Hi Everybody,
Probably the worst person to perform this task, so I'm just going to get into it. As you may or may not have noticed, and if you're around, you probably did. But, Jake hasn't posted in a while.
Of course part of the fun a place like this (and being online in general) is there's a little bit of anonymity and you can be someone that's a little different than you usually act. You can interact with strange and interesting people you wouldn't normally interact with and become friends. The downside is, we don't usually have a last will and testament with our user name and password on it for our next of kin to go let those strange and interesting people that you're not going to be back. Maybe we should.
So, to be perfectly honest, we don't KNOW for sure what happened to Jake. So, Jake, if you've decided to spend the spring in the Andes looking for Inca gold with no wi-fi, sorry man, I didn't mean to vote you off the island so quickly, send a postcard next time.
But here's what we think happened.
February 5, 2024
www.wkbn.com
There's a deleted post from him out there that gives a hint, but I'll let that lie there because he deleted it. Other than that
@heisman did most of the digging here, and he referred to himself as Jeff in PM's to me, and his IP addresses traced to Youngstown and the dates here match up to his last post. There are a few inconsistencies, but, people tell stories too (I don't ever fill out the right birthday on the internet either, stuff like that, not big things). We have reason to believe he had some health issues, and I heard that from a few people who might have more detail than I do.
I don't mean for this post to serve as a eulogy, I will leave that to all of you if you're so inclined. But 2 things I do want to mention, the first is numerical and I hate that it is, and I would never ever ever want to equate the value of our friends to a post count, but, on the other hand the guy made 60,000 posts here (and did a lot of the games and contests and all that stuff). His absence will leave a hole in our community from a participation perspective alone. Second, and I think this is much more illustrative. A few years ago when we started to explore finding new ownership for this website, he was the first person to reach out to me. Obviously we weren't able to put it all together, but, he thought enough of this place to at least ask if he could throw some significant money at it.
It sucks to have to make this post. It sucks that we don't have concrete information, and we even kind of put of making this post for a couple weeks hoping we were wrong. We thought it would suck more to not share what information we did have and have it just be another question mark in the MIA thread.
That's all I got.
Quick edit; I appreciate you guys reacting to this post and I thought long and hard how to break this to everyone but I am really struggling with this and the Kinch thing, so, add a comment instead. I can't explain why really but every time I pop in its more and... Well please understand I appreciate the thought. Thank you. But please stop!
