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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

Nickname? Heh. I don't hide my identity on the internet. It doesn't take much courage to be non-anonymous; I've been online since 1990 and had all my personal info exposed on the web and in my message sig since 1994, and have had no problems. This, even though I've been in countless flamewars on newsgroups and elsewhere!

On the other hand, if one is going to adopt a new identity, that alternate personality should be seamless and natural. Hmmm. How many of your friends on the internet are actually Bill Beaty? (Part of an alternate identity is to violate your 'main' identity's habits... such as echewing use of handles!)

"The weirder you are going to behave, the more normal you should look. . .When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person. " -- P.J. O'Rourke

Rather than choosing a login name, instead choose a login persona. Don't bother with the facade, instead redesign the next layer down.

Back in Usenet days I realized that I'd adopted R. Feynman's fighting technique: appearing a bit "slow" in order to attract intellectual bullies with whom I could play. He used his Brooklyn cab-driver accent. I used my habit of describing physics in ultra-simple Kurt Vonnegut-style language. Ah, the simple joys of watching trolls on the tech newsgroups desperately backpedaling when they realized which one of us was going to end up as the victim of public embarrassment.

Going back further: I was on 1200 baud compuserve back during the Cold Fusion controversy. Then while searching the public library BBS, I found that their magazine index was actually something called "Gopher," which also linked to thousands of university hypertext sites, and something called "Usenet Newsgroups." Reading newsgroups only, not posting.

Then I heard about a local company called Connected Dot Com which was offering genuine internet connections for about $50 per month! Soon I was posting to newsgroups every night. Internet addiction 1991, no websites only Gopher. Then Connected stopped billing its users, so we had free bandwidth for months and months before the Sherrif's dept. broke in and confiscated all their equipment.

Other companies like eskimo.com had appeared by then. And then... this guy in Europe had a non-gopher hypertext thingy where you could write your own linked pages in your Unix files, and other people could read them (called http: rather than gopher:) There was a free page-viewer app for windows 3.1! Then there was a version with color pictures! It required a 9600b modem, but I discovered that it worked just fine with 2400b. Guys at Stanford Akebono server started a topic index of these "web page" things. When was all that, 1993?