What happens behind the scenes at Gawker? We know you ask yourselves this question every single hour of every single day, and we don't blame you. We are fascinating. Sometimes we order sandwiches for lunch, and sometimes we order burritos. Sometimes we listen to music while we blog, and sometimes we do not. Sometimes Max Read picks his nose, but not always. With all this in mind, we're sharing with you our official "behind the blog post" backstories for all of the posts you clicked the shit out of this year. Next up: the day Reddit blacklisted Gawker for exposing Violentacrez, the site's biggest troll.

Note: This post—a response to Reddit's free speech argument in the wake of Gawker's Violentacrez story—was originally published on writer John Scalzi's personal blog, and is republished here with permission. You can find the original here.

Michael Brutsch, the Texas man behind the notorious Reddit troll Violentacrez, was fired this weekend, one day after Gawker outed him in an article Friday. This is not surprising, as Brutsch had built his online reputation on distributing pictures of underaged girls in bikinis and being offensive as possible.

Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres).