In Memoriam

[Myst42]

I dont know if this is a thing, but due to the events of the current year mostly, it has come to my attention that the internet is a place where everything that happens in the real world echoes as well.

 

More specifically, I refer to the topic of death. Regardless of political opinions, most people know of something who died due to the recent pandemic, or perhaps for some other cause. Death is not a stranger to people who stays as long as I have on the internet.

 

When you stay for long enough, you'll eventually meet people, make friends, and one day, those friends may be gone too. And it's almost worst online because, on the idea of "keeping anonimity", as much as that can be a thing, it's a good habit to not reveal any personal information, even to people you've come to know and trust online. This will inevitably mean that in the event of their demise, or yours, friends will probably not know, and all that will be left of them, is their memory, and an empty account that will never reply to messages again, or post new content. Not knowing can be worse because unlike real life, you dont get to have closure.

Without any knowledge of their personal reality, these accounts are the reminder of the people who's gone.

 

Of course they could just be gone because "they simply got bored of gaming/modding" or they "just got busy doing something else", but that is not always the case, as I've seen happen with knowledge of cause more than a couple of times.

 

So I thought to write this because a few people I used to talk to, are now missing, and I have the nasty impression that they are no longer among us and will never come back.

I dont want to give names in case they are still alive and around, but in the case they are not, I'd like to at least write that they will be missed. That at least, someone remembers them without ever even knowing their faces. That they contributed something and that their content cheered someone up out there, or perhaps even helped someone on their own journey through gaming life.

It is the invisible footprint of our online lives, a mark that can endure even beyond the mark we leave "in real life". A virtual memory far away, and across the globe, echoing to the farthest regions of the planet, to reach places some would probably never even have dreamed of knowing personally.

 

In memory of all the people we have known and lost online. If you have been around for long enough, you'll know someone too who one day will be gone. If you have been around for long enough, you'll probably have already lost someone too.

To them, especially to the ones I write this about, I wanted to dedicate a moment to remember them, and what they meant for me and my gaming life.

In the purest of modern internet traditions...

 

F

 

Feel free to write about someone if you knew them on this thread if you want... Would be nice to know I'm not the only one who remembers people who's no longer around. Who were these people, and how do you remember them

[flutie]

The worst part about making friends online is not knowing what has become of them when you lose contact, several guild mates from GW 2, come to mind, I just hope the people you refer to are alive and well 

[Joe Pineapples]

Death ? at 53 I've lost a few,best friend's, old friends, parent's ( I hope i read this correctly and am responding correctly ) online no one,

 

The hardest one was my Uncle,who died from Dementia,In the end he didn't even know his own name, this is a person who despite his age educated me more than any school ever did and was like a father to me,taught me the value of hard work/smart work and was a real Aussie bloke

 

So annoyed when Tim Brooke-Taylor died that's part of my childhood though

 

To quote Kirk how we deal with death is just as important as how we deal with life

 

Take time to grieve,but don't dwell,it comes to all of us

 

I only have 3 people left now

 

I didn't survive the Rave scene to be killed by some virus named after a beer

[dharvinia]

I am 30, so you would think that death would be more of a stranger to me, but I lost both my parents on the same day in a car accident.   That was five years ago.

I was lucky, soon after I met the loves of my life and it has made being without parents much easier.  I still miss them,  but I have people I can turn to when I am sad.

 

As for online friends there was a guy who is still listed as one of my followers but who disappeared a few years ago.  He was older, and I often wonder what happened to him.

We used to have great chats together.

It is the not knowing part that makes it hard to bear.

[Mr. Otaku]

There's no real way to know if a user is dead or just abandoned their account. These thoughts often come to me when i read very old (or not so old) threads that have been inactive for a long time. What are these people doing? How many of them could be dead at this moment? Or how many of them could be living very happy lives with new interests and activities. But as is the nature of anonymity, there's no real way to tell. I think there's a certain tranquility in that, people swarming together in a moment of time and then scattering away. Take LoversLab for example. We're all here in this moment, communicating, immortalizing our digital presence before eventually drifting away into our own paths. In this moment it feels like an eternity, as if nothing will ever change but time catches up with us all eventually.

 

For some it does a little too soon. Back when i was regularly active in a private, rather small scale forum site dedicated to anime/manga i was friends with quite a lot of the users but i soon formed a very tightly packed little group of select few who got along very well. We would frequently share pictures, talk over voicechat while watching anime/hentai together on rabb.it before it got relaunched as "kast" and shitpost on each other's profile pages. The site had a myspace like feature that allowed us to put a song as our page theme, we could also pick any picture as a page background and there was a code block in the settings page for us to write our own page UI, so we all had a lot of fun with it.

