A week ago as of when I started writing this, I found my best friend Kenny Knapke in his house. He was no longer living. No one is sure when he passed away, exactly; the medical examiner gave us a range of five days, based on when we last spoke to him. Which means that write now, as I put these words to digital paper, it’s been two weeks since the last time I’ve spoken to him. It’s time to give myself permission to start on this weird eulogy.

I emphasize the time when I started writing this above because I’m sure it is going to take me time to work through this. This will almost certainly be a living document; with three decades of stories to remember, how could it not be? It’s 2023 in the present where I am writing. It will be 2024 when anyone reads this. That’s fine, though. His obituary is out there. It’s right here, and you should read it.¹ This is my eulogy of Kenny, not the only one. No one is waiting for me to write this. 

Like any true eulogy, I should start with who Kenny was. These are the sections everyone skips for someone they don’t know, because they mostly contain the same things. Does that matter, when they’re true? If someone cares enough about you to write a eulogy, to think about you after you’re gone, of course you were kind, you were generous, you were loved. That’s no reason to not write it! Eulogies are for the living. Kenny’s never going to read this. But those he left behind, they need to know, they need to never doubt that he was loved, that he will be remembered, that he was appreciated. He leaves behind an army of parents, siblings, and friends who will never doubt that, who will never forget him. He will live on in all of us. 

So who else was he? 

Kenny was the kindest of us all. He was the truest introvert I have ever met. He hated strangers with a passion, but he’d drive 500 miles to visit his ever-growing family without a thought. His friends trapped him in a cabin, every year, for days, with children he wasn’t related to and spouses he had no choice in selecting, and it was one of his favorite weeks of the year, second only to Thanksgiving and Christmas. He was nice to everyone involved. Then he’d retreat to his house and not emerge for weeks, to recover.

He was the most infuriating of all of us, too. Only my own grandmother was more stubborn than him; a level of bullheadedness that I, the third most stubborn person I know, can only aspire to. Once, the natural gas company messed up his bill and shut off his service. Rather than talk to them and deal with it, he went without hot water or heat at this apartment. For three years. Luckily we live in Georgia, but…damn. He fixed his car door with a rope for six months when the latch broke. The water main to his house sprung a leak in 2019; it wasn’t fixed when he died, in 2023. Because he couldn’t afford it? No, of course not. He just didn’t want to fix it. So he turned the water on at the street every time he needed to fill the toilets or take a shower. Once he was done, right back off.

Why, truly? I’ll never know, because I don’t think he ever knew. Kenny was a unique soul. I’m going to miss his curmudgeon side as much as anything else, because who else will I ever meet who will DO stuff like that? The next time it takes me eighteen months to replace two screws in a banister, something I absolutely have never done, I know he’ll be watching over me, the patron saint of Our Perpetual Maybe Tomorrow.

He loved games, he loved computers, he loved technology of all kinds. Technology was probably his true passion, because like all passions he loved and hated it in equal measure. A man of few words who mostly liked responding to what others were saying, on multiple occasions Kenny launched into hours long rants about the mandatory printer drivers included in operating systems. For over twenty years. He would recompile his own linux kernel, from scratch, to remove mentions of libraries he didn’t like.

All of us in his core group of friends work with computers in some fashion, most of us are even programmers, but Kenny was a goddamn savant.²

One of the very last things we were doing together was working on Advent of Code 2023. Scott was doing it in TypeScript, Peter in F#, and Kenny and I were working in Python. As the worst programmer among the four of us, I appreciated that Kenny (the kindest one!) would praise how readable my solutions were, then drop a convoluted regular expression monstrosity that none of the rest of us could even understand. Don’t take my word for it, take Peter’s too:

All of us have our niches, but I truly think Kenny could have done whatever he wanted. That he often wanted to do nothing at all was infuriating, but, again: that’s Kenny. I’m going to miss getting frustrated with him as much as I’m going to miss anything else.

Gods, I loved that man.

Maybe I should write about what he meant to me, too. I first met Kenny in 1995, although we did not truly become close until 1997. In 1998 he moved to Pennsylvania from Georgia; I visited him up there that summer. It would be expected for us to grow apart, given that distance and our young ages, and for a time we did. We spoke a few times a year for the rest of high school. Then, in college, we started playing games online together again. In 2002, we founded this website (the Jux Entente) together.

