No more having sex in SEK's office.
The thing about the deaths of Prince and Bowie wasn't just that they were great artists, but that they had so much life. They were people you could count on to be new and different.
Scott was like that times 10. This doesn't hit me as a death of someone I knew, so much as a death of someone who made everything more interesting.
It looks like the family is not making an official announcement yet, but I suspect when I wake up tomorrow morning, it will be official. We are all worse off now.
I'm gutted.
He certainly made everything more interesting.
(I recently found out there's a Belgian Beer Cafe in town at one of the hotels here. I think I'm going to pour one out and tie one on in his memory after work.)
I'm hoping that this is exaggerated. But if not, this is terribly sad news. He had a quick wit and a very big heart.
I don't want this to be true, and am therefore still holding out hope that he can recover (though I understand that the case is quite dire, of course).
I still have a pair of thoughtful, sweet messages from him following up with me about a stupid comment spat on the Valve. I hope that, in his last lucid days, he was able to draw as much comfort as possible from his impressively large audience of loyal fans.
It feels oddly like the end of an era. I'll remember him for a long time.
Gary Farber said at the other place that he'd confirmed the news, the part about being taken off life support.
Such a great spirit, and man could he write like it was going out of style.
Very sad. One of his threads long ago got me hooked on reading here. So sorry for those of you who knew him well.
8: I know. It's so unfair; it is so massively, stupidly unfair.
But unless and until his family confirm the very worst of our fears, I'm still going with "taken off life support" is not necessarily incompatible with "still alive, and still fighting to remain so."
I don't know SEK personally, btw, but he has long been one of my favourite internet people ever. And he's so young! and such a great writer, and just brilliant.
2016: if you snuff out this light, you really are one of the worst years ever.
In light of 13.2, let's note that 2016 has also distinguished itself by repeatedly keeping hope alive until the last possible minute, then slitting its throat and spraying the blood around like a B-movie.
How awful, and what a wonderful amount of light he shined in our stupid corner of the internet in a short time. Rest in peace.
Good to see you around, Halford, even if it's under unpleasant circumstances.
Halford! We miss you always.
But this is a bloody awful set of circumstances within which to welcome you back to the fray.
Off life support and adding heavy duty pain meds is the end. I will miss him.
You know it's bad when al is at a loss for words.
I have so many happy internet and Unfogged memories associated with SEK. This is so horrible and sad. It feels like a door closing.
Damn damn damn! And just after it looked like the worst might not happen. We are all much poorer.
This comment from the thread linked at 12 seems appropriate:
200 years from now, he'll be like Baron Munchhausen: A historical figure with obviously fantastic stories attached to his name.
Ugh. I only ever interacted with him directly a few times via comments on various blogs, but I've read so much of his writing over the years that he feels like someone I know.
Fuck off, 2016.
I keep waiting for him to show up and post that it's all an unlikely and idiotic misunderstanding. Fuck, indeed.
And the infamous deleted thread ... he really had some kind of gravitational pull for weirdness. A terrible waste and a loss to his friends and family.
I don't have anything useful to say. Brilliant guy, gone too soon. Damn everything.
If this violates the privacy and sanctity of off-blog communications then obviously don't share, but does anyone know what exactly afflicted him, health-wise? I read "multiple organ failure", but I'm assuming something presaged that.
Multiple organ apparent success?
Rest in peace.
In re 29: He was in remission from cancer, and so obviously not working from a great baseline. There was some kind of infection in recent weeks that first didn't go away and then got dramatically worse. At LGM (and elsewhere, I think), there had been a call for donations to help defray costs of ICU care. In the last few days there had been conflicting reports about hospice care or long-term care. Presuming this news is confirmed, keyaki at 15 has it right.
This makes me sad.
I'm looking forward to re-reading a bunch of his stuff, though. The guy could write.
Damn he was funny as fuck.
I hope Apo links that thread ( SEK once wrote me that he didn't mind us discussing it when I mentioned it had come up at a NYC meetup).
