Deadnail

RIP if true

it's been confirmed and deadnail is dead.

There aren't many of us left now – there are few left fit to eulogize him, at any rate. I'll remember him as an ancient fucking horror of the internet, at his best he was utterly incandescent. He was the funniest fucking poster on doomworld 1.0, bar none, I used to anticipate and savor his posts: deadnail, he could commit rape verbally, he was that fucking good.

For the Vets, he was our friend.

I was really hoping that the news of his death would just be bullshit; there is precedent, deadnail killed Lüt and laughed about it. A lifetime ago – literally, tragically – a young darknation watched him post and felt something akin to fucking awe. In the days of the green Legacy forums, and IRC, deadnail was the fucking shit, man. His screeds were legend, his wrath was righteous and hilarious. He took no shit. He walked in those places like the Red Right Hand, he was fucking biblical, he kicked over the pillars of salt in Soddom and gritted the fucking path with those retards.

If I wanted to be anyone in the community, it was him. The way he comported himself, elegance and empathy matched with gnashing teeth and flying fucking spittle... for better or worse, deadnail *is* the fucking mould, crying out against retardation and the dying of the light. Those who came to maturity afterwards, we simply cast ourselves in his image.

There was more to him than frothing biting-holes-through-the-fucking-plasterboard-of-the-forum, of course: I learned that later. The deadnail in private wasn't different from the public persona – there was nothing fake about him – but on the vets he was... deeper. He was a man who fucking hated people as a collective, who found crowds and the group mentality abhorrent. He actively sought out Individuals and talked with them rather than at them.

He was one of the most honest people I ever met. Behind closed doors, his exposed psyche was fucking raw, it was like talking to a man with no skin and few pain receptors. There was something ghoulish about his delight in this, as he hammered out blog after blog while pulling lumps of solidified pus from the cyst in his cheek, grinning.

He was an inveterate collector of fucking trash as well: he hoarded fucking data as if the internet might explode at any second. He was a survivalist who said “Fuck tins, fuck beans, if I'm gonna be stuck in a nuclear bunker while retarded mutants eat each other in the wastes, I want fucking music to dance to.” It wasn't just the people in forums who would cringe away from his approach: internet service providers learned to fucking fear him, deadnail logged on and fucking AOL would slow to a crawl. Gigabites upon gigabites, torrent upon torrent. This he would share: dn, you need to check out Ziltoid the Omniscient, and I did.

deadnail, you fucking legend. If this is a tragedy for the community – and it is – it's because this is an extinction level event, it's because our biodiversity just took another fucking nosedive into a soulless, homogenous soup. You, sir, were a fucking irreplaceable apex predator. I heard about your death and I instantly thought of you wandering a circuit of gas stations in deepest, darkest, blackest fucking America, grinning like a feral cunt and waiting for other cunts with guns to start shooting, because cunts are cunts and mostly because it was funny. I remember the way you approached the creative arts, you were like the old woman who swallowed a spider to catch the fly, you just fucking ate data and intelligence until the moment came and you vomited it all up again, maybe 10% of the shit managing to hit the page and back to eating spiders and flies again. You approached drugs in the same way: there once was a deadnail who swallowed a xanax to catch the E to catch the barbiturate that wriggled and wriggled and tickled inside him...

I guess he died.

I'm going to fucking miss you.

There should be a statue of this man!