I did not expect, this past Thursday, to be on the phone with authorities two thousand miles away trying to convince them to take the need for a wellness check seriously. I did not expect to hear from someone I only occasionally spoke to (but still think warmly of) asking to check in on a close friend. I did not expect peaceful quiet to become worry, then anxiety, then panic, then the hollowness of loss. I did not expect to spend the next day and a half reaching out to as many places and as many people as I could to let them know what happened, hoping that I could reach far enough and to enough people that the news would start spreading itself and everyone who should know did know. I did not expect to lose one of my closest friends of 22 years, a person I have known longer in my life than not, suddenly and unexpectedly. I did not expect to be saying good-bye to Belghast.
I did not expect to post in my blog, this blog, possibly ever again. I’m not really writing this for anyone to read. I don’t even know where it syndicates anymore, if anywhere. I’m not really writing it for myself, if I’m honest. I am not as open or talkative a person as Bel was, it was always something he would chide me about. He, I think, always wished I would write as prolifically as he did, or as regularly, but I am not much for sharing outside of closely controlled spaces. It is one of many ways Bel and I differed, and one we would joke about a lot.
I’m writing this for Bel, because a blog post seems fitting.
I met Bel in 2004, as a persona I had no idea was so far from his default. He was Lodin, a Hunter in WoW, and the only thing about that character that even slightly reflected the real Bel was that Lodin was a Dwarf. He was mostly quiet, he was friends with the raid leader, and he was competent. Other than “skilled, not annoying, not conflicting with my loot drops” for the first few months we knew each other we barely talked. What he did, the thing that really caused me to sit up and take notice, was set up the website and forum for our little group, the Late Night Raiders.
He could have co-lead the raid, if he’d wanted. It was me who wound up co-leading instead. What he did instead was use his IT skills to make sure everything we needed to run the raid was smooth and functional, and community-building to boot. He took innumerable screenshots, I came to realize, recording everything over months and years of raiding together.
When I got it into my head to go after a frankly stupid endeavor– trying to build a Scepter of Ahn’Qiraj ahead of the Gates event in WoW, I found myself desperately trying to scrape together mostly disinterested people to do some difficult and deeply unrewarding challenges in the game, including the frankly horrific process of farming bug shells in Silithus for literal weeks on end. We were not a top-tier raid group, we weren’t even sure if we could manage the requirements, so most of it was me going it alone. I had one regular companion though all of it, and it was Bel. At the time I didn’t really understand why he was content to slay thousands of elite bugs in Silithus or die repeatedly to hydras in quests that we should have had 40 people for and not 5-10, but I never second-guessed the company, and we talked and told stories about Everquest and other MMOs we had played. It turned out we had been just missing one another basically since Ultima Online, each game a near miss where but for one random quirk or another we had simply not been in the same places at the same times.
In 2007, Burning Crusade shattered our raid group. Beyond the mess of going from 40-person to 25-person raids, the wide reset meant that we never really got anything off the ground again; there were too many different interests and too many different playstyles that had worked together in Vanilla but didn’t survive TBC. When the group broke, I inherited things, and at the same time I was about to graduate college. I simply didn’t have the capacity to try to keep everything together and keep it all functioning, and I disappointed a lot of people by openly saying that and leaving. Amid all of that, Bel was the person who reached out and told me it was okay, and that people would find a place. I later found out that he had built that place himself. It was a community vacuum, and Bel always abhorred those. He had seen a need for community infrastructure in LNR and saw it again when LNR fell apart, and stepped into the gap himself. He turned House Stalwart into a home for many who had been in LNR and ultimately resurrected the teams.
When I’d gotten over my WoW burnout, started fresh on a new server, and started collecting people who I wanted to stay in touch with, I had set up an AOL Instant Messenger chatroom, plugging people into it. When, on a whim, I logged into my old WoW main, Bel quickly reached out, and soon after I’d added him to the chatgroup. The group was maybe five or six of us, variously keeping up, rarely playing games together but slowly converging. AIM eventually killed their chatroom functionality, but this was the original Aggrochat. It wasn’t until we moved to another platform — after Bel had started his blog– that we actually called it that, but that AOL chatroom was the seed.
I will always remember that Bel HATED that chatroom. He could think of twenty better ways to facilitate chat and he probably suggested we move to IRC, or MSN, or Gchat, or one of several different homebrew tools, but we would chat while at work and several people couldn’t access those other chat programs, so AIM it was, until years later when this thing called Slack came out and Bel jumped on it with glee, especially as the AIM chatroom had been so deprecated that it barely worked at that point– we couldn’t access any admin controls, and I’m not even sure if we could add new members.
It was about when Bel joined that AIM chatroom that I realized he’d started blogging regularly, and he slowly got the rest of us to at least dip a toe in. For a variety of reasons, we wound up moving with the Cataclysm expansion back over to where Bel was, joining up with House Stalwart. We were on voice chat regularly, often nightly, just talking about whatever while we raided. Bel immediately made me a raid leader, and while it didn’t last, I remember his strong vote of confidence. It was also when we started playing other games together, trying out Guild Wars 2, City of Heroes, SWTOR, and other things. This was the point where Bel really started to come into his element. He brought people together and shepherded people between games and into groups, and would reach out to people on various social media who seemed to be looking for a home. It was a time when we operated very much as a team– Bel would find people and I would help organize and lead them. Not so much in WoW, but as I jumped from game to game and he built communities in each one, we would leapfrog each other and built a kind of odd team.
