I received a notecard from Rayno Kidd (and a duplicate from Gregory Wellman) this morning about the dearly departed Jane Kit, which I have copied into this post after the fold.
Apparently, Jane Kit is not dead after all. It seems it was all a hoax. If you believe the perpetrator of the hoax (whose identity is still not 100% clear to me, perhaps because it’s early and I’m too busy concentrating on an RL deadline to see the obvious - Who the hell is Rudy Ruml?), this wasn’t done out of malicious intent but rather out of ignorance of how the C:SI community would react to the loss of a friend. Even a virtual - and apparently not even virtually real - friend.
I am very upset about this. I was not good friends with Jane, we didn’t hang out and chat a lot, nor did we even duel all that much. Nevertheless I felt a profound sense of loss when I had heard that she “died”, coming as it did so soon after the loss of amber Suising, and being in the stage of my life where the death of friends and family is becoming far more common than I am comfortable with.
For the perpetrator of this hoax to express shock at the outpouring of grief and goodwill from the community strikes me as profoundly ignorant. Even to those of us who did not know “Jane” well, there was still the feeling of loss, because she was “one of us”. Who would expect anything else?
I will certainly have more to say about this issue when I’ve got my mind together and more coffee, but for now, read on to see the notecard mentioned above:
Popularity: 11% [?]
Rudy Rummel is (or was, I’m not sure) a political science teacher at a hawaiian university. He used Jane Kit as a way to plug his democratic peace theory. Obviously this kinda backfired for him