I would've loved to have talked to Daniel and heard what he sounded like. He asked me a couple months or so ago if I had teamspeak, I of course never got around to getting it- I'm too cheap and poor in general, not to mention lazy.
Even so, he left an extremely unique impression on me. "Internet personality" or not, he has, like many I've gotten to know on the boards and in the games and on ICQ, become a true friend, somebody who I've thought about in my free time, spent as much time with as anyone, bashing heads or plotting strategy. He's affected who I am today in a positive way.
It's hard to explain exactly. I guess, I understand his type of personality better than I did before, and have come to respect it more, to emphasize with him. Seeing his pictures though and the videos on the Bridge website brings forth a whole new angle- for a long time my mental picture of him was Eugene Levy, and then, as I got to know him better, that image disappeared and was replaced with the simple letters of his name as displayed on ICQ in red "Daniel A". Just that, and for the past day, as the memories came back, that has been running through my head, the conversations we had- how can I let that go all of a sudden? ICQ even says he's still online.
He looks like he was a very fun-loving guy IRL, the pictures really soften the upright, humorous but firmly ideological ICQ image, or the somewhat vague, always proper english using schoolteacher image I usually had of him. Where do we go now? How do we deal with this loss? I don't know if it has even struck me fully, I know I'm going to be missing him even more later on whenever we have a TOS2, or just randomly, I'm not going to be able to escape the memory of him, nor would I ever want to.
I wish I would've gotten to know him more outside the context of Eu2. In that niche, all I can say is that he was a great player, not necessarily the deadliest, but he was certainly one of the nicest, and no mean competitor either.