That's about where I am, although slightly more nervous because the one time I was identified by someone who didn't know I blogged, they were seriously offended by something I'd said about them. Which tells me I have terrible judgment about what's going to piss people off (I wouldn't have guessed that what I'd said would be offensive at all), so I should probably never say anything to anyone under my real name.
But I don't worry about being outed. In a formal sense, I'm out at work, although I don't think anyone I know from work actually reads here.
As with fb, where I'm pretty taciturn and impersonal, my concern is focused attention from somebody who is hostile and unbalanced. In a normal interpersonal context, the OP is exactly right.
FWIW, about half the people I know on fb who also are pretty quiet there have similar motivation.
Someone in particular? Or in general, that you might become the focus of someone?
Mostly, I'd just prefer that when people google my real name, they find professional accomplishments instead of cock jokes.
Facebook, which I almost never use, has made me realize how heavily compartmentalized my life is and has been (and I don't think it is all that emotionally or intellectually healthy--sometimes I my job feels like basically one long continuous deception* on multiple fronts). In part because I started the FB account under this pseud and then moved it to my real name. There is pretty much nothing I would be interested in sharing with the entirety of my current (not even that big) friends list.
I have a few people (in addition to my wife and kids) where things leak through, but I find that even among my more internet-savvy friends (especially those my age) trying to explain various online presences under different goofy pseudonyms is generally a complete non-starter. Well, fuck 'em.
Nobody wished me happy birthday on Facebook last week. Facebook is assholes.
You're not even comfortable sharing the text of your footnote with us?
6: Huh. Are we not friends? Come to think, I have no idea what your name is.
(Or, possibly we are friends and I just didn't notice.)
4: Yes, when Alta Vista etc. first came out* the first result for my name (with associated work email) was basically a Usenet posting highlighted on a FAQ site which was the moral equivalent of a cock joke. Upon request the site owner anonymized it.
*Apparently it is being shut down by Yahoo this summer.
I find FB handy for keeping up with people I can't quite be bothered to keep up with in person or over the phone.
8: I don't even have any New York FB friends. I'll email you my real name if you're curious.
New Yorkers never make eye contact on FB. So rude.
Facebook, which I almost never use, has made me realize how heavily compartmentalized my life is....
Me also. My FB is almost entirely people I grew-up with or went to graduate school with (the people I went to college with are basically the same people I grew-up with). I don't do much socializing with coworkers, which seems a bit odd now that I've been here seven years.
7: Not even sure what the footnote was going to be. I think a discussion of 9 and some similar incidents (but I also conceal my politics and various other activities) . Most of the contexts in which I imagine being "outed" at work would be bad. I am undisciplined, play a stupid fucking game*, and am not a careful person as I was just discussing with my two sons recently.
*Rather low self-image day here today.
Mine is almost entirely either Unfogged or my inlaws. Given that there is nothing I'd ever say to both of those groups of people, I don't ever put anything on FB beyond comments on other people's posts.
Wait. I am friends with a family in the Connecticut suburbs of NYC.
5 - has made me realize how heavily compartmentalized my life is and has been (and I don't think it is all that emotionally or intellectually healthy
I've always compartmentalized the various different roles in my life, even before the internets. Don't know how healthy that is, but I'm not interested in changing it.
There is pretty much nothing I would be interested in sharing with the entirety of my current (not even that big) friends list.
This is precisely why I find FB to be so useless. I don't communicate that way in real life, so why would I ever want to communicate that way on the internet?
I think of FB as student outreach - liberal news, but I try to steer clear of anything explicitly insulting to conservative people.
Ignore 14, everything's fucking great. My discontents are but a mere striving after the wind.
I am going to appear in a vaguely embarrassing news clip next week, and there's a high chance it will get tagged on FB. I'm not enthused about this at all.
19: That's good. I'm horrible at cheering people up.
The compartmentilization thing is the key. Do people who post personal statuses to FB often feel they have a single community?
Google+ has good tools for dealing with compartmentalization but they are far from achieving critical mass to take on FB. Also they routinely hose the rollouts for new social media products for some reason, and Google+ is no exception.