Here we go. The post is a nice list of SEK stories and re-reading the back and forth between me and SEK at the top had me cracking up. Yes I'm fucking btocked, why do you ask
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/04/to-those-who-wonder-how-im-constantly-assailed-by-the-improbable
The Man To Whom Improbable Things Happen is not the only character he created that has some prospect of having staying power. There's also Oldman Cat. ("Battle Prawn!") Not a bad legacy.
Right now at LGM there is post that basically calls the news that SEK has died rumor, though it doesn't sound good.
39: I updated the front page accordingly.
I'd like to think that he is such an attractor of the improbable that he would now proceed to make a full recovery.
But damn this is awful news.
Didn't an SEK-related post disappear from LGM earlier on?
I'm just going to go head and feel horrible anyway.
I have been wondering how SEK was doing and stalking his FB occasionally. I'd hoped that no news was good news, as it meant he was beginning a slow and painful journey to recovery. I suppose we can still hope for a miracle, but it's looking grim and optimism has a bad track record. 15 sums it up perfectly.
Fuck 2016. The universe owes SEK a wildly improbably positive outcome for once, but this hasn't been the year for that.
42. Yes. There's a new one now. On Facebook his brother asked purple to please refrain from tagging Scott in posts saying he was dead. The brother said this was distressing to their parents and others as Scott wasn't dead. I believe that LGM post was taken down in respect for that wish.
He's gone. It's "official" in that the news is coming from his brother.
Several members of his family are now posting on fb--SEK is no longer with us.
Spent last night crying and rereading some of his greatest hits. What a loss.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
A world in which "deserve" ain't got nuthin to do wit.
This is so sad. I remember so many correspondences, he was my first "blog" friend. I remember talking to him on the phone, keeping each other company one NYE because the Little Womedievalist was visiting family, and he was home with a sick cat. I remember having pizza at a restaurant at UCI. I remember all the little moments our paths crossed, but more than that I remember reading his words. I am so sad; he was my first Internet Friend. My heart goes out to his family.
Nice to see you around, BL, even though it's under such unpleasant circumstances.
Is that the exact same thing I wrote to Halford? Checking, not exactly the same but close enough. Oh well.
Thanks. This is such awful news, even on top of such an awful year.
2016 can go fuck itself. Seriously.
Really sad news. Deepest sympathies and condolences to all who knew and loved him. I was only a peripheral admirer, but his posts made me laugh and helped me learn. Not much more you can ask for.
Say, has this led anyone else to stare back over the last 10-12 years of personal life on the Internet? All this wasting of time, it really did matter, this has been life (and lives). I still can't quite get the measure of it.
Yeah, I'm sad for Scott, and I miss the environment where I got to know him. I didn't know him past the sort of friendly bloggy acquaintance level, but that was a really good feeling, back then, that there were all those great people out there who you could be sort of connected to, and if it ever made sense geographically or otherwise, you might be able to turn them into real friends. The internet doesn't feel that way to me anymore.
65 is more or less my feeling too. It feels weird to look back on 10 years ago as a sort of "golden age" of blogging and the connections it engendered, but it also feels accurate.
The internet doesn't feel that way to me anymore.
Yeah. Christ.
It was 14-15 years ago, another globally bad time, when I was blogging about a locally bad time I was having, another blogger got in touch with me and it turned into a correspondence. I'm married to her now. The medium really did seem like proof against loneliness for a while, both in its purely amorphous days and then in those semi-structured social blogging endeavors like Six Apart's Vox. I wish they had been sustainable against the other place.
The Golden Age of Blogging had Megan McArdle in it, and this one still feels shitty and mean-spirited.
And all credit to Standpipe at 1 for the right phrase.
The Blogging era was great, and I thought it would last forever.
There was only one Unfogged thread important enough to show my wife, and SEK starred in it.
71.2 Which thread was that Walt? *Checks to see if SEK was in that clown-fucking poetry thread*
Guessing it was the quickly-redacted photobucket thread.
This is so sad. His family must be devastated.
Is it just me? Or does the world seem like a meaner, harsher place?
65: I associate that early blog era with both SEK and John Emerson. At least in my own blogoshpere travels, they seemed to be ubiquitous. Whatever new venue I discovered, it seemed, they were already there.