I'm only a couple years younger than yourself, and I've got friends whom I still play tabletop games with every week...in the over ten years since our first semester at U of M College Park. Not everyone we hung with then is there anymore, and I'm saddened by how a couple of them turned out, but it's nowhere near as serious as your friend Joe's story. I don't normally reply unless I have some big point to make, but I just wanted to say I've seen that kind of thing, if not so extreme, and I know how you feel.

"They say one should not speak unkindly of the dead, so I say, 'nice try'." --Lezard