I wish the comments I've made across the internets under my real name weren't so, in general, stupid. If I start commenting under my real name again to change the distribution, I'm sure just a few years later I'll reassess and have the same problem. The only silver lining is that my name is fairly common and there are more prominent people in my field that share it. Alas, some of the comments are Facebook-linked.
also that people wouldn't get why I was saying so much on the internet. That it would just seem like a really odd pastime
I think I shook this feeling (not that I say that much on the internet) at about the time I stopped feeling weird about telling people that I used OKCupid. It's true that Facebook has been a big part of it, but I think people just accept that a much larger part of life takes place on the internet nowadays. Almost everyone I know reads newspapers online instead of print, even my mom uses Skype, etc.
Google+ has also done more to out me than any other entity. I didn't encircle Jammies, intentionally, and it suggested real life friends of his to Heebie. So I deactivated my account.
Then later, it reactivated my account, with a warning that heebie-geebie does not seem like a real name. They threatened to re-deactivate my account if I didn't provide a real name. Thankfully they kept their word.
Facebook shut down my account, because they inexplicably decided "Faceless Friendless" wasn't my real name.
21: I'm horrible at cheering people up.
On the contrary, you've cheered me on many occasions. Asshole.
23: Ah yes, Google+, friend of the pseudonymous.
26: Odd. I just logged in to G+ after more than a month of inactivity and the first thing it did was suggest I friend you. Maybe the Heebie account lives on as a Zombie of some sort.
I could not believe that Google+ (I think, or whatever Google thing I had to join to do the hangout) would not take a "first name" of just initials.
31:it was reactivated right after unfoggedycon, so they were probably promoting me in the window.
Is the switch from gchats to hang outs connected to google+?
Wait. Did x. grapnel activate google+ on my computer, in DC, in order to facilitate the hangout? It's all making sense now...
That's much less bad than google doing it.
I deactivated my Google+ account shortly after inadvertently outing myself to heebie (who has probably forgotten this incident). Back then, it would have been risky, for professional reasons, for someone to connect my online identity with my work identity.
So far Google has not deduced out that "Alexandra Teamchat" is not a real person strangely interested in discussing AngularJS with my colleagues but without any other interests.
I thought nobody knew Moby's name, kind of like the opposite of Cheers. I thought that was a thing about unfogged.
I don't care too much about the compartmentalization on fb, which is weird, because I do sometimes get nervous about it with different sorts of people meeting in real life. Once every six months someone makes a cock joke or the equivalent in a thread about something and I delete it and mention to them that I'm fb friends with my dad and (reluctantly) first grade teacher.
Mostly the other Fred Smearcase comes up if you google me, last time I checked. I hate to think my embarrassing arguments about opera singers are still out there but I guess they are. Otherwise probably you get my LinkedIn page? I don't know. I haven't ego-surfed in a long time.
She really didn't want to be your first-grade teacher?
One of the other Freds Smearcase, I should say.
She was hoping to teach one of them?
No I think I was sort of cute and sweet in first grade. God knows what happened. Look at this tangle of thorns, &c.
Right, the prettiest whistles won't wrestle the thistles undone.
Wait, what happened?
If that was directed to me: I sent you a proposed blog post via my anonymous gmail account which, unbeknownst to me had been connected to my Google+ account, which had my real name. You kindly declined to blackmail me with the threat of exposure.
I also have serious compartmentalization worries that have kept me from posting on FB almost entirely. I still enjoy reading it a few times a week, largely for what people here write.
One of the oddest things about Facebook is the information gap that develops between one's knowledge of the lives of the obsessive posters, and everyone else. I saw a bunch of old, good friends this weekend and had to do basic catching up on things like their current job, age and number of kids, etc. Meanwhile I know every ingredient that some random law school acquaintance put in her salad yesterday.
48 -- It is a funny thing, that's for sure.