It’s also where we fought, for the one and only time we ever disagreed so intensely that we stopped talking to each other for a while. I remember that we had had some kind of guild resourcing issue, people wanting help or resources from the guild and not feeling like they were available, or that people in the guild would ignore them. Bel responded in his classic determinedly idealistic way– he updated the guild charter to effectively insist that people provide help when asked. It led to a number of people coming to me with concerns, and ultimately Bel and I clashed over it. It led to a guild split, where he and I led different guilds, and I had to set up the infrastructure we needed, while Bel had to manage and lead people the way I had been. In the course of less than a month, we went from at each other’s throats to trading tips via backchannels as we both ran our own guilds. When the next MMO came around, we wordlessly returned to a single guild.
In 2013, lightning struck with Final Fantasy XIV. We had been puttering around in different games, none of them fully satisfying, and often just sitting around in voice chat talking about nothing in particular, or going on about the games we’d been playing. Bel confided in me that he missed the LNR days of talking games and game design, and wanted to get that kind of feeling back. He had always been around and hanging out when I, an aspiring game dev, would go on and on about whatever I was thinking and riffing off of him and other people. He floated the idea of a podcast, something I didn’t feel comfortable with at the time (working on an MMO myself and being very touchy about losing my job). It was also the point at which we finally kicked that old AIM chatroom to the curb, and started to build Aggrochat properly. Bel and Ash were eager to move to something better, where we could bring in more people, and while we’ve always kept our group small and tight-knit, it’s been my home online for over a decade now.
In all of this, Bel was a constant voice in my life pushing back against my own insecurity and people who would try to cut me down. He would love to say that were were essentially the same person, just from different starting positions, and we would often find places we disagreed and trace back our thought processes until we found what he liked to call the “divergence point”, where he had zigged and I zagged from the same point. We found hundreds of such things, and it was why despite Bel’s searing distaste for both “finger-wigglers” (i.e. wizards) and “sneaky types” (i.e. rogues), which were my two primary class choices, he still would talk about how much he and I saw eye to eye from different mountaintops, in games and in life.
When I actually, finally released a game in 2014, Bel was there from the beta through launch and squeezed out every drop. He played more of that game than I did myself. He smiled through the bugs and told me about all of the stuff he’d seen that he loved, and got me through one of the hardest periods of my life, as “dream job” and “burnout” collided and I left the games industry. He understood, he got it, and he was pulling for me the whole time. He was the first person to clock that I was severely depressed and needed a change, and despite him being one of the most stable, unchanging people I had ever known, he helped me think through what needed to happen and what I needed to do. It is not exaggerating to say that Bel saved my life, helping me step outside myself before the spiral of depression became inescapable, and encouraging me to make moves and changes that strengthened my bonds with other people and helped me build a life outside of my work.
The Aggrochat podcast has been a fixture of my life for 12 years now, and Bel quietly hounded me to join it every single show from the beginning until I finally got past my worries and jumped in. Games have come and gone, and the games we have played separately now far outnumber the games we played together, but through over 500 episodes we have come together to talk about what we’re playing and what we’re thinking about, and every so often, when lightning strikes, we’re all in the same game together and feeling great about our time together.
There is a lot that could be said about the last year. Most of it Bel has said himself. Most of the rest, the parts only I can really say, aren’t super relevant right now, except that when Bel had his colonoscopy and discovered the cancer, one of the first things he did was reach out to me and tell me to get one. It was emblematic of his mindset– help others avoid what I’ve struggled with, let me tank for my friends. I almost didn’t want to tell him that mine had come back clean, not even polyps to remove, but when I did he was genuinely happy in a way that shattered me.
Losing Bel is not something I can encapsulate in a metaphor. It would be easier if I could. What I am put in mind of is him tanking through raids, and how when he went down in a fight he would immediately cheer the rest of the team on in his absence. He built communities intended to outlast him, and spent nearly two full decades being successful at it. When stress would spike for him, he would “turtle up” as he called it, going quiet for a while while he recharged. He understood, at some level, that he would not always be able to be around so he built things that could function without him, could move forward and grow in his absence.
I have had to sit with this thought for the last few days, struggling to articulate it beyond the simplest of forms, but where I’m landing is here: if there is anything I know of Bel, it’s that he would have been furious about all of this, that he left so much unfinished, that there are pieces for other people to pick up, that he hadn’t had the chance to get all of his ducks in a row and do his damndest to ensure that he could fade away without any disruption and, ideally, without anyone noticing. It was never going to happen, but it’s what he would have tried in vain to do. He would have wanted the things he’d had a hand in building to continue in his absence, to keep going without him and to grow beyond him. He would have wanted people to find each other, to come together, and to forget about him.
I will disrespect one of those wishes: I will not forget about Bel, and his passing will not go unmourned, even if I can hear “Ta-am, you don’t gotta DO that” in his voice in my head. The ache I will carry forward with me will remind me of the love I have for a person who was without equal, but it will be carried forward. The best way I can honor his memory is to continue with the things he had a hand in building, and to build more things in the way he would have.
Goodbye, Bel. I will make things in your memory.