With an opening sentence like that, you know you are in for a good post.    Back in the day, Scienceblogs was first populated by fairly militant people (politically, culturally) and the group had traffic but little credibility - yet success breeds success so if you have not followed them over the past year, they got serious legitimacy too, acquiring writers like Deborah Blum and Maryn McKenna, among others, and that boosted their profile among serious readers.    But now you may know that, during the same period, Scienceblogs also seemed intent on self-destruction, and now they have squandered that goodwill away, along with writers old and new.

Maryn starts her departure post with the sentence in the title and with phrasing like "it is important to say that he was unsuited to marriage, with outsize appetites for beer and for women who were not me" she will surely be missed over there, but she will be back at her blog and, if she ever gets a hankering to leaving Blogging 1.0 behind and get into some Science 2.0, she knows where to find us.

Pulitzer prize winner Deborah Blum has departed as well - the drama is not welcome when it comes to reputation and she wants to write about things important to her, not worry about what her blog URL will do to her credibility.   And she will be back at the blog on her site.

David Dobbs tells us why it matters in the evolving science writing landscape and points out that the number of departures now totals 18.   I think other science sites, us among them, assumed this would blow over, though we also assumed writers there knew about the influx of corporate and institutional blogs, so surprises are always happening.