That party was a huge milestone in retrospect. It was the day FOSS went mainstream. Shortly thereafter, the dot-com boom ended and the 90s tech parameters got upended and scrambled.
His blogs (LiveJournal, and later on, his own WordPress instance) and website has content going all the way back to 1993. I remember finding it as a teenager and reading all the stories and being enchanted by them.
At some point he did write why he bought the club, he was moaning about the state of night life in SF, and a friend said something like "Why don't you do something about it?"... so he did.
A mentally ill San Francisco restaurant/nightclub owner [1] who is eternally bitter that he did not become a billionaire like his colleagues and contemporaries during the dotcom bubble.
[1] Well, until said restaurant/nightclub finally drain his remaining funds
People talk the same shit about Woz and Paul Allen too.
I could have gotten in on the third big round of hiring at Amazon, but I told my friend I’d rather work until retirement than get rich writing Perl code. People are allowed to have standards, and those standards are allowed to keep you from taking money you don’t feel good about.
If it wasn’t then we would all be sex workers. Most pay for the least work.
This is the first time I have ever discussed jwz here. I have no particular brief for, or against, whatever HN's "consensus" on Zawinski is. What I said is based on my reading his blog for more than a decade.
It's partially because of inertia, because I put it into my RSS reader a long time ago. It's partially because there are interesting posts every now and then, such as the one about him repurposing his old Lisp Machine terminal, or about XScreeenSaver. And yes, it's partially because rubbernecking while passing by a colossal trainwreck is always entertaining.
