the problem with wiki

[kaigou]

...is that you start out, in all innocence, looking up truth serum to find out if it's actually real or just memorex hollywood, and suddenly it's three hours later and you've read about the Bunny Man of Fairfax County, gaslighting, the break-ins at the Watergate, Munchausen by Internet, and somehow ended up on biographies of lesser-known but no less chilling serial murderers from the '20s, capped with a pleasant finale of fictional lethal viruses.

Wtf, wiki, you need an off button.

Comments

[haya5h1.livejournal.com]

...
Munchausen by Internet?!

[kaigou]

It's faking an illness to get sympathy/attention, but on the internet. Like studying up on, say, liver disease and then joining a forum for people suffering the disease, and posting about your own "disease". If a terminal disease, then at the point that you'd be "unable" to continue posting, create a sockpuppet that introduces itself as your mother, who continues posting for you! Also be sure to throw in at least one alcoholic parent, possibly a dying or drug-addicted sibling, and maybe even a natural disaster or a house fire, if it looks like your forum audience is starting to get bored (or skeptical).

What's really crazy is that there are people who are doing this fake-illness thing up to three at a time, like one woman who was "dying of cancer" in the morning on one forum, then suffering a difficult pregnancy by mid-day, and would round off the day with a few hours on a forum for people with hepatitis C. There's crazy, and then there's...

[(Anonymous)]

I'd heard of that happening, but I didn't think it was widespread enough that it's officially a syndrome with a name.

...so wait, from truth serum you ended up there?

[kaigou]

Ayup, but I think there might've been a segue through the kingdoms that were later combined to become Thailand.

HOW I HAVE NO IDEER.

[haya5h1.livejournal.com]

derp, that was me, forgot to put in the openid crap being all occupied with trying to decipher the captcha. (I have a dw account somewhere but I can't remember how to get into it.)