Online deaths

[BKC]

Was he Steel? I didn't visit GamingW very much, but I followed his thread very closely. He was one of the lifelines of the community, like Doug is to Smogon. I talked to him once. He had cancer at 23. And when he died, when I read every reaction, when I read his letter, I really cried. He was an incredible guy. He wanted to help people and leave behind a legacy. For me, he did.

i had never even heard of the guy until now and i was this close to crying after reading that letter, jesus christ

I've been pretty lucky where deaths are concerned until recently when my dad committed suicide. He did it due to a bunch of problems with my mom, and he was kind of psycho, but I can't pretend it didn't hurt like fuck when I found out he actually did it. He literally sat me down in my room and told me he was going to do it, which completely freaked me out, and then I started cussing him out, telling him if he was really making up bullshit like this just to make me listen to him that he could go suck a dick. My mom called the cops, who came with a psychologist, and he bs'd his way past them by 'admitting' he was just bluffing. He left about 20 minutes after the cops did, and then a couple hours later we got a call from a guy who lived about 15 minutes away from us, telling us he found my dad lying on the street with a gun in his hand and his head in a pool of blood. And I just sat on my bed doing nothing but feeling like shit and mentally beating the crap out of myself. The man who taught me how to play sports, who helped me with girls, who was there for me on just about every occasion was dead because I just wouldn't listen to him on something as trivial and stupid as the fact I wanted to go to a party on saturday night instead of doing homework. I felt empty, horrible, and I hated pretty much the whole world. I considered suicide, and then I thought 'do i really want everyone who knows me to deal with the shit that i am right now?' and decided against it. That being said, if I did die I would want smogon to know about it, I have a couple online friends who I have on facebook that would probably let it be known.

 

[akuchi]

I found out one of my best friends from college died through Facebook. Ironically, there was a troll on IRC (another network) that same day where everyone was told one of the sysadmins had died; so I thought it was just some sort of weird internet-wide fad until I saw her facebook and found out she was actually dead. Suicide, she was eighteen.

Obviously due to my involvement with pro-choice suicide communities and mental health forums/USENET etc in the past I expect I have a much higher incidence of knowing/being friends with people who have died than most - I can think of maybe thirty deaths, ten or so of which I was close to (and a couple I'd met IRL). Still sucks, but it's something you just have to accept. I've toyed with the idea of topping myself on more than a few occasions, and I think the internet would find out should that happen cos most places I visit I have at least a few people on my Facebook. But, who knows. I do wonder if it'd go unnoticed by the internet.

 

[drcossack]

In light of recent events, I've been thinking a lot about things like this. In the age of Facebook, it is really difficult to lose track of people you actually care about after what were previously pretty major shifts in lifestyles (high school, college) unless neither of you care to pursue a continued relationship. Even then, unless you take an active role in blocking everything that they are doing on your News Feed, you're still getting a pretty good idea of what your (potentially) former friends are doing. Ultimately this pushes regular communication more towards the "impersonal" internet communication of facebook chat, forums, and instant messenging programs.

Personally, the internet has played a pretty huge part in my life. While online communities have really only been a relatively recent part of that, my high school girlfriend lived a very protected life so, outside of our interactions during school hours and occasional weekends, the bulk of our "relationship" happened online. Similarly, my only real college "relationship" consisted of a drunken meetup leading to a Facebook add leading to IM chats leading to an actual in person relationship. And after those relationships inevitably fell apart, they along with my friends from those periods in my life, linger on via Facebook and the ease of text messaging and the internet.

I guess what I am saying is, while in those cases the internet was a supplement to the physical, that didn't make the internet portion any less "real." This has been confirmed in my meeting various Smogonauts either via the Video Game Championships last year or just they were coming through my town (or I theirs) and connecting with them. Society is undergoing a paradigm shift away from internet relationships as the last refuge of the social outcasts, geeks, and nerds, and towards the internet as merely a means for discovering people with similar personalities and interests as yourself, only across the country and not just locally. Given all of that, it is unsurprising to think of how the death of even someone you may not talk to every day will still hit you pretty hard. It would be the same as if one of your "real life" third tier friends died and I think that everyone can agree that, while maybe it doesn't send you to a psychiatrist, that really sucks.