I'm not that concerned with compartmentalization, and so even though the folks in my friend set come from all sorts of different connections, there's no set of people I worry about learning that I think my daughter is a good writer, or that it's going to be hot enough today to go tubing on the Clark Fork. Mothers Day, Fathers Day and the Prom Season are great. And I'm glad that some of the folks who've dropped out here keep up a presence there.
48: Being ignorance of heavy metal music, for the longest time I thought you were posting under your own name.
But it seems much, much less fraught than it used to, particularly if Heebie U were to find out.
It seems curious that word "tenure" doesn't appear anywhere in the OP.
One of the oddest things about facebook is that I'm friends with many of you but don't know your real names. Someone here once drew up a handy chart for me (eg. Robert Halford = Ari Kelman*), but I quickly lost it.
* Sorry for outing you, dude. No, wait, you're the other Ari Kelman, aren't you?
One of the oddest things about Facebook is the information gap that develops between one's knowledge of the lives of the obsessive posters, and everyone else.
I can report from the perspective of the obsessive poster that you end up with friends who think you're still close because they know what's going on with you; meanwhile, you have no idea that they had kids and changed careers and moved to Africa because they're some form of a lurker.
53: The guy who posts as "Josh" here is, in real life, Eric Rauchway.
55: I hope you mentally made the same typo as I made.
Lurkers have to move to Africa? Is this some kind of latter-day American Colonization Society thing?
54, 48 -- Of course the very thing occurs here. Even in our current pared down state (compared to 2007) there are folks that haven't told much of their stories. Which is fine.
Also on the information gap: I'm extremely high on the Unfogged side - anyone can read my personal blog and find out what the hell's going on with my broken car and cat, but I may not even know Moby's real name. Whereas on FB, I haven't shared that I'm a mathematician or that I work at Heebie U. (The former because I find it slightly embarrassing, as if I'm saying "My career is GENIUS", and the latter because I find it slightly embarrassing, as if I'm saying "I work at Bob Jones U", even though it's actually a religious-affiliation that still delivers a secular education.)
60: I sent you a holiday card with my real name.
I guess I knew that Halford and Smearcase are the same person -- I mean really, who has ever seen them together -- but I'd have never connected them with that AK guy. High quality sock-puppeting is what that is.
Although it may not have had my pseudonym on it.
61: That's right! I didn't commit your name to memory. You'll always be Mobes to me.
I still have the card, however. I'm not an asshole like Stanster.
That's why I didn't send him a card.
I'd have wished you a happy birthday if you'd wished me a merry Christmas. You made your bed, fella.
And now you've wrecked your chance of revising history. Way to fail to exploit his trash-habit.
Carpy, we'll be in Montana in August, btw.
My Facebook friends list is almost evenly split between second grad school friends and Unfogged. When I started using it, almost everything I was doing there was grad school friends related or non-audience specific - politics, interesting links, that sort of thing. I think I consider personal posts grad school friends related. I'm too lazy to maintain audience lists, so I just post that stuff generally and I assume that people who aren't in the audience will ignore, hide, or unfriend me. It's fairly rare for my updates to have "crossover" appeal, I think.
The exception are a few people I hadn't been in touch with for a long time and a former roommate who was never home and I barely know. I started excluding them by default when I started using Facebook and either they hide me or they're barely active there and now after so many years of them not seeing most of my posts it seems like it would be odd to take them off the exclude list. Typing this out it really brings out how silly this is.
Figured. We'll leave while you're here, so the place doesn't seem too crowded.
You're a funny man, Moby. That's why I'll wish you a happy birthday last.
We should all add "unfogged" as a skill on LinkedIn.
Wait. Did x. grapnel activate google+ on my computer, in DC, in order to facilitate the hangout? It's all making sense now...
Maybe? My memories of that night are a bit hazy.
I'm now connected to an Australian. LinkedIn is easy.
50: Me too, and I thought you were brave for giving first and last. What if someone googled that?!
My hope was that if they googled the name, they'd think I was Rob Halford, metal god, and who wouldn't want others to think that about oneself, even for a moment.
