This might have been already discussed before, but I'd like to pick your brains on this all the same.

Plaw's death shocked me. I didn't know him personally. To me, he was just a valued member of these boards. All I knew of him, before his death, was that he was a New Yorker, loved sports and politics and had this wonderful and rare ability to honestly tell all his thoughts about everything always keeping the utmost respect for other people. Definitely too little to maintain I actually knew him.

But now that he's gone, I miss him as a human being, as a friend. I picture his grave and I get tears in my eyes. I feel so sorry. As sorry as if he was someone I met in person.

I wonder can virtual friendship be considered as real as real life friendship? I know Plaw himself sort of answered this just in his last post here:

The friends I've made here - those who I've had the pleasure of meeting in person as well as those I haven't - mean every bit as much to me as any friends that anyone could make under any other set of circumstances imaginable.


and I know myself I do care (I really do!) for some of the members here. But how is this possible? What makes a friendship real? Knowing someone by mutual writing is enough? What about Plaw's voice? How does Afi laugh? How does JustMe look when she plays the piano? How are Mick's hands? Does he eat his nails? What does Don Cardi say when he picks up the phone? How does Partagas pronounce the word "orsacchiotto"? I'll probably never know.

Yet I probably know about their souls more than some of my real life friends'. And even if I never meet them, I know I've already met them in some sort of way. And they are not lesser friends just because I never embraced them.

What are your thoughts about it?