If this Gus person has in fact died, despite the fact that he's fabricated some elements of his life*, I want to know so I can mourn.

If he's not dead, I have a bajillion better things to do with that emotional energy.

What Sean said.

I was trying to track down a high school friend a couple weeks ago who is working on her PhD, but hasn't earned it yet, and within five minutes I had not only found her name but her e-mail address as well. Someone with a PhD should be easily googleable.

BTW, there's no Guy Straley at www.ratemyprofessors.com, either.

I checked there just last night. And ended up rating my prof from this semester.

Also, yes, there are now 500 posts in here on this subject, and we don't really know anything more than we knew before*, but I think it's necessary and healthy, so that maybe it's easier to deal with the next time something like this happens, whether it's true or not.

*I do think that 500 posts, and two days of sleuthing uncovering no new information is significant. If you investigate UFOs for 20 years, and essentially uncover no information you did not already know when you started, and have no more proof one way or the other than you did 20 years ago, you know what the best possible conclusion to make is? That UFOs don't exist.

No, we have no new proof or evidence one way or another, after quite a bit of expended effort, but that is enough to make me think that, until we receive something definitive, a wake thread and a donation is a waste of time, money, and emotional energy.

And I am mostly in agreement with you and Sean - but we're throwing out an awful lot of emotional energy here too.

That's a fair point, but again, I think this has mostly been healthy, and may serve us well in the future.

Brenda, there's also the whole story about the novel which apparently he recycled from his blog three years ago. There's definitely been lying. Enough to reasonably question the death.

Aside from that, the whole episode is extremely typical for the pseudicide dynamic. The pattern is well established by now and this one goes by the numbers.

we're throwing out an awful lot of emotional energy here too.)

Jesse said this about 250 posts ago or so:

In a world like this where all we have to create community is our words, people feeling like they can't speak is what creates division, IMO.

And that's in line with what I'm thinking about wasting emotional energy. This always happens when there's a gash in the world here-- we plaster it with hundreds or thousands of posts. We just do. It's painful to read when you want the discussion over, but I don't think it can be stopped, and it always wears itself out after awhile. I've said a lot that we need these occasional temperature-taking, boards-on-boards bureau controversies and it's probably been over a year since the last time we reaffirmed what's important here.

the whole episode is extremely typical for the pseudicide dynamic. The pattern is well established by now and this one goes by the numbers.

What other cases are out there? (Besides the one that Allyson wrote about.)

question: what's the site that you look up PhDs?

That's a fair point, but again, I think this has mostly been healthy

Yeah, I think this has been more of a diversion of emotional energy, if anything, and this way feels like accomplishing. It's Stage 1 of grief, after all, to an extreme degree.

What other cases are out there? (Besides the one that Allyson wrote about.)

There are gobs. I think Victoria Bitter is a particularly wacked-out case.

What other cases are out there?

Oh, lord. There's one about every few months in fandom somewhere. I can check the fandom_wank wiki.

Edit: There are several links at the bottom of this page. [link]

I still argue for spelling it pseudicide, though.