Every board is disfunctional, if there are people posting on it.

My love for Clay Shirky grows. He's supposed to be in LA, soon. I'm hoping to meet him.

Coool, Allyson. I like his stuff.

Village Voice had an article on it, Consuela. I'm trying to balance axe-murderer pieces with the better things. Have Buffistas had a Munchausen by Internet? I feel like I was only at TableTalk a year before we moved to WorldCrossing, and I didn't really latch onto this community until the Bronze was really most sincerely dead.

The "death" and revelation of the fraud was a really fascinating community meltdown there for a while.

btw, I am dead.

Have Buffistas had a Munchausen by Internet?

I also have terminal cancer. Or else my cat does.

And the Penlind timeline has melted from my brain, so it's all jumbled. Was that four years ago?

it was right around the time i showed up and was starting my site for DeKnight. sometime around April/May of 2001, i think. it's too bad people didn't keep her posts. though now that i think about it, maybe some of the people on the investigation team did. if you want, i can ask janni. i still keep in contact with her.

There was a story on This American Life a while back about this group of kids who got to know the cast of Rent. One of them made up cancer for herself and a few other things. Most of the communication was via Internet.

tiggy's right, Allyson. It was Spring, 2001. I was brand new, and inclined not to believe it, until so many old timers seemingly did. I knew nothing about PCs or the internet, but copied and pasted "Cairo's" post on "Djoser" and saved it as a draft in my email, because it hit every single one of my alarm buttons. I wonder if I still have it...

Oh! I do. That's rare, that I save something that long. It made a horribly big impression on me--one I've never quite gotten past.

Here:

Cairo says:
(Fri Apr 27 07:34:05 2001 208.4.95.62)

Uncle Karn says I have to go
and pack. We are leaving this
afternoon. The babies are
going to stay with Aunt
MaryGrace. Mum says the only
thing that lasts forever is
words like the things that we
say and write. Everything else
just goes away. I just want
someone to remember
Djoser. His faverite story is
Winnie the Pooh and his
faverite song is How much is
that doggie n the window. He
sucks his thumb but he's
trying not to and shen he
wakes us in the morning his
hair sticks up in the air. He is
black like me. He likes it when
I take a piece of paper and I
move it over his face really
light. eh smiles when the sun
shines and when I'm being
Buffy and I stake somebody.
He likes it when you rock him
and when he can have
peaches. His faverite toy is
my old grey elephant. He
thinks he looks just like Da
when he walks around with
his hands in his pockets adn
when he doesnt have pockets
he pretends. He hates it when
he is blue and can't breathe
right adn if he could get
enough air he would cry when
it happens. He likes to sleep
next to Poe because she is so
big adn soft. He laughs when
you give him a bath. He'll
always be my brother even if
he can't be a vampire but it
would have nice if he could.
and I lvoe him. There now
Djoser will live forever,

It was a skinny post (like your AOL ones at the Bronze used to be, Allyson). I tried to preserve the formatting above. I think DX said the t pre causes problems, so I've just put in t br instead.

One of them made up cancer for herself and a few other things.

The big one that made the news was that girl on LJ waaaay back in like 2000, I think. Or earlier. Maybe it wasn't even LJ. Nicole something?

And she had cancer, or leukemia, or something, and the community rallied around her, and sent her presents, and she showed pictures and everything. I think she even spoke to people on the phone.

When she "died", nobody was able to find an obituary notice, and then people started investigating. Turned out the girl didn't exist at all; she was made up by a woman in her 40s or 50s. The photographs were of a classmate of the woman's high-school-age daughter, a local basketball star.

The daughter was pressed into service to play the part of the dying girl on the phone when people called.

Quite a scam. The woman who did it claimed she did it to raise the profile of this particular kind of disease, and I know a lot of people laughed it off as weird performance art. But it's the sort of thing that can cause a lot of damage to a community.

Have Buffistas had a Munchausen by Internet?

t shudders reflexively

If we have, I'm not aware of it. Unless Zeo really wasn't broken...

There's a crackpot in Nikita fandom who tries to distract everyone from her plagiarism by either posting about her husband's brushes with death or her own. Car accident, suicide attempt, brain injury, etc.

It's a weird way to live. I check up on a friend's cousin's baby every couple of days. She was born with a genetic deletion and some severe birth defects over a year ago; lately I've been reacting to her parents' messages with "Don't you think it's time to let go?" because I am a creepy judgmental person.

Contrariwise, I keep a daily watch on getupgrrl's infertility blog, because she is a heartbreaking combination of funny and wise and angry. I want her to be happy; I've never met her nor never will but she's real to me. I cannot imagine how I'd react to her not being real.