I'm not much for online friends. Or maybe I am. My friends from California, most of whom I haven't seen in almost twenty years are essentially online friends. I talk to them often, most of them anyway. Sometimes I feel like we've all drifted apart and become very different than we used to be, though still we do keep up.

But other than that, I just don't have any friends from the internet. That wasn't always true though. When I was a middle schooler at the outset of the internet age, I made many friends on the internet. I mostly met them through playing StarCraft on Battle.net, or through the chatrooms on RPGClassics.com, or through the chats on Gundam.com back when that was owned by some rando who eventually sold it to Sunrise.

Halfway through high school, my folks couldn't afford for us to have the internet in our house anymore, so my relationships with all those people and places just ceased to be. It did suck, but it did also force me to live in meatspace for a while and you know I got good at being among people there when previously I had not been. Took a while, though.

Back in the StarCraft days, I met three awesome guys. Internet etiquette at the time kept us from sharing too much about our lives, but we learned a bit about each other. They knew me as Red_Reaper, then later Sith_Lord, then later StakeTeriyake.

The first of them was Gunsteel, a dude named Michael who lived in Hawaii and was two years older than me. He and I used to run guilds and I was his second, which is to say I just did what he asked me to do without always understanding it 'cause I wasn't terribly good at StarCraft despite being Korean.

The second was Top_Cat, who randomly asked in a chatroom one night if someone wanted to make a videogame with him. We spent many a night coming up with stories and game concepts. We pretty much independently thought up the hero based RTS concept that Warcraft 3 would use and that World of Warcraft would grow out of. Of course, being kids we didn't get very far, but he was someone I always enjoyed having conversations with at 2am in the summertime. He said he soft pitched our ideas to some folks at Blizzard, but who knows if that was true or not. Regardless, a ton of our ideas ended up in Warcraft 3, it was pretty much exactly the game we envisioned (though my vision was more dark fantasy). Could be that's where the design philosophy was heading, could be we gave them some neat ideas, but it's certainly lost to the past now.

The last was Ceramic_Bull, or as their forum/email signature said: The Almighty Ceramic Bull. His name was John and he lived somewhere in the Midwest. I can't exactly remember where, but he was around my age.

Ceramic_Bull was the closest thing I had to a best friend for a while. We met when I signed up to do some work for a StarCraft mod that was looking for people as one of their story writers. I also helped them a little bit with map design and a tiny bit with programming an enemy that could travel underground. I'm not exactly sure how we became friends, but we were the type of teenage boys to exchange hentai back and forth and comment on porn. For some reason.

Ceramic_Bull was the guy I showed a lot of my writing to. I used to make this DBZ fanfiction (cringe incoming) with my own self-insert character modeled on Sephiroth who was dating Android 18 and I wrote in Ceramic_Bull as a sort of Enkidu type of character who initially fought but then became best friends. Oh and this was all in screenplay format with notes about what music should be playing in scenes all taken from whatever anime or movie I'd watched that week. Verr 2000s cringe, and I hadn't even discovered Hot Topic yet.

Guy was always supportive, even when I was a misanthropic asshole. He always encouraged me to ask out the girl or build the thing or whatever. Didn't mind playing StarCraft with me even though I sucked. We played through this RPG map modeled on Diablo once. Really good map that I still remember all these years later made by someone called HumanApe. At the end of the dungeon after fighting all the monsters and defeating the boss, the map said "congratulations but I can't have you going and beating my first map" and then we all died and got a "mission failed" which I thought was hilarious but others not so much.

In those days I didn't understand much about depression or anxiety or mental health in general. I'd gone through some very rough times not too long before and I'd let myself become a bit of an edgy teenage jerk. I didn't like it, I just didn't know how to feel safe and being a jerk just seemed to be what I had to be to survive. One night, during one of our conversations, I said, just to be funny "I am evil" and Ceramic_Bull replied "You're not evil. Darker than most, but certainly not evil."

And I can't tell you what those words meant to me. Nobody had said that before and maybe I guess I needed someone to meet me where I was in my melodrama and just softly say "nah." I took that idea of myself with me on all my adventures since, and it's helped me stay grounded in dark times.

Losing the internet meant I lost touch. I emailed him once near the end of high school from the library to see how he was doing and he seemed to be well. I remember his last name and email still and every few years I see if I can find him on social media just to see how he's doing. I haven't been successful.

These days it's hard for me to maintain relationships with people who aren't in my corner of meatspace very often. I find it difficult to talk to folks I don't know very well online now, even if I did meet them irl. I used to do it all the time, but now I'm just too self conscious or something, I'm not sure. There was something about communicating through IRC and ICQ that's been lost to our modern day social media barbarism.

I don't know exactly when I became stilted when talking to new people over chat. Sometime around when my Dad died, I'd guess. In the summertime it's not a problem, lately in the summertime, so long as I'm exercising, eating right, and sleeping stably, I basically have no symptoms of depression and anxiety. In the winter though, that isn't the case. Though who knows how much of that comes from the terror of the historical period I am living in.

I miss my internet friends, especially the Almighty Ceramic Bull. I wonder how they're all doing now and again. I think Gunsteel went to UCLA, and who knows where Top_Cat's gone. I know Ceramic_Bull ended up dating that girl he really liked for at least a while. I hope they're still playing games. I hope they're not fascists. I hope they're happy, as happy as can be at any rate. I wonder if they remember long nights with StarCraft and the weird kid who loved to write colorful non-racist death threats constantly.

I wonder what they'd think, me still remembering them all these years later, writing my memories down like it's the last record of a lost civilization. Then again, isn't it just?