In 2005, he moved back to Georgia. It didn’t take; he left again. But he came back for good in 2007. In 2011, I offered him a job; he took it. in 2013, Kenny was the best man at my wedding. In 2016 he bought a house in my neighborhood. 

After such a long time together, the hardest parts of this are the things I know I’ll never get to share with him again. Despite living in close physical proximity, the vast majority of our friendship was online. Kenny was private to a fault, and rarely wanted to go out and do something. But we talked online constantly. Ever since he left us, I keep finding articles I want to share with him, news, games, videos. Who do I share those with now? Kenny, did you know someone did the entire Advent of Code on a Commodore 64? Did you know Alfie’s really enjoying Pokemon Y and OmegaRuby on his “new” 3DS that I was worried about? And, hey, did you know Awesome Games Done Quick starts in two weeks? No one else is going to watch that with me, you know.

We played so many games together. One of the blessings, or the curses, of the streaming era is that I have hundreds of hours of recordings of us “hanging out” online. There are games that I played with no one else BUT him. Crusader Kings. Splatoon! Mario Kart? Mario Party?

How many stories can I share without getting boring? I want to write so many.

If any of his siblings are reading this, I’m pretty sure Kenny and I have now retired undefeated in Mario Party against the lot of you. Whenever I was in PA and Peach (Kenny) and Daisy (me) were on the same team, we were unstoppable. Kenny always found a way to get at least two extra stars in the end-game awards. Once, Peter had a video game competition bracket at his Halloween party. Kenny and I were paired against each other in one of the N64 Mario Party mini-games, a jumping rope one. That competition went on for about five times longer than anyone expected and despite not being the actual final game, was the emotional finale of the whole event. Kenny, of course, eventually beat me.

We were evenly matched in Mario Kart. Once, flying to Boston, we played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe the entire flight. He beat me in every single race. On the way back, we did the same…only, I beat him in every single race. But I wasn’t playing fair: I decided to start playing Mario Kart like it was a racing game, not Mario Kart. I just didn’t want to lose anymore, okay? 

He taught me to play Dance Dance Revolution. I eventually learned to cheat and beat him every time by picking only fast songs, because I was in better shape than him and could do them on HEAVY MODE until he was exhausted. Kenny eventually learned to cheat and pick the slowest songs possible because my timing would slowly accelerate on complicated steps if the beat was too slow. I took me a decade to learn how to stop doing that.

In Jackbox games, he was always Keno. One time, someone else made their name Kenny. At various points in the past ten years, we have had Jackbox Party Pack games with lobbies containing Kenny, NotKenny, Actual Kenny, Keno, Kenny2…I think our record was six Kennys in the same lobby. It might take a year or two, but I doubt that joke dies with you, sir. In your memory we shall continue. 

Kenny taught me how to play disc golf in 2006. I beat him for the first time, ever, in 2022. That year we played once a week. It was his new year’s resolution to himself: he wanted to get out of the house more. I told him if he really wanted to do it, I would hold him to it and make sure it happened. Kenny stuck to it. We played 54 rounds of disc golf in 2022. Travis and Peter joined in with us. It was awesome. 

I’m sure we’ll keep playing sometimes, Travis, Peter, and me. But we’ll always be thinking about who isn’t there with us, won’t we? The last round we played before he died, Kenny actually didn’t make it out to meet us. He said he wasn’t feeling well. 

I think about that, now. It’s hard not to. 

He loved board games, too. We played Magic the Gathering together. Once, he got so mad at the Game of Thrones board game I thought he was going to break the board in half with his nerf sword. And Kenny was always, always, the Cylon. If you know, you know.

Most of all I’m going to miss the connection we had while playing games of any kind. After decades of doing this, we didn’t have to communicate to each other about what we were going to do. We already knew. Do you know how easy it is to play League of Legends when you already know where your support is going to be without asking? Do you know how much I still laugh about the time we broke Ben’s brain playing Cranium, because the prompt was Oprah, and we all wrote down “BEES!” as our number one response? He’s probably still pissed about that, but we got all of the points. 

