I just heard about this when I woke up and saw the message from Israfil and have been in a minor shock since then. I'm now thoroughly depressed and I absolutely can't believe that Shade's not playing some kind of joke on us.
I first met Shade when I was playing on my mortal on IN:X. I was paging about adding a special building to the inside of cove that would be a public library / bar, then we got to talking. We talked about all the different exploits we had done in past SPHERE shards, about GMing in general (I had GM'd previous shards), and after about an hour of talking, we wrapped it up and he left.
About a month or so later and after a few other conversations, he and Taran popped up outside my house and asked me to become staff. Ever since then we've been good friends in-game and he's the reason I learned to use the spawners as well as I can use them now.
We'd spend hours upon hours just building different events or playing with what we could do in-game to come up with creative new events and items and scripts. We'd be talking, then suddently some little something one of us would say would give the other an insane idea that would get built on and eventually would get turned into an amazing new item or script or event.
After IN:X went down, he'd been away in the hospital for a while, but when he came back, we were talking and we both realized we missed GMing and building things. We started up IN again, mostly unannounced and working with just me and him logged into a server he was running on his own machine. The reboots and crashes were constant as we added things, tweaked others, worked out bugs, and implemented so many of the new scripts and fun things that you see in-game now.
The man was a veritable virtuoso of UO. I can't believe how many little tricks and things that he knew how to do and I'm really going to miss him.
Apart from the emotional/friendship side of things, I do plan on trying to keep this project going and am talking with Taran and the other staff to see what we need to do. A lot of things are in Shade's name and we'll need to see what we can do about that.
I'm also thinking of some sort of memorial that I can add in-game for him. PM me if you have any ideas. Whatever it is, you know it has to be green.