Going to expand on the bolded part later since I'm heading out the door, but this is definitely true.

Back, so here's the rest of my post.

Back when I played Yu-Gi-Oh (started in junior year of high school maybe?), I went to tournaments at a nearby mall every Sunday without fail (until the mall forced the store owner to stop them.) A few of the guys there posted on gamefaqs (I can recall 3 including myself), and the other two recognized my username - the one was older than the rest of us (a college senior at the time IIRC), and he and I would frequently talk between games. After the mall forced the tourneys to stop, we all more or less went our separate ways, and I have no idea what happened to any of them...or if they'd remember me if we happened to meet. Still, that was definitely my first encounter with "real life/internet mesh with the opposite."

In 2006, I started playing poker online more frequently, and began posting on Full Tilt's on-site poker forum, then later went to another poker forum. I no longer post on either one, though I still talk to people from both - general conversation, sports, and occasional poker talk.

Technology is definitely highly ingrained in how people today communicate with one another though; some of my ("exclusively irl") friends are in different parts of the country, so calling is generally out of the question. If it weren't for things like facebook, texting, etc, I wouldn't be able to talk to them at all.

 

[Gabe]

i had never even heard of the guy until now and i was this close to crying after reading that letter, jesus christ

I've been pretty lucky where deaths are concerned until recently when my dad committed suicide. He did it due to a bunch of problems with my mom, and he was kind of psycho, but I can't pretend it didn't hurt like fuck when I found out he actually did it. He literally sat me down in my room and told me he was going to do it, which completely freaked me out, and then I started cussing him out, telling him if he was really making up bullshit like this just to make me listen to him that he could go suck a dick. My mom called the cops, who came with a psychologist, and he bs'd his way past them by 'admitting' he was just bluffing. He left about 20 minutes after the cops did, and then a couple hours later we got a call from a guy who lived about 15 minutes away from us, telling us he found my dad lying on the street with a gun in his hand and his head in a pool of blood. And I just sat on my bed doing nothing but feeling like shit and mentally beating the crap out of myself. The man who taught me how to play sports, who helped me with girls, who was there for me on just about every occasion was dead because I just wouldn't listen to him on something as trivial and stupid as the fact I wanted to go to a party on saturday night instead of doing homework. I felt empty, horrible, and I hated pretty much the whole world. I considered suicide, and then I thought 'do i really want everyone who knows me to deal with the shit that i am right now?' and decided against it. That being said, if I did die I would want smogon to know about it, I have a couple online friends who I have on facebook that would probably let it be known.

Fuck.... I'm sorry BKC. You can talk to me anytime you want on the chat or w/e about this.

 

[(makeup)]

Has anybody heard anything about akuchi? Since she's had it pretty rough in the past, and last time she was on the forums she was pretty hard into stims... Do people have her on facebook/has she been active there?

she's online right now

 

[Sceats]

she's online right now

Ahah, keep up with the thread lol. A few weeks back toothache posted that she was fine and if you look up a bit you can see her post

 

[Nix_Hex]

I don't have any irl friends here but I correspond with a few close friends in research, middlecup and such. My girlfriend hears me talk about smogon on a daily basis and knows my password, so if I pass it wouldn't be too Farfetch'd for her to post a thread about it or something. It's weird to imagine since I'm not a huge time poster and I've only been active on Smogon for a year, so I don't know how many people would care. I suppose it would be strange if I altogether stopped posting in the FR/LG Research thread. Other than that, my activity here is rather sporadic. I would genuinely be sad if anyone else on here was known to be dead. Disappearing from an internet community is a strange but expected phenomenon. In any case, we all die at one point.