dead internet friends

i think it's sad. but it must be easier to deal with if you have never met in person. (and the internet is often a lot more impersonal than seeing someone face to face)

The archive thing is the weirdest bit, I suspect, in that you have all their words there, in exactly the same way they've been ever since they were written in whatever trivial argument or thread of banter or whatever. A friend of mine worked in the WTC, and she said that when she finally got back to work, the hardest thing was opening up her inbox and finding a load of light-hearted emails from people who just didn't exist any more.

For reasons of security and anonymity I prefer to keep my real and internet lives separate, but I have one or two close internet buddies who do have all my personal details including address and telephone numbers and I am sure that if I disappeared suddenly without trace that they would be able to track down what had happened to me and let the rest of the webbernet know. Though I'm not sure anybody would actually be all that interested :)

http://kuci.org/~nraggett/ilan.html

Still there, a few things are of course quite outdated, but the spirit is true to the time.

Double X.

Now I feel all creepy.

The worst part was his last Livejournal entry, the night before he passed on, that simply said "adieu". I suppose he knew what was in store. Friends have left his page up as a sort of tribute. It was terribly sad.

Fortunately I've not lost anyone close to me since the early '80s, but I know one day someone I'm close to will die, and in all honesty I have no idea how I'll react. With luck I'll have the strength to see it for what it is and be able to move on.

That said, a few times I've seen people disappear from internet forums &c., and secretly wondered if those people are no longer extant. It's a horrible thing to consider, but it's the very basis and core of our existence.

I mean, one day my wife might walk in front of a bus, or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, or suffer cardiac arrest; and then it'll just be me, and I'll have had no chance to say goodbye. This occurs to me nearly every day.

Anyway, after Christmas break I ran into my friend Ally and asked her how she was doing. She looked terrible, she asked me if I'd heard the news, I said no. She said "this girl who lived in my dorm, right next door to me, she went home for Christmas break and her ex boyfriend killed her. Her name was Melissa."

I talked to her one time for an hour, several months before, never met her, and I felt absolutely miserable for a long time. Can't ever forget her either.

(jraff if you are reading this, FFS email me!)

Eventually, someone made contact and got the story. Morten had come down with an advanced form of cancer and had been fighting it for a long time. The list (and The Church's music) was one of the few things that was able to draw his attention away from things, but eventually the cancer won.

Someone else picked up the list after Morten and it continued for a year or so, and then I took it over and I've been running it since 1998.