If its not one thing its another to punch you below the belt out of nowhere.. on the end of my much needed vacation to see family and celebrate my 47th birthday I find out Taral Wayne AKA Saara passed.
I get home tonight from work, sat down, fire up FA and see a post made moments ago that Dragoneer passed. WTF man, WTF??? I know he has had health issues for a while, but from the recent half dozen journals he was making I would see, it looked like he was on the final lap to find out WHAT was causing him all of these pains…. And I guess he didn’t make it long enough to find out. :/
Sorry if I am a bit emotional in this, but I don’t handle people I know fairly well passing suddenly on me. Especially ones close to my age.
Also considering the person I am talking about, that has oceans worth of drama around their name online and with FA - who did NOT know Dragoneer personally or been around him for years seeing him away from FA’s spotlight, im going to be touchy/bite-y on those who just come up and trash talk about him for a while. Most who do don’t know him at all and I tend to tune them out in general.
Most don’t know how nice and sweet of a person Dragoneer was.
I learned of him back in the late 90s early 2000s. I think he first couple pics of art he did I found was in the 2001 era - either on VCL or from usenet. I still got them in my collection/archives. I THINK we chatted a couple of times on a muck or emails before FA was even thought up.
Then FA comes out, I know the original owner who made it. Dragoneer stepped in to take it to where it is today. Going from a few hundred users and a little blip on the online map to the big community for furries it is today. Its a big anchor online for folks to know about the fandom in the art/writing side, for writers and artists and other creators of furry stuff to get their name on the map and known. Many users are actively on it.
He helped even make a local con (to me) for a few years id go hang at when I had the money and time off. We chatted a fair bit there, when he wasn’t busy at the time. Always enjoyed chatting with him.
A piece of history most probably DON’T Know about him and I, is with an issue witch where we had our servers co-located to for a while. I ran my sirkain.net server in my parents home from 1996-2002 when I had to go to college. Parents wouldn’t let me keep it there, even thoguh I made the servers and network to get them all online in the first place. Gushi (furry) worked at a colo in ronkonkoma NY that offered me and Dragoneer, two of my best friends (one who owns side7.com) to have our stuff there for a good price, no bandwidth restrictions and stable uptime. They were true to their word on that, and we would send them the payments for our servers. After a few years, he moved to CA. Said he was still managing the servers of ours in NY OK, cool. Kept on paying. After a while, me, dragoneer, bad karma, and my other best friend all got email notices from the collocation saying we had 30 days to get our servers or they would be thrown out from not getting payments for months….
The guy miss-managed our money that was to go to the colo and it went elsewhere. Yeah. Everyone had to scramble and make the long drive to NY and get our physical servers before they were trashed. And figure out where the heck to go now. I had no options. I thought, “whelp that’s it for sirkain.,net”. Who steps in to help me out?
Dragoneer.
He lived within an hour from me at the time, and that’s where FA got moved to in a collocation he could easily drive to and manage when needed. He offered my server space in there for a reasonable flat rate price that went towards FA to help keep it going, until I found a spot I could have my server go to.
That’s how nice this guy was we no longer got around. He definitely earned my respect after that.
Sorry if I rambled in this, but I am tired, I am stressed over various things today (Tuesday into Wednesday) and this was not a good note to end my night on. It wasn’t a good note for the fandom either to…. Rest in peace man. I’m gonna miss you and the things you have done for this fandom.
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4 months, 2 weeks ago
07 Aug 2024 09:26 CEST
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