I think it would be good for me personally if I took a 24 hour break from this thread, to get a little more emotional distance. But Buffistas are going to wander in from vacation and whatnot, and wonder what was goign on here, so there's still going to be some questionign on the Gus beat for a while yet.

I'm basically just checking periodically to see if there's any new news. I do appreciate that Tommyrot made phone calls, and the lack of news is not proof, but is informative, anyway.

Not to throw a wrench into the works, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's possible that Kimi gave us a fake name for Gus. In which case there's really no way for us to confirm any of this, one way or another.

(I don't understand why anyone would give a fake name for someone they claim is dead, but it's at least possible.)

Nutty's comment about Schroedinger's Buffista may in fact be right on the mark.

Several (at least) people had the name Guy Straley for Gus before this, so that part, at least, seems pretty verified.

Sorry to interrupt, but we are going to need a new Natter name fairly soon.

Any ideas?

nevermind

I also did want to add, fairly late, that it is precisely my own googleability as a staff member of a university that led me, personally, to have doubts as to the veracity of some of Gus's life. And, that we all are probably at differant stages of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, so we can expect continued posting.

And to keep this Buffy related, from my personal favorite Buffy "Espensode"

Anya: Okay, that's denial. That usually comes before anger.

Buffy: (angrily) I am not having sex with Spike!

Anya: Anger.

Went back and reread. I totally missed this from Topic!Cindy:

He was quite ill, and would never recover from whatever it was the monkey gave him. He was able to post despite whatever it was the monkey gave him, because he used voice recognition software. He had a hard time posting with it, but he wrote a book.

Is this true (about him having to use voice recognition software)?

Has anyone here corresponded with someone on a board or mailing list who uses voice recognition software because they are unable to use the keyboard? There tends to be tons of typos - extra or missing words, but especially lots of homonyms. And to edit the resulting text using voice recog is a huge PITA - you gotta sit there and command the cursor where to go, and then you have to tell it to edit the word and then you spell out the word for the software.

I knew a guy on another board who couldn't type and who had to use voice recog software - it was very obvious from his emails that something was off (as it just wasn't worth his trouble to edit). If someone had told me years ago that Gus used voice recog it would have immediately pinged me.

(Or are we done poking holes through Gus's backstory?)

As a lurker, I really appreciate the way this was handled in the Bureaucracy thread rather than backchannel. It's been comforting to be able to work through thoughts and emotions in the company of such a thoughtful, caring group of people. Many of you express my thoughts much better than I can! Thank you all.

Is this true (about him having to use voice recognition software)?

I have rememberings of this as well.