Everything Old is New Again

[mwchase]

Hi all. After dropping off the face of the old forum for about 2 years (!!!) I'm back, with a new username, avatar (Now with significantly less potential copyright infringement!), and, I don't know, hope that I'll be vaguely productive in some fashion.

The fact that I'm doing this to avoid doing homework while I wait for the guy ahead of me's laundry to finish somewhat puts a damper on that hope, but oh well. I'd ask what I missed, but I'm pretty sure my brain would pop.

How's everyone been?

[Ashes]

Welcome back!


Oh my, so much has happened. Comics got finished. People stopped posting so often. Jennifer came down with the flu, which triggered a depression, which she's still in.

What was your old username?

Procrastinating is never good, but at least it can be fun!

[mwchase]

I was wierdo203. I went through a couple iterations of usernames afterwards, before settling on this one because it A:is better tied to me, being most of my given name, and B: somewhat less silly-sounding.

I'm planning on a full-scale archive binge when I finish up my exams next week.

(Man, stopping posting. I was looking for a rules clarification on Toymallet, found the old forum and was like "Wait, no new posts in over a year WHAT?!")

Anyway, I'm going to bed soon. I can finish Tuesday's homework tomorrow, then Wednesday's shouldn't be too hard, and Thursday should be fine, giving me from Friday to Monday to slack off... study. I said study. Really.

[Alfador]

Welcome back! Things are a bit slow around here, what with Pastel Defender Heliotrope and To Save Her being over and Ika Takozushi not yet started, but many of the old regulars are still around. :3

[Ashes]

I was wierdo203.

Aha! I remember you! It's interesting that you're going with your real name here, since we're in an age where a single slip of the tongue can come back to bite you years later if it is tied to your real name. The internet has a long memory.

It might be tough to get answers for your Toymallet 40¢ questions — Jennifer hasn't been on the forums much since catching the flu at PAX. At first we were afraid she or one of her spouses had died! But they'll be alright. The flu is gone from their home now. They're just not young enough to bounce right back. Jennifer has slipped into a depression, theorized to be a neurological side-effect of the flu.

[mwchase]

It's interesting that you're going with your real name here, since we're in an age where a single slip of the tongue can come back to bite you years later if it is tied to your real name. The internet has a long memory.

There's a couple things going on there:
Internet anonymity is nowhere near as strong as it intuitively seems. It's possible to divine someone's identity from a pathetically small amount of information. My thought here is, I'm going to want to talk about things that have affected me. Beyond some critical point, I'm going to have ranted about enough stuff that any suitably dedicated individual could probably work out who I am, where I live, some of my habits, and my class schedule. So, unless I deliberately hold back, anonymity is false. Therefore, I am better served to dispense with the illusion.
Another thing is, the above notwithstanding, the internet does not have a clear idea who I am. There are various other mwchases online, various people with the same name as me (the Facebook network for Boston contains two people the same name and age as me. One of them is me. The other is not. (See, Texas? Marriage is invalid.)), and my name is a pair of words anyway.
Since I know I can't count on anonymity, I've spent my time online like this doing inoffensive stuff like mocking Neo-Nazis. (Okay, so it's just one guy. But he's stupid enough for ten people.) I've begun to take other steps to try to control my online image, which I won't go into because they're not that important and this is already tl;dr.

EDIT: A side note, so far as people not posting as much goes: this board is still in much better shape than one that one of my friends started up. Three members: one admin, two moderators, neither of which moderate anything, with a total of ten posts, five of them hidden. It's so small-time that no spambot knows it exists.

[draque]

Hey, welcome back ^^. Also, @Ashes, I've used my real name here since way back on the old boards. I've never really been big on using changeable online personas.

[Coda]

I can take a crack at your Toymallet question; I've asked a stack of my own in the past.

I've used Coda since 2000, and I don't expect to stop using it; it's fairly easy to tie that back to my real name if you really care (and I don't mind).

[mwchase]

Well, I'm actually not that interested in the question (what does "pinning" entail?), it's more that performing the search finally got me to notice that the forums had been archived. What had kept me from returning before was actually the question of whether to keep my old (ridiculously high-post) account (I'll try not to be so spammy this time) or start over from scratch. With the choice gone, I no longer had a dilemma, so I set up this account.

Also, I have no problem with using personas with no overt connection to me. It's just, as I see it, internet anonymity is all or nothing, and I didn't want to be prevented from talking about my personal life because elsewhere I'd made a comment that I expected to be anonymous. If I remember rightly, that kind of worry was what burned me through a few other names.

[Alfador]

I did the reverse of using my real name as my online name. In 2005, I legally changed my name so my former middle name is now my first name, and moving in to replace it as my middle name... "Alfador", which I've been using as my online name since May 9, 2000.

[Sinosaur]

A fine return to a person who is from some previous time.

Enjoy your procrastination, it is always worthwhile.