I have to say that today, however, I'm feverish and don't feel like either a metal god or my blog character. Frankly snuggling under a soft blanket with a stuffed animal and a box of saltines sounds pretty good right now.
You should probably add in some ginger ale with HFCS. It is perfect with saltines.
Isn't "Snuggling My Teddy Bear" a song off British Steel?
I now have LinkedIn connections on three continents. Four if you count Mexico as part of South America.
I think I've complained in entirely too much specificity here about one or more of my collaborators to be very comfortable with having it become widely known that I comment here. Probably I shouldn't have done that.
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I'm looking for a good adventure book to listen to on our car trip tomorrow. WWZ would be perfect, but it is already checked out. (I figured out how to check out audiobooks from the library!) We listened to all the Gregor the Underlander books already. Looking for a lot of plot, maybe not so much with interior monologues and deep characterization.
Thank you!
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And I am also asking for recommendations from y'all. I wasn't just informing you of my search for no reason.
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83: if you want to stick with YA titles, the Fablehaven books are maybe stretched a bit thinner, plot-wise, than the Gregor books, but they're still a lot of fun. That said, please note that I tend to read/listen to this kind of literature through the eyes/ears of my kids.
The Magyk books are also filled with charming characters, though the plot peters out toward the end of the series.
Anything stand-alone, or at least not obviously a series?
Doesn't have to be YA, although I find those go down easy. I'd like something boy-flavored, 'cause I've got my brother and boyfriend in the car. Exciting history of Shackleton? I looked for Under a Flaming Sky, but it isn't on audiobook.
I think the reader of audiobooks is really important, so I'm reluctant to recommend titles unless I've actually listened to them myself. And most of what I've listened to, for nearly a decade, have been kids books or YA lit. That said, I do remember being tickled, many, many years ago, while listening to Bill Bryson's book about Australia. The reader was very good.
Books with dogs would be good. We listened to that book where the bull terrier and the golden and the Siamese cat walked really far.
A dog does not read an audiobook well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.
Inside a dog it's too noisy to listen to an audiobook.
On an audiobook, no one knows if you're a dog.
Tangentially related to Megan's question, a friend raved about the game "Last of Us". I watched a gameplay video to get a feel for it, and, wow, I would pay to watch that at a cinema. Luckily the dude who made the video was both annoying and incompetent, so I didn't get sucked into watching all 20+hrs of it. First video is here, if you're interested (NB: lots of violence):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wLljngvrpw
90: Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey was a book?
CCarp, shouldn't you be out looking for Randy Udall?
94: For when you fill like destroying your productivity, try this one.
GSwift is a lot closer.
I will go check this afternoon, and make sure he's not somewhere along the Clark Fork.
Von Wafer, in my searches for an audiobook, I turned up a series I've recommended to you before (now in audio). Stoneheart is the start of a trilogy. Boy in contemporary London gets sucked into a war between the statues of London, which come to life and fight. They have the properties of the thing they're a statue of. If they get back to their plinth by midnight, they are like new. If not, they're dead stone.
On the "outing yourself on unfogged" front, the Dean just walked into my office and informed me that I have tenure. Fortunately I wasn't writing a comment on unfogged when she walked in.
If someone I know IRL reads here, they'll probably be able to guess who I am.
Congratulations! How do you celebrate tenure -- show up for class drunk because now you can?
Great news. Now you won't have to limit yourself to lurking.
Wait AcademicLurker isn't already drunk? I have been misled about this tenure business.
Can you be tenured and a lurker?
Paradise Lost read aloud is pretty compelling.
Paradise Lost read aloud by dogs is pretty compelling.
Congrats AcademicLurker! Now you can comment under your real name!
Hooray Academic Lurker!
On the "outing yourself on unfogged" front, I thought the Mineshaft would enjoy my pride of place on the op-ed page today, perfectly situated for a serious thoughtful argument that has never been made with such care.
