This is going to be 99.5% meaningless to most of my Anime Detour/Convergence peeps, and people
who didn't have much to do with Balticon.

therevdrnye has been in the hospital since Columbus Day weekend, and I don't think he's coming out. His kidneys stopped working, his liver is fucked up with non-alcholic fatty liver syndrome (=cirrhosis), and he has so much fluid in his chest cavity that his heart and lungs aren't working so great either. On top of that, he's fighting an MRSA skin infection. Yay. He was moved from Washington Adventist Hospital to the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore earlier this week, since their liver people are better than WAH's, but I don't think it's going to make a lot of difference.

We go back a long way. We met in community college, got hooked on D&D together, and stayed in touch pretty consistently afterward, talking about music and books and movies and all that stuff; also about more serious things, now and again. He helped me get my head screwed back on straight - well, as straight as it could be - after the Skycache debacle, and it really irks me that I haven't been able to repay him for that. He was always a great storyteller, which is part of what made him a great DM, and I wish to God he'd written some of that stuff down and published it. None of his friends would have begrudged him the stories, but he wouldn't do it.

I went up there today to see him, but he was solidly asleep and apparently could not be wakened. I'll be going up again tomorrow with P, on the off chance he wakes up and can actually talk, but I'm not too hopeful. One thing's for sure - whenever and wherever his memorial service/wake is, it better be pretty roomy, because he had a lot of friends. Damn shame none of us could do anything to prevent this.