@ Valka - That is very sad news. I am sorry to hear about your friend.
It's pretty sad news. I wonder if CFC survives next 50 years so I have to experience people from here passing away. Would be heartbreaking.
Sorry for the loss of your friend, Valka
Thanks, all. I appreciate your kind words. A lot of people miss her, and of course it may seem trivial to some who think that online relationships are ephemeral or "just pixels and bits," but years of shared fun, discussions, and even the occasional argument add up to something that's at least as real as snailmail pen pals.
@Dusters: I've had the experience numerous times of losing an online acquaintance or friend when they die. And yes, it can be heartbreaking. I still wonder about the young man on my Doctor Who forum, who we discovered died by suicide. I keep wondering if there were any signs that were missed in his posts, if there was anything at all any of us could have done to help him... we'll never know.
Many years ago, the first RPG forum I belonged to allowed an underage boy to join - because his mother and uncle were forum members, and he loved role-playing games (especially Fuzzy Knights - "Mossfoot ruuuules!"). It hit everyone hard when he had an accident - fell down some stairs, hit his head, and died from his injuries. He wasn't even 10 years old. Years later another member of that forum died... this time of illness. She was elderly, but never lost her enthusiasm for gaming and mentored a lot of the younger players, me among them. When she died, people on four gaming forums went into mourning.
And there have been others, on forums, social media boards, in email groups... we nearly lost Robert Silverberg last year, to a heart attack (he survived). I guess where I'm going with this is that it definitely is sad to lose online friends and acquaintances. Most of us will never meet in person, but we're real to each other, and it does matter when sad things happen.
...i feel zero empathy for someone dying, because of my religious views. Therefore I tried to rationalize it a bit to see if it changes anything for me.
I'm atheist, yet I don't see that as a reason not to have empathy for someone dying. Mind you, it does depend on the circumstances. I wasn't able to summon up even the slightest shred of empathy for my dad's last girlfriend when she was in the hospital. She'd done her best to play "divide and conquer" among my dad, grandmother, and me for 17 years, so when she was gone, I just heaved a sigh of relief, bid her good riddance, and then had to deal with the collection agencies who were after her. They didn't get very far.
how do we know if anyone's real tho
I do all of you here the courtesy of assuming you're real people.
It's sometimes hard to tell, though. A long while ago there was a thread that went on here in OT for weeks before the realization set in that the people replying to the thread were conversing with a spammer advertising a YouTube music channel.
I had an argument with a RL person several years ago. She thinks that when I type comments on a forum I'm really just talking to myself because nobody online is real. I asked her why she thought that, and she said, "Because you can't see them." So I reminded her that when people send snailmail letters to people, you can't see who you're writing to, so they must not be real, either. She responded, "That's different."