The article is actually a good example of why I tie myself in tangles over this issue. I'm trying to break in to tv/feature writing, but my bread and butter is political communications consulting that requires some degree of comportment. So then I write something that straddles both sides -- which is fine, except that I don't use my twitter professionally, so civic-affairs people who find it afterwards get random humor that doesn't really add to my cachet as a consultant.
Basically the long way of saying that my various personae don't separate out easily. I yearn for the day that I can just be a jackass on the internet under my own name.
I have thought about saying fuck it and combining my real-world and pseudonymous personalities, but I generally decide it would be way, way too fraught. It has been annoying; some of the things I've done under a pseudonym would look great on a CV-type thing of some sort. But no.
Congratulations J.J. Ksky! Appearing in the opinion pages right next to a titan of journalism like that.
some of the things I've done under a pseudonym would look great on a CV-type thing of some sort.
Let's see . . . I see that you served on the board of directors of The Poor Man Institute. Refresh my memory, were their offices on K Street? Or am I thinking of the Heritage Foundation?
That's him in the spiderman underwear, no?
Whatever happened to the Poor Man, anyway?
111: That's a tough gig -- you can be super clever and witty, but it's hard to compete with an idiot that's trying to be serious.
AcademicLurker should try to trade tenure for a gig like Petraeus's.
118 before seeing 117. What's the probability of the word "gig" coming up twice in succession like that?
110: Rekrul Cimedaca!
Aerial Cum Dreck Muckier Caldera.
Thanks all. She says that I really need to up my unfogged commenting game if I want to go up for full professor in a few years.
On the audiobooks in the car front, does Elmore Leonard fit your criteria? I could imagine his books could be pretty entertaining if read aloud by the right person.
This recently came up when Mr. Steele mentioned he might forward one of my posts to friends, and it became apparent we hadn't discussed whether or not I would remain anonymous. It never happened so it doesn't matter much. When I chose this name, my own realname was just common enough that you could find me if you wanted to on the search engines, but you could also not tell me apart from other people with the same name, some of whom I didn't want to be confused with (there was only one other bianca steele, a receptionist in Australia, at the time)--now there are way too many people with that name to even try to find me unless you know what town I live in (and even then, someone around the corner married someone who now has my name, apparently). Lots of software people lurk around the nets, probably more than in other fields. Most are open-minded, but a few aren't. I worry a bit about, say, good-natured banter appearing to someone as hostility toward someone they like and assume, wrongly, I dislike. I don't know how secure my pseud really is, so then there's paranoia, and naming it the long arm of karma doesn't help all that much.
I go back and forth on the pseudonymity issue, especially given how rare my full name is. The only compartmentalizing I do on FB, though, is to block my uncle from all political posts. Other than that, I just try to remember that I'm FB friends with my department chair, and so I don't post anything that I wouldn't want her to see.
Congrats, AL! Congrats, K-sky!
Which reminds me, I never responded to this:
It seems curious that word "tenure" doesn't appear anywhere in the OP.
I suppose getting tenure also relaxed me in terms of feeling secure, but I don't remember specifically breathing a sigh of relief about my secret identity. If we were still in Dooce-Gets-Fired years, even with tenure I'd be a little nervous because I don't like confrontations and drama.
123 - I thought "Robot" was a very common Czech name.
126 - Let me try again. I thought I read on Standpipe's blog that "Robotnik" was a common Czech name!
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Hm, this bunting is much too small. A house with way-too-small bunting sure does look silly, doesn't it? Oh well!
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125, 126, 127: MORE COMMON ALL THE TIME AMIRITE
127: It's uncommon in the States since it was Ellis Island-ed to "Eggman."
I see that Australia has chosen the side of Heebie against Emerson in the great debate.
I find that when I tell people I have a blog and some readers from all over the world, almost nobody cares. The one time somebody did, the reaction was negative in a weird way.
But my blog has brought me into slight email contact with some who share the enthusiasms I show in my blogging.
Walt is about the only one who has made me regret any rudeness on the Internet, and I did not think I was being very rude in that case.
My last name is more common than one might expect. So when I ego surf, I get a goalie, reporters, somebody on trial for assault or attempted murder, a murder victim, somebody disappeared, a bishop, various people arrested for some mix of drunkenness and drugs, etc.