 

Then one day i realized that one of them was being rather off, in hindsight he was being off long before i realized but this unsettled me. I'll call him Sam. So this was a rather cheerful guy, but jarringly lost his spark which we all noticed. I brought it up in few occasions and tried to pry a bit but he'd just shrug it off. So instead of realizing that something's really not right here i took that for granted and carried on. Then one day he posts in his page "Thanks guys, been a ride." which caught us by surprise. Is it a hiatus? Is he leaving? What? Why?

 

In 5 days we get a group PM from his brother telling us that Sam passed away within 10 minutes of making that last post before texting his brother who was now going around closing all the accounts he had. Apparently Sam didn't leave any clue behind as to what was troubling him so much. It was shock mixed with sadness to say the least, came outta nowhere like the strongest sucker punch ever. Not long after the rest of us in the group started to slowly fade away into our own lives causing an ever growing gap between us. In 2019 the site itself got closed due to lack of funding and the domain got sold. Sometimes i wonder what must've gone through his mind in his last moments. I'll never know, all i can do is forever guess.

[AKM]

On 9/19/2020 at 1:05 AM, Mr.Otaku said:

I'll never know, all i can do is forever guess.

Oh yes.  I'm there as well.  Had one I was close to, but we drifted a bit.  I knew enough to know there were problems, but not enough to assist.  The problem was, this was online, and, worse, I caught several "mis-truths" ie lies.  When I confronted them with that, the answer was to the effect of: "I just don't know if you'll like the real me."  So, basically, I had a "friend" who I thought I knew at least some about... and then got the "letter of intent" ("Thanks for being my friend. Goodbye.").  Then the account closed, literally overnight.  For some reason, I decided to check here in the morning (something I never do), and got the message, with the account already gone.  I went back through our correspondence, and found a number of things that just didn't quite make sense.  They did at the time, because I wanted them to, but looking back, it was "What? How?" on not just one or two things, but a few.  Some things were seemingly true, with photos to "prove" the "fact", and they had that "home-made" atmosphere to them, but it's still a complete unknown if that wasn't just pulled from the infamous "somewhere".  Hell, I even found that a personal photo sent to me had been posted to another website (that I'd never even think of, never mind visit), though it was the start of the confirmed lies.  Even over the top security for sending me the picture, only to find out years later that the same picture had been posted openly on another webpage.  Truly odd.  It seemed like the truth was something they just couldn't face.  The only indication that I have that this was someone real was that the photo was posted to the website shortly after being sent to me (a few days later), and it's the only instance of that photograph out there.  Then again, there were the "home-made" photos that included things we'd talked about, so... all I have is more questions.

The worst part is, to this day, I have absolutely zero idea who it was I spent more than two years talking with.  One day, it was "You don't know me.", the next "You know me!"  And of course, this was no voice, no video, just typed words.  I got a feel for the person behind the words, to be sure (you can't hide basics), but there's careful, and then there's just beyond.  This was a bit far, in my humble opinion.

Stupid me.  Oh well, live and learn.  Never again, that's for sure!

Still, there's a reason I leave up the Oregon Suicide Line in my profile.  Just in case.  Kinda stupid after all this time (years), but I really did care.  Even if this person wasn't at all who they said they were, they still deserve(d) the help they really needed.  But as a family member told me shortly after I got the letter: "You can't help someone who doesn't want the help."  Ah well.

And at least I have the whole My Little Pony thing to thank them for, but even then, it's just a prop to remember what was, rather than going out and finding something (someone) new.  Hell, I even went to the last Bronycon convention trying to find answers.  I think I did find some, but certainly not the closure I was really seeking.  Just more questions/possibilities.

Not knowing is the worst.  If I were able to confirm it, a death certificate, even a newspaper obituary, but I have nothing other than "Thanks, goodbye.".  Just a first name (a ridiculously common one), and you've GOT to have a last to do anything with regards to having a hope of figuring anything out. Really kind of puts an exclamation point on what the whole thing was in reality: nothing.  And I believed it!  Oh well.  At least there were a few valuable lessons learned about life in general.

Found this one.  I'll post it elsewhere eventually, but for now, here's to you, my friend:

Spoiler