Mostly they're not. Damn...the opportunities I've missed to be Erika Johnston from Fayette and Gilmor, witnessing buys and all sorts of shit. But it's the pasty white chick in the wheelchair that needs to communicate with Outside, right? And I'm not even sure Fayette and Gilmor intersect. Guess I'm stuck with myself.

I married Betsy's sockpuppet

sockpuppet of . . .

Point of information: If people are looking for a newspaper obituary, they're more and more uncommon as newspapers rarely provide them for free anymore. Lots of families do without them these days.

Other than that, not enough information to have an opinion.

I am glad that I know so many buffistas irl, because if you tried to google my name to see if I was real, you would get about half a million hits.

If people are looking for a newspaper obituary, they're more and more uncommon as newspapers rarely provide them for free anymore.

Huh. I did not know that. I was going off the basis of my grandfather getting a decent-sized reporter-written obit in the Boston Globe on the strength of being a veteran and former small-town pharmacist (as far as I can recall. There might have been something more). Not exactly an exotic story. But it was many years ago.

That it is!

I'm just saying -- with three pieces of information (name + former location), it was pretty easy to find the real you online.

I was vastly entertained by Gus, whoever he was. If it was a persona, it was an excellent one. If the person who played Gus wrote a book, I'd buy it, because I'd expect it to be entertaining and imaginative. He did have actual programming skills and added some things to the board, including, IIRC, the code to create (link). He put together the Nilly site.

I assumed from his posts that he was in his late '50s or early '60s, because he and I had similar memories of things like '70s fandom and art.

His references to his illness were either joking or oblique. He never, that I recall, asked for anything, including sympathy.

It is a small possibility that he was quite real but wished to continue to remain anonymous and "Guy Straley" is also a pseudonym.

I will miss Gus, whoever he was.

In all honesty, I'm tempted to save the past several days of board somewhere as a study in the nature of grief and the nature of reality. Someone/something was deeply mourned, that is the incontrovertible fact. Even if Gus was a real person, the entity that was mourned exists only virtually for several people. If there is no physical "Gus" as previously defined, the entity still existed and was loved. It begs redefinition of the term "real".

I've been accused of thinking too much about sensitive things. My apologies for the writer in my head who's taking notes.

Newspaper guy does speak true(if he really is one.) But if y'all are fakes, I never wanna know as you are allegedly living out my high-school Poets in Love fantasy, and I want some illusions.

It is a small possibility that he was quite real but wished to continue to remain anonymous and "Guy Straley" is also a pseudonym.

I keep hoping this is the case.