Oh hm. I've gone and said I don't really compartmentalize on fb but come to think of it I compartmentalize a lot off.
I had a private livejournal under this name, which I've also used a couple of other places, including a short-lived social work blog. I had an opera blog (read by some number of strangers) under a different name. I am now on Twitter under a silly handle I might change but it also has my real name.
Sometimes I get itchy about the intersection of these, because I used them for such different things.
My biggest concern with pseudonymity used to mostly be that I feared Rory one day discovering the written record of some of my post-divorce stupidity. But she knows my pseud and either wasn't sufficiently mortified to disown me or wasn't curious enough to find anything terrible.
I am also now friends with enough of you on Facebook that my mom will periodically ask where I know
you from.
Congrats AL. Now, don't be that wuss who just keeps up with the same old respectable projects after tenure. I want to see you working on a weaponized dinosaur-quadcopter hybrid.
I think I half-consciously almost told someone Bave and I met on here because it seemed like a better story than OKCupid. This may have been after my grandmother asked where we met and I sputtered "a personal ad" and felt a twinge of self-consciousness.
You may now imagine me explaining unfogged to my grandmother, if you like.
138: it is always a funny dance explaining where Blume and I met; "online. But no, uh, not that kind of online, uh..."
I don't generally share Unfogged with my real-life friends, because my real-life friends suck I think it actually is a little weird, and it's easy to forget this because you grow accustomed to it, but really there's a significant potential for people to get turned off by this place if the first thing they read is on the more eccentric side. I mean, you really don't want to have to explain what "NMM" means, right at the beginning of the tour.
I tell people about Unfogged in vague terms, and my immediate family a little more. My brother might be starting to read it (yoohoo!). Given the guessability of my pseud given my full name, and some indirect FB/Twitter/blog pseudonymity slippages, I've tried to only talk about my job in ways that I could defend to supervisors, which is to say not that much.
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Hey Seattle-area people, I have a friend who is due to head that way for a six-week trip, but her housing arrangement has just fallen through. If you know of anyone who would like a pleasant, clean, 40-something singer/songwriter and her dog as a housesitter or similar, please let me know at the linked e-mail.
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139: I can't even imagine what that must be like.
,I am also now friends with enough of you on Facebook that my mom will periodically ask where I know you from.
This is my greatest fear. Forunately my mother is dead.
At this point, I figure most of my most intemperate/revealing comments are buried so far back in TFA that anyone I mention the blog to is unlikely to find anything too offensive. Not that I'm putting it on my resume, but really, it is hard to imagine a situation (Cabinet appointment?) in which my commenting here could really harm my prospects at this point.
My mother has asked about Unfogged people. My parents are relentlessly nosy because that's how my family shows they care.
111: I yearn for the day that I can just be a jackass on the internet under my own name.
Long ago when just coming into my own intellectually, I fussed quite a bit about the compartmentalization thing, but I think I'm with MAE way up in 17 by now: not everybody needs to know everything. My voice is very different in different settings, and I'd have thought most people's are.
I'd been about to say that a beloved friend, also a FB friend, speaks in the same voice to all of his 500-odd friends, and I've marveled at it, but on reflection, no: all sorts of things occur in his life that he's kept fairly quiet.
I honestly don't know any more whether erasing boundaries is worth aspiring to.
Oh, Witt, I'm sorry, I'd love to but we don't have a kitchen. Or doors on one of the bathrooms. And they may have to turn off the electricity again.
Renovations: the bobo art form, for which we bobo suffer.
I want to see you working on a weaponized dinosaur-quadcopter hybrid.
Couldn't it be, like, a shark-quadcopter hybrid? One kooky dinosaur project on the blog is enough.
HAVING TWO IDENTITIES FOR YOURSELF IS AN EXAMPLE OF A LACK OF INTEGRITY, GUYS.
