by 
“To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses.” – Cicero
I’m going to start this blog with a goodbye to one of my oldest and dearest friends.
Back in January my friend Tim finally convinced me to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with him. That was always his genre, not mine, he liked compelling stories and methodical gameplay, I liked action. He was the folk storyteller to my Elvis. After months of him hyping up BG3 I finally said okay sure.
We had a day planned to start playing. I let my significant other know that I was about to enter gremlin mode and go on one of my game binges because BG3 is immense. I planned, I prepared, I had notes ready, a build planner in my bookmarks, my windows arranged on my second monitor. I was ready. I was going to play a bard.
Tim didn’t show. I emailed him and he sent me back a picture of his ceiling that collapsed. That was one of the last messages I would ever get from him. He told me that debris got in his eye and that he breathed it in as well. A couple weeks later he told me he had been in the hospital. A couple weeks later he told me he was still in the hospital but was hoping he could go home soon. He died three days later.
We’ll never get to explore the world of Baldur’s Gate together. I’ll never have the pleasure of having him spend weeks hyping up some RPG that he’s super excited about. I won’t get to hear his thoughts on Witcher 4 and we won’t have any more heated debates about which of our chosen MMOs is better.
Twenty years ago we met in a WoW guild. I don’t remember our first conversations or why we bonded. I remember that I played a warrior and he played a druid. I remember our first dungeon run together and how he pulled aggro from me constantly and how annoyed I was after that run. I remember I would come online and he would immediately send me a message and start telling me about his adventures so far that day.
Most of our conversations were via email. He would send me the most disturbing memes trying to find where the line was. He was the Howard Stern shock jock of my email inbox. I’d see that I had a message with an attachment knowing I was going to see some absolutely bonkers disturbing meme.
We would talk technology, theology, politics, whatever. We would play single player RPGs like Fallout and Dragon Age and compare or playthroughs. He might say something like “Did you find X item at Y place?” And I’d say “No, but I’ll go look. Did you see this cool thing, though?”
He went through a phase where he knew that the McDonald’s jingle would get stuck in my head so he’d find a way to link it in conversations. His own little version of Rick Roll.
He wouldn’t say things were cool, he’d call them “kewl” and say things like “Shibby” - There was a period of time where he would communicate in phrases like “Shibby” and I would reply with something from Pootie Tang which as far as I’m aware he never saw. We might explore a new area together in World of Warcraft and he would say “Shibby” to express that he thought whatever we were looking at was cool, and I might reply with “Wa Da Tah!” to express that I agreed.
One of my favorite experiences, one that we would talk about for the rest of his life oddly enough, was back in ‘09 or so. World of Warcraft added the random dungeon finder, and for the first time you could do dungeons with people on other realms. We joined a group, I on my warrior and Tim on his Death Knight. We got matched up with three people on a different realm and in the same guild. They turned on slow walking and roleplayed for the entirety of Utgarde Pinnacle, telling Tim that they were keeping an eye on him because he was a Death Knight and they didn’t trust him to be honorable. What should have been a 15 minute dungeon run turned into an hour long event. At the end they thanked us for being good sports. We just stayed because we wanted to avoid the queue debuff and the long queues.
Years later in Pandaria we decided to do a 2AM dungeon run. The queue time was nearly 30 minutes. I went afk for 30 seconds and missed the queue. He didn’t let me forget it for ages.
Also in Pandaria he would play a monk, and he rolled off so many edges.
In Cataclysm I got distracted by a text message and walked off a ledge to my death in Grim Batol.
I remember raiding with him in Wrath of the Lich King and he was so specific about everything. People in our raid would use the Hallowed Wand toys to transform his character into a ghost, pirate, leper gnome, whatever and he would immediately cancel the buff and yell “NO FUN ALLOWED!”
Two decades of adventure came to a sudden end and I’ve realized I’ll never have quite the adventure again. You meet new people in our hobbies but meeting someone you can adventure with across multiple worlds and universes, laugh at the dumb mistakes, and just have fun is really once in a lifetime.
All things change, whether from inside out or the outside in. That is what magic is. And we are magic too. -Jaina Proudmoore
So, it has come to this. Together, we have learned and grown over the years. -General Nazgrim
I hope wherever he is now, if there’s a place after this, he has all of his books and games that he loved.
From banishing Ragnaros to the bug filled Temple of Ahn’Qiraj to fighting the scourge. From going through the Dark Portal to clearing the Black Temple. Fighting the Scourge AGAIN. Slaying Deathwing the Destroyer. Saving Pandaria. Doing whatever that was in Draenor. Defeating the Burning Legion. Collectively skipping Shadowlands. Exploring the Wasteland from Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, etc. Until we meet again, Lok’tar Ogar.
