Before Vanishing, Ryoshi Changed His Face — to a Hermit Poet and a Half-Moon

A small, easily-missed detail from Ryoshi's exit — and it turns out not to be the one the story usually tells. ❶ What the archive holds: On X, the avatar was the same ink drawing (a Zen ox-herding scene) from at least March 31 through May 4, 2022 — it did not change in the run-up to anything. It changed at the vanishing itself: the replacement image was uploaded at 01:01 UTC on May 30, 2022, and it is Jetsun Milarepa, the Tibetan hermit poet who withdrew into the mountains. The header became a half-moon. Two outlets writing that week say the same (DailyCoin, TimesTabloid), and the Wayback captures line up with them. ❷ Then where does the bird come from? From Medium, in community retellings — but the earliest surviving capture of that profile is September 2022, and by then it carries Medium's default mark, no avatar at all. So the bird cannot be checked, and on X it plainly did not happen. ❸ The crow bridge, honestly: CAW's identity is built on the crow, and a founder turning into a bird right before a crow-token appears would have been a perfect parting wink. What he actually turned into was a hermit who sang and disappeared — and a half-moon, the shape that keeps recurring across this archive (the full moon behind the plague doctor, the crescent in the Venice post). 🔍 Observatory: the bird is the version that travelled; the record kept something quieter. That gap is worth leaving visible — it is a clean, gentle example of how a community polishes its own lore, and the polished version was, for once, less lovely than the plain one. Unverified as to Medium; the X change is documented. 🐦‍⬛