Online identities and their reality
A couple of weeks back, I mentioned in a brief post that when I was trying to remember all the pen names I had written under over the years.
The reason behind this was that I was thinking about myself and the fact that I've never actually had a personal site that gathered all my writing into one place. And I was thinking through the pros and cons of bringing all my various identities under one identity--although, I'm not sure that I actually could do that. Because there were times when I was creating an identity per story, and I don't even remember all the identities or all the stories.
I can't even combine my two primary identities, for reasons I have decided am unwilling to explain. Because the reasons there are a little too weird and all about fannish crazy.
Some of my pen names were ridiculous--the type of obvious online "screenname." Others were a common first name, a common last name, some combination I could get as firstlast or firstlast01, firstlast02, etc in hotmail or yahoo the day I was looking to post. And that is where I've discovered how I might have accidentally made at one other person's life difficult.
So, we've all heard about the HR people who google people during the hiring process, and exclude those who have things associated with their names that they don't want to associate with their business? I've always thought that a stupid process--there's not necessarily any way for that HR person to know that every result returned for that name is truly associated with that person.
Years ago, I wrote a couple of fairly dark adult stories in XF--one of these stories was the one I received a whole bunch of flames for and no positive feedback (while I ROFLed, because seeing what would happen was part of the intent--it was during a period when a group of shippers from XFCreative were privately flaming the butts off of authors in particular genres they hated). I made up a name, and posted. Yesterday I googled that name, and did a double-take at the results.
The stories did make it out onto a few other XF archives which are indexed by google. And those results are neatly mixed into about five pages of results all about a twenty-something woman of the same name. Looking through those results, there is absolutely no way to tell that this twenty-something female didn't write these rather dark and somewhat twisted stories when she was a teenager.
Oops. I kind of feel a little bit guilty here.
The reason behind this was that I was thinking about myself and the fact that I've never actually had a personal site that gathered all my writing into one place. And I was thinking through the pros and cons of bringing all my various identities under one identity--although, I'm not sure that I actually could do that. Because there were times when I was creating an identity per story, and I don't even remember all the identities or all the stories.
I can't even combine my two primary identities, for reasons I have decided am unwilling to explain. Because the reasons there are a little too weird and all about fannish crazy.
Some of my pen names were ridiculous--the type of obvious online "screenname." Others were a common first name, a common last name, some combination I could get as firstlast or firstlast01, firstlast02, etc in hotmail or yahoo the day I was looking to post. And that is where I've discovered how I might have accidentally made at one other person's life difficult.
So, we've all heard about the HR people who google people during the hiring process, and exclude those who have things associated with their names that they don't want to associate with their business? I've always thought that a stupid process--there's not necessarily any way for that HR person to know that every result returned for that name is truly associated with that person.
Years ago, I wrote a couple of fairly dark adult stories in XF--one of these stories was the one I received a whole bunch of flames for and no positive feedback (while I ROFLed, because seeing what would happen was part of the intent--it was during a period when a group of shippers from XFCreative were privately flaming the butts off of authors in particular genres they hated). I made up a name, and posted. Yesterday I googled that name, and did a double-take at the results.
The stories did make it out onto a few other XF archives which are indexed by google. And those results are neatly mixed into about five pages of results all about a twenty-something woman of the same name. Looking through those results, there is absolutely no way to tell that this twenty-something female didn't write these rather dark and somewhat twisted stories when she was a teenager.
Oops. I kind of feel a little bit guilty here.