Flowerchild was a mysterious online figure who, over the course of ten years, created and updated Better Than Wolves in his free time. Not much concrete information is known about his identity in real life, except that he was bald, probably Canadian, and served in the military. Online, however, he was radiant. His presence on forums and in chat rooms lit up the whole place. His insights into making games were so fundamental as to be groundbreaking. He literally rewrote Minecraft from the ground up, creating a new genre from scratch. Indeed, over the course of his short decade of productivity, a unending stream of exciting updates flowed from his fingertips, through the web, and across the screens of millions of people around the globe. He was also hilarious.
Flowerchild was not without his controversies, but time has made those things feel like the arguments kids have, remote. The dramas that so captivated us in years gone by will probably soon fade out of memory, but it is my hope that the unbreakable character of Flowerchild is not soon forgotten. In the sea of ass kissing and pettiness that is our internet, Flowerchild was not afraid to tell people no. He really wasn’t afraid to tell anyone exactly how he felt, and that authenticity was liberating. In Flowerchild’s corner of the internet, words retained some value. A little spark of the enlightenment, or at least some 20th century perversion of it, burned on in his carapaced heart.
All told, Flowerchild was a man of exquisite taste.