In the early days of blogging I set up a site and it asked for my name so I entered it thinking I could pick a pseud later, but then the site was set up and it used my real name. So I started with that and now it's out there forever in google because I got links from some people who are still going (Cole in his wingnut days and instafuckingpundit.) I like to pretend that if I had used a pseud I'd still have a blog.
I've wrestled with this issue a lot, for some of the same reasons Sifu and k-sky were talking about above. I've generally managed it by having one-way openness from my real-life persona to my blog one (e.g., linking to my blog posts from Facebook but not linking to anything with my real name from blogs). As I get more serious about the idea of writing a book this issue has become more important, since my blogging is the only thing that really gives me any obvious book-writing qualifications.
My mother has asked about Unfogged people. My parents are relentlessly nosy because that's how my family shows they care.
My mother is extremely happy to hear when I e.g. go to DC to attend a party with unfogged people, because it's almost as if I have a well-adjusted social life.
155: Yeah, most likely. I'm still thinking through it.
My mother is extremely happy to hear when I e.g. go to DC to attend a party with unfogged people, because it's almost as if I have a well-adjusted social life.
Likewise.
I used to care about pseudonymity a little, back when I had a blog. I had nightmares about my mother finding it and seeing how she was represented. (There is no safe way to talk about her. All stories about her are bad--almost as bad as not telling stories about her.) When I was a child, she was constantly finding some evidence of betrayal and shaking in my face while screaming.
But once I ended my own blog, the anxiety really disappeared. Anyone who is obsessed with me enough to stalk and hunt me down in comments here would only reveal how weird and obsessive they are.
One of my friends here is really crazy about trying to limit information about himself out in the world--"if you tell anyone about this, say my name is Gerald or something"--and I'm like, (a) why do you think I would want to tell anyone about this conversation, and (b) why do you think they would give a shit who you are? At least, as I get older I care less about the consequences of being known for all the parts of me because I realize how little most people think about me. Who gives a shit what I've said in various places?
157: Start tonight, make it a good one since I told you to write a book.
it is always a funny dance explaining where Blume and I met; "online. But no, uh, not that kind of online, uh..."
I met Magpie through Usenet. Try explaining *that* to people.
161: aren't most of the people you're likely to explain it to familiar with Usenet?
Or maybe you have to say "netnews" for them to know what you mean.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You crazies talk to your families? That's just giving them ammunition to use against you!*
* The foregoing may not apply to those with non-Flippanter childhoods.
164: Unless you're going to lie to your family about how you met someone, you kind of have to tell them you met the person, er, online.
Whereupon you might could have to answer questions like, "Oh my god, how do you know he's not a serial killer?" "How are you sure he's not totes lying and he's actually some child rapist or something?" "You are going to meet this person? Who you have never met?"
It can be awkward, and it's actually a little odd to say: "Yeah, no, I really am certain that this will be fine, and he's not a serial killer."
I think my family would be more concerned if used "totes" than if I befriended serial killers.
Unless you're going to lie to your family about how you met someone...
"How," "that," "when," etc., etc.
166: I know, right?
Then again, I recall a moment maybe 5 years ago when I said "Dude" to my housemate, and he was *seriously offended*. (Context: he hadn't refilled the ice cube tray after prying the last ice cube out of it -- he'd just put the empty tray back in the freezer. This is a thing, and I said, understandably, "Dude, you didn't refill the ice cube tray!" He was absolutely offended by my use of the term "Dude".) Different vocabularies for different audiences: it's the only way.
168: No "who"? Or does "that" make it unneeded?
164: My family talks to me. I think they mostly want to keep tabs on what nuttiness I might be getting into and thus know when to order up the ice floe.
172: If I have to speak to my family, it is in free verse, full of strange music and secret harmonies.
173: "Or we'll put you in that crooked home we saw on '60 Minutes'!"
173: Do you find that irritating? Or charming?
order up the ice floe
Too late. Climate change. Sorry.
I communicate with my parents primarily through games of Words With Friends.
173: I find it amusing. There's lots of banter about that sort of thing, and also some serious communication about up with that which I will not put when it comes to medical interventions.
178: Oