIn at one time with a photo that closely matched this guy. I believe he was, in fact, in the New York area but I cannot remember for sure,
I did some poking around tonight but couldn't pull up his LI profile again.
There are two remarkable things that I saw in the autopsy report -
First, there were "abundant" feces in his intestines, which suggests to me (though I am not a doctor) that he didn't starve to death.
Second, he had an abdominal scar, which might be pretty identifying to someone who knew him, and also supports the theory of a recurring cancer or similar illness.
Not even a passing mention of the privacy questions at stake here. I don’t fault the police for seeking answers, but every self-nominated amateur sleuth isn’t due an answer about the identity of someone who in all likelihood wanted to live privately and never committed a crime.
On his hike he was anonymous as far as his real name goes, but he shared some things with people, and I'm not convinced we know that we know what his wishes were as far as his death goes, if any family would ever hear of it, etc.
That could give some peace to their beloved ones, and nothing can harm him anymore. It seems that he has tell to be a divorced; maybe he has children. I think that is a fair move.
Is there no an index of "unrecognized dead people" that can be matched to a list of "people seeking to find disappeared lost one"? I would imagine if a loved one asks for them, providing pictures, the authorities could the said matching?
Readit News
I've spent a few days looking into this and haven't been able to find anything. There's also a big thing about "algae pools" "stock markets", etc, which didn't seem to be about Screeps.
I tried to find games that had these mechanics, and ended up spending a bunch of time looking through Spacestation 13 forums, but I'm leaning toward these references being about a game that he wanted to invent.
Is relevant because the man has been most probably poisoned. It was not a fast poison and it was painful but not too alarming. Not a bee, a wasp or a Bothrops. A plant or fungus, yes, could fit.
Is not suicide and terminal illness in my opinion. Nobody dies by starvation in presence of food.
But there is a third category that I was missing. Your own food. A too old Spirulina package can be contaminated and lead to slow poisoning. Emaciated in the context of plenty of food around and plenty of money means that he was deliberately refusing to eat while resting in the tent, this is a common effect of food poisoning.
[1] Speculating "Roach motel" can be an humorous surname for their tent. Nanites could be some kind of "armour", clothes or boots maybe.
Edit: I know that folks thought this was a red herring. Checked the steam profile, power player badge was unlocked on 10/23 but Recently Played shows nothing (might be privacy settings) and last review was 3 years ago. Do badges ever auto-unlock, or could this person have shared a steam account?
Unfortunately the Screeps dev team is Russian based, so they declined to provide helps with their data.
The journalist contacted players who were active in 2017 and earlier individually (I was one of those) in hope of getting some leads. But from what I knew, even though we had some suspected players, it ended up not getting the lead we wanted.
* starred any screeps repo before May 2017, and no other screeps repo since then
* no public contributions or events since April 2017
If someone has some time to do further filtering, ensure the users have not starred any GitHub repo since May 2017
I didn't go through forks but that would also be an avenue.
[1] https://gist.github.com/aramperes/2363dc3434de6b494b28b5a658...
- amidman
- eqzus
- Mike Hancoski (follows users from NY, wrote PHP code, his personal website domain wasn't renewed and is now available.)
Here’s a link to the transcript of the notes typed out
https://www.reddit.com/r/screeps/comments/fnwhvr/who_is_this...
https://www.colliersheriff.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=94010
Mostly Harmless is an old, now defunct, EVE corp. Might be someone who ran in that that might recognize him.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/cd7ku3/disbanded_allia...
1-2: Ideas for a screeps AI. (Screeps seems interesting! From a brief look, it's an open-source online MMO/RTS for programmers. It's seems kind of like an AI tournament akin to Battlecode, but persistent. You write your AI in JavaScript or WebAssembly.)
3-5 (top half): Unclear. Maybe from a game idea? Maybe part of the screeps AI?
5 (bottom half) - 6 (top half): CPU time calculation for screeps?
6 (bottom half) - 10: More screeps notes.
