If I were gonna write pseudonymously, I would not choose My First Name + Middle Name as the pseudonym. That would just be asking to be caught out. *Especially* if I also published about similar topics under My First Name + Last Name, and all three names were easy to find out.
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Replying to @avram @arthur_affect and
Or if you start out with a rando blog that gains national attention that you never expected?
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Replying to @GabrielObray @arthur_affect and
I made this decision way back in the ’90s, when I first started out online. Do I want to put the effort into keeping a distinct online identity, or not? I decided not, because I knew real pseudonymity took a lot of effort. Even when I started my rando blog in 1998.
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Replying to @avram @GabrielObray and
Moreover, it puts a cap on how successful you can get By the time people are actually citing your blog in mainstream articles and you have actual famous people among your fans, you've probably got to make a choice either to hang it up or to come out
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Replying to @arthur_affect @avram and
I'm trying to think of exceptions and there aren't many Even pseudonymous writers back when information traveled at the speed of horseback were usually outed surprisingly quickly (George Eliot came out after writing her very first book)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @avram and
The biggest successful secret identity story I can think of is Belle du Jour/Brooke Magnanti, but that was back in the 2000s, before Web 2.0 really existed And she still outed herself in '09 because she was sure she was going to be outed involuntarily soon if she didn't
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Replying to @arthur_affect @avram and
I don't think The Secret Barrister's real name is public knowledge. But that's about it.
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Replying to @HickeyWriter @avram and
The Last Psychiatrist was outed, and quit writing around that time for that reason, IIRC He wasn't actually famous enough for people to really care that much but his real name is on the first page of search results for "The Last Psychiatrist"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HickeyWriter and
I bring that up because he successfully "got away with" being TLP despite being far nastier and meaner in his overt affect than Scott, and to me that does kind of demonstrate his fears of being fired were pretty overblown
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HickeyWriter and
(And yeah actually I do think TLP was fucked up and his attitude toward his patients was obviously bad and his general shtick indicating that he, at least, believed his attitudes were common among his colleagues are a valid reason to distrust psychiatry)
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Scott gets compared a lot -- in terms of being a psychiatrist who writes anonymously about politics -- to "Theodore Dalrymple"/Anthony Malcolm Daniels And hoo boy is his writing a stomach-turning journey if you imagine him treating patients at the same time
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HickeyWriter and
And Scott is less bold than Dalrymple and mostly says the quiet part quiet but the same visceral revulsion for the dysfunction of "the underclass" still seeps out of every pore of his writing and is clearly both informed by and informing his patient interactions
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HickeyWriter and
(I don't even have to point to one of his stories about patients to explain why I don't want Scott working in mental health, just, say, one of his blog posts about how much he hates living in San Francisco because of all the crazy homeless people on the street)
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