The New York Times reports that writer, game designer, and filmmaker Theresa Duncan is dead, apparently by suicide. Her partner, artist Jeremy Blake, is still missing, presumably at sea. It's a sad and strange story, which gets stranger and stranger the more you read it. It's one of those stories where the full truth may never be known.

From the article:

Ms. Duncan, who was raised in Detroit, became a prominent video-game designer in the late 1990s, making sophisticated story-based CD-ROM games for young girls — an underserved population in a business largely aimed at adolescent boys. She and Mr. Blake had moved to Los Angeles but recently returned to New York, Mr. Kinz said, where she was working on writing and movie projects.

She also maintained a blog called “The Wit of the Staircase,” where she wrote energetically and at length on topics ranging from books to politics to Kate Moss. Her last entry, dated July 10, the day she died, includes a blurry photograph of a woman putting on a mask and quotes the novelist Reynolds Price: “A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens — second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.”

Read the full article over at nytimes.com