11: A table of contents for the notepad(s). Not clear what "3s" refers to. t I think it's the name of a game he wants to make. Seems like some of those notepads might be missing?
12-15: Idea for a peer-to-peer backup/storage system.
16: "BLL", a programming/scripting language, probably short for "B... L... Language".
17-18: Nutritional wafer/bar notes. (Probably for an "all-in-one" hiking food.) The mention of "future" and "no allergies, minimum ingredients, natural ingredients" makes it unclear whether this was something he tested, or just an aspiration.
19-33: More Screeps AI notes.
34-40: "Nanites guild". Either a full game idea, or from a game he wants to make and that he provisionally titled "3s".
I’ve posted up above, but just incase you’ve missed them here’s a the transcript of his his notebook typed up
There is one point where he is musing about mapping commands to hex values within a single byte which makes me think he started programming in the 8bit era.
- p2p, client-server notes
- Class definitions and implementation notes
- Source code doing position calculations
My guess is there are some oncologists and surgeons (probably in NY) who know who this person was, but cannot say anything due to confidentiality.
If it was a poison is not a haemotoxic one in my stupid opinion. (No petechias or inner bleeding, all correct in the circulatory system and most of all all apparently correct in the liver).
If it was a drug it did not appeared in the analytics, so either it does not leave trace after a while or is not a common one. There was not specific medication against cancer or hypotiroidism found in the backpack. Only ibuprophen and antihistaminics I think [1].
[1] I think that is reasonable to explore at least the possibility of an Ibuprophen overdose, just to discard options.
> My guess is there are some oncologists and surgeons (probably in NY) who know who this person was
Agree.
So just possibly MH was a fan of Soylent, or of DIY Soylent.
[1] https://www.robrhinehart.com/
Edit: on this notebook page[2] are the words Algae Pool and Nutrigs (nutrients?)
The pages[3]-[4] seems devoted to planning or documenting an energy-bar recipe. Similar fascination with the nutritional details of artificial foods are expressed by hobbyists who dabble in DIY Soylent recipes, see for example [5], [6].
On this basis I think it at least credible that MH was aware of Soylent and DIY attempts at complete-nutrition foods, so might have learned the "Mostly Harmless" title from Rhinehart's blog.
Which is no help whatever in identifying him, but interesting.
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hkpqsnk858pzu7f/AADnCzr7tabArQ_xq...
[3] https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hkpqsnk858pzu7f/AADnCzr7tabArQ_xq...
[4] https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hkpqsnk858pzu7f/AADnCzr7tabArQ_xq...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent
[6] https://www.completefoods.co/
My guess is his choice of phrasing was influenced by Adams, given he was reportedly an sf/f enthusiast, but it's a pretty standard sort of geeky small talk reply.
I wouldn't discount your explanation, but Rhinehart pulled that name from a very popular source.
There was a fellow named Ben Bellamy, who was a software developer, on LinkedIn at one time with a photo that closely matched this guy. I believe he was, in fact, in the New York area but I cannot remember for sure,
I did some poking around tonight but couldn't pull up his LI profile again.
That simply cannot be just a coincidence.
So, not a coincidence.
Sorry for the hazy memory. It was a while ago and was not super important to me. It was just one of my many random OSINT exercises I like to do.
Hopefully my comment might spur somebody on HN with more time to locate the LI profile.
Google also informed me that "Benemy" (or "Benami") means "no name" in Urdu, so if one was into word games then "Bill Benemy" could be "Bill No-Name".
> 16: "BLL", a programming/scripting language, probably short for "B... L... Language".
Could "BLL" be related to Ben Bellamy?
There are two remarkable things that I saw in the autopsy report -
First, there were "abundant" feces in his intestines, which suggests to me (though I am not a doctor) that he didn't starve to death.
Second, he had an abdominal scar, which might be pretty identifying to someone who knew him, and also supports the theory of a recurring cancer or similar illness.
On his hike he was anonymous as far as his real name goes, but he shared some things with people, and I'm not convinced we know that we know what his wishes were as far as his death goes, if any family would ever hear of it, etc.