there are some internet friends where eventually you start calling them by their real name and then thereβs times where its like nah son your name is crispy forever
I remember sci-fi/hacker media from the late 80s - early 2000s, full of people with names like Hagbard and Cereal and Hiro Protagonist. My response was always βaw man, so in the future we not only get to choose our names, but we can make our own cool unique ones that are related to the activities and identities we actually care about? This is awesome! I wish I had friends who had cool names based on their self identities. I wanna hang out with people named Y.T. and Whistler, but Iβm stuck here in the suburbs with my friends Bob and Doug. So lame.β Flash forward twenty five years, Iβve transitioned to male and Iβve started writing under the pen name Idal Waves. Iβm talking to a family member about my friends and contemporaries and as I discuss people with names like Shoe and Fork and Evac, I realize that modern-day queer names and modern-day online handles are just the same as those dream hacker names of the early days of cyberpunk fantasy. Theyβre the identifiers that are chosen so you can do something cool, something so cool that you get a whole new name that you choose to describe yourself. A name for the world we choose to inhabit, not the one weβre stuck with.
Congratulations, pre-teen me. We made it. Weβre cool as fuck and we got to choose our names and define ourselves and hang around with other people who do the same. The cyberpunk adults were right. Itβs fucking awesome, just like you thought it would be.
Sorry about the name though, I know you were hoping for something you thought was awesome like Shadow or Goremaster.
my actual friends and lovers call me roach, like the bug. family and coworkers call me ray, a compromise name for the most boring parts of my life. once my mom asked me if my friend βlizardβ had a real name and was amused when i said that *was* her real name. βher mom named her lizard?β my mom asked, as though a motherβs name for a baby would have anything to do with who that person really is.
i learned this lesson from a deadhead in the late 80s or so, guy by the name of wharf rat, and i asked him once what his real name was, and he said βwharf ratβ. like, yeah, thereβs a name on his ID that isnβt that but no one calls him anything else. okay you know what, you have convinced me. thanks, wharf rat. you were 100% right.
have definitely met people whose Internet name became their legal name eventually. yes, I am Crispy forever. got the paperwork and everything.
