For Belghast

Belghast died on Thursday. He was in the middle of his seventh round of chemotherapy, one year to the day after his wife died from her own cancer.

I have to be careful writing this because I never met Bel in person. Our relationship was the kind that only really exists now. Mostly Mastodon these last few years, Twitter before that, comment threads on each other's blogs going back further than I can properly account for. And yet the news landed hard enough that I have been sitting with it for two days, not sure what to say, not sure if I have any business saying anything at all. That last part is the piece I want to talk about.

The last time Bel meaningfully changed my thinking, he told me that my blog wasn't just me typing into the wind. He said it had value for the broader gaming community, that people were reading and getting something out of it, and that the writing was worth continuing. I don't remember the exact wording. I remember how it felt to hear it from him. Bel was the kind of person whose opinion on gaming blogging carried real weight. He had been doing it since forever. He had built Blaugust from a small annual challenge into an actual community event that runs every August with over a hundred participants. He podcasted on AggroChat every week. He wrote nearly every single day, across MMOs, ARPGs, and just about every game genre that mattered to him. If Bel told you your blog had value, it had value.

His last post went up on July 1st. It opens with a quiet apology. He apologizes for not blogging enough, because the seventh round of chemotherapy had wiped him out in mind and body, and he was honestly barely holding in there. Then he wrote nine hundred words about Path of Exile 2 mapping being kinda broken. That is a nearly perfect summary of who Bel was. Whatever was happening to him personally, his default was to sit down and write about the games he was playing, because that was the shape of his life and he was going to spend it the way he wanted to spend it.

His site tagline read: Life and times of Belghast: Blogger, Podcaster, Tank, MMO Gamer, Widow, and Cat Dad. He added the Widow himself after his wife died last July. He was open about the grief and open about the diagnosis that came right after, and he kept blogging through all of it. That the two dates ended up matching to the day is the kind of coincidence I would not believe if it were fiction. It is not fiction.

I did not know Bel well enough to write a proper eulogy. I do not have first-name stories. I do not have voice-chat memories. What I have is what a lot of us out here have. A shared blogosphere for years. A few Blaugust seasons where his encouragement kept me going. A Mastodon feed where his cat photos and his POE screenshots and his hard chemo weeks all showed up alongside each other, treated with the same steady voice. He made online relationships feel like real friendships instead of the thinner one-sided thing they get written off as. He treated the people who read him like actual people, he responded when we wrote to him, and he took our writing seriously in a way that most of the internet does not.

I keep coming back to the fact that he sat down on July 1st and wrote about mapping in Path of Exile 2. Not a farewell. Not a legacy post. Just what he had been doing for years. That is the version of him I want to remember.

Good morning, Friends. That was how he greeted us, most mornings, for as long as I can remember. It landed differently than a greeting was supposed to. I am going to miss reading it.

Joar