Whenever his social energy would run out, Kenny would disappear for a bit. Sometimes he’d go dark for day, sometimes a week. I understood; I’m also an introvert. I always told him, warned him, that if I hadn’t heard from him in a week I was going to bother him by checking on him, just to make sure he was still alive. He laughed and agreed with me. Three or four times I had to go over to his house and ring the bell. He’d open the door and glare, or maybe smile, depending on why he wasn’t talking, but he’d always open the door and acknowledge me.

This time he didn’t open the door, because he couldn’t. 

As a writer, I wanted to make that the start of this eulogy. What a hook! But as a human being, as friend, that’s not fair to who Kenny was, or who he was to me. Although…he would have fucking loved that joke.³

Perhaps the hardest thing Kenny ever had to do was give a speech in front of over a hundred people he didn’t know, at all. And it was my fault he had to do it: he was the best man at my wedding. He never complained, not once, but it’s hard to think of anything he would have liked to do less than that. I can’t remember everything that he said, but I can remember how it made me feel. It was a great speech.

If Kenny’s ghost is hanging around somewhere, watching us all deal with his absence, I have to think that somewhere around the third time I had to go back into his empty house in the two days after I found him, looking for his immediately-required valuables, or picking up clothes for his family so he could be buried in them, I have to think he was chuckling a little bit about the payback. He did have a dark sense of humor.

Perhaps I’m only telling myself this for my own sanity, to make up for having to find him that way, but I think he would have wanted it to be me. If he had known he was going to die, and Kenny had had the chance to ask someone to be the one to find out…he wouldn’t have wanted it to be his family. He wouldn’t want to do that to him. He would have asked one of us. He would have asked me, I think. I hope.

I have apologized to the air each time I’ve gone back into the house. It felt wrong not to. I took in his mail yesterday. I let him know I was going to look through the rest of the house to make sure everything was still where either he, or I, left it. It was. Out of the corner of my eye was I walked through his living room I saw, on one of the glass display shelves, the three groomsman gifts he’d received from being in weddings over the years. The first one, from Travis, one from me, and one from Peter. I’m glad he always knew he was important to us; I’m glad to know we were important to him, too. 

And now, here at the end, it’s 2024. Tomorrow I’m flying up to Pennsylvania again to visit you, but this time, it’s for your funeral. You’re going to be buried, Kenny, and have a gravestone and everything. 

It feels like a thousand years ago now that you bought that stupid Openmoko Neo FreeRunner open source smart phone, the one that literally never worked. How many different Linux kernels did you install on that thing, three? Four? At one point, after months of work, you managed to get it to make very poor quality phone calls. When you finally gave up on it, this device that no one else on the planet would have ever purchased in the first place, I told you that I was going to make sure you were buried with it, because nothing else could encapsulate the experience of Kenny as much as that thing. The FreeRunner was the platonic ideal of something only you could love, and tolerate. It was everything we loved about you, too. I never thought I’d have to follow through on that threat.

I found it, when I dropped off your mail. I apologized for opening the bin it was in, but I remembered you showing me where you kept all of your old phones and tablets once, and I thought it might still be in there. And it was. I didn’t take it with me, though. I left it in your house. Maybe one of your siblings has memories of that thing, the same way I do. I wouldn’t want to take it from them. But if they don’t, Kenny, I promise you this: I’m going to get that thing from your house. You’re going to be buried so far from me, but with that FreeRunner in my possession, I’ll have the excuse I need to visit your grave again some day, when I’m ready. And I’m going to leave that stupid thing there, so you can have it again. You might need it.

I know we still need you. Maybe you could call us, sometime. You’ll have all the time in the world to get it working, now. 

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1. I took the photo used for his obituary. He asked me for a headshot while we were getting dressed for Peter’s wedding. He liked it. Now I know his family did, too. ↩︎
2. Should you swear in a eulogy? Perhaps not, but he would have wanted me to keep that in, so I will.  ↩︎
3. And there’s that profanity again! Kenny would have loved it, I promise. ↩︎