I liked that handle enough that I kept using it when I moved onto the wider internet proper a year or two later. Again, this still wasn't a primarily fannish activity for me yet -- this was the mid-1990s when websites were still relatively scarce and clunky, almost everyone was on dialup, and consumer-grade online access that wasn't geared to serious geeks was just getting started, so there weren't so many kiddies running around: the geeky crowds I was hanging out with at the time actually used to joke about September being the worst time of year, because this was when you'd see an influx of new college students getting internet access for the first time, and disrupting things for the old-timers via their cluelessness about the established social norms. Here, I was initially active on Usenet and mailing lists, and while there were already fannish groups and listservs out there, those weren't really the corners of the net where I spent the most time. But there was still a pretty broad acceptance of "fake" handles -- not everyone used them, but enough folks had come up from similar BBS cultures where they were part of the game that they were fairly common. Additionally, some of the groups I was reading were focused on issues relating to sexuality, so there were cases where folks who had reasons to be somewhat closeted about their sexual orientation, kink/poly interests, hobby erotica-writing, etc. might not want to attach their real names, or even their other online personas, to stuff posted in these areas; and Usenet in general also had enough of a reputation as a space dominated by sometimes-poorly-socialized male nerds that some women chose to use male or gender-neutral online handles to avoid harassment.
It was a little trickier to establish multiple online identities in those days, when there weren't free email/journal/webspace etc. providers around every corner, but it was still doable -- especially if you were the sort of hardcore geek who had your own domain names, and/or had friends with their own domains. So even before I got involved with anything fannish again, I had multiple email addresses, and could easily use a more jokey or pseudonymous persona in one place and a more formal, professional-looking one in another. And I knew enough folks, in the extremely geeky circles I was on the fringes of, who did exactly the same, that it was really normalized further for me: someone with a fannish or geeky handle, a jokey domain name, etc. was reflecting some of their interests, but not necessarily reflecting something that was absolutely central to their life. It really was like the t-shirt or real-life nickname analogy you make, where some of the pseuds were used in contexts that made them sort of the online equivalent of hanging out with your buddies at a bar, wearing a nerdy/fannish t-shirt and getting called by a silly nickname; that was on your own time, for fun, and didn't necessarily carry over to when you put on the business clothes and went to the office with folks who address you by the legal name on your ID...
So that's the perspective I had fairly well established, long before I started nosing around the fringes of fandom again in the late 1990s. Even before LJ or the Pit took off, there were folks using all sorts of obviously pseudonymous names when they posted to mailing lists or their own personal sites or fandom-specific web archives...and at this point it was easy enough for even the less-geeky sort of users to get a free website from someplace like Tripod or Geocities, or get a free secondary email address from the likes of Hotmail or Yahoo if they didn't want to use their main ISP/school account, that I never really assumed that some name I saw linked to a story on a random site was necessarily that person's only, or even primary, online existence. Why would I assume that, when I had years of experience at this point telling me that many people choose to compartmentalize their lives, offline and online, especially where not-quite-mainstream interests or hobbies were concerned?
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
It was a little trickier to establish multiple online identities in those days, when there weren't free email/journal/webspace etc. providers around every corner, but it was still doable -- especially if you were the sort of hardcore geek who had your own domain names, and/or had friends with their own domains. So even before I got involved with anything fannish again, I had multiple email addresses, and could easily use a more jokey or pseudonymous persona in one place and a more formal, professional-looking one in another. And I knew enough folks, in the extremely geeky circles I was on the fringes of, who did exactly the same, that it was really normalized further for me: someone with a fannish or geeky handle, a jokey domain name, etc. was reflecting some of their interests, but not necessarily reflecting something that was absolutely central to their life. It really was like the t-shirt or real-life nickname analogy you make, where some of the pseuds were used in contexts that made them sort of the online equivalent of hanging out with your buddies at a bar, wearing a nerdy/fannish t-shirt and getting called by a silly nickname; that was on your own time, for fun, and didn't necessarily carry over to when you put on the business clothes and went to the office with folks who address you by the legal name on your ID...
So that's the perspective I had fairly well established, long before I started nosing around the fringes of fandom again in the late 1990s. Even before LJ or the Pit took off, there were folks using all sorts of obviously pseudonymous names when they posted to mailing lists or their own personal sites or fandom-specific web archives...and at this point it was easy enough for even the less-geeky sort of users to get a free website from someplace like Tripod or Geocities, or get a free secondary email address from the likes of Hotmail or Yahoo if they didn't want to use their main ISP/school account, that I never really assumed that some name I saw linked to a story on a random site was necessarily that person's only, or even primary, online existence. Why would I assume that, when I had years of experience at this point telling me that many people choose to compartmentalize their lives, offline and online, especially where not-quite-mainstream interests or hobbies were concerned?