Oh yeah - for the longest time Gus never gave us his photo. He had no digital camera (and no access to one), which is slightly odd for a demonstrated computer geek. Then he supplied one tiny picture.

Also, he never got us pictures of his kites. There was supposed to be some local TV news thingie on him and his kites - anybody ever hear what happened with that?

Um... are we piling on?

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I'm just surprised no one suspected anything before, if there was this much sketchiness about. Like I said, I've recently had to deal with this kind of thing, and people were suspicious of the poster for a while. But it also turned out that quite a few people were suspicious and just never said anything. And then people got together and commiserated and Googled like mad and discovered all sorts of inconsistencies and yeah.

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I mean, I could feel okay if Gus were a pseud.

Personally - and whoa is this hitting too many people I like in too many different ways - Gus was a poster here. Pseud or not. That is kinda fact. I mean, many of you will be entirely shocked to know that my name is not actually "Cass." But I still kinda exist.

Did he actually die? God I hope so because as sad as that seems, the alternative is just cruel. But this world we live in is the world we live in and people don't just lie, they try to cause as much pain as possible.

kimi was a new poster. I hope that she did just want to let us know and that there is nothing else at work. Can I be sure of that? Sadly, no.

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err... Some of us were suspicious, and did say things to other people. This is just the first time something less than benign came up.

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I'm just surprised no one suspected anything before

Oh, some of us "suspected." OK, that's too strong a word. But some of us (at one of the Midwest f2fs) commented that he seemed "too good to be true" and we noted that no one had actually met him so it was possible it was all a fake identity thing. Speaking for me personally, it was just a tiny little doubt that sat at the back of my mind - until the whole car thing, when the doubt moved more to the center of my mind.

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The schmoker theory sounds strange to me, as we suspected pretty quickly that mieskie had returned and no one suspected the same about Gus. I think the timeline is probably a coincidence.

Could be so. I don't really know.

I'm just surprised no one suspected anything before

Some people did. But there was no reason to call him on it. He wasn't scamming people out of money. When the whole Weremonkeyfest of '05 fell apart, that definitely pinged me. If you've read anything about long running pseuds in fandom, there were many red flags around Gus. His whole story is almost an archetypal pseud.

Mary-sueish backstory. Incurable illness that upsets face-to-face meetings. A separate, previously unknown entity announcing the death. Inability to corroborate anything online.

His synopsis bouncing back? He forgot about the Midwestern summer BBQ he was supposed to host? He's building a fucking aspirin replicator and he can't get his scanner to work? Phone numbers left which don't go anywhere? The entire pattern is all about evasion. Again and again and again.

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tommy, I don't think you look like an idiot. Also? I remember that picture. I've been keeping an eye on Gus, since that picture. It never sat right with me. It looked like he got it off a website.

Ok, to counter my "look like an idiot" statement... I really started having major doubts after Weremonkeyfest fell though. (Plus I was angry at Gus for a while after that.) Even when Gus first offered me the car, I was thinking "He's giving me a car? I'll believe it when I see it." And when I asked my boss (who's a car whiz) if he knew anyone who could work on a 20-year-old Mercedes, I was thinking, "I'm going to look like such an idiot to my boss if this car thing is fake."

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tommy, do you have any old emails from him. Can you look at the header, and get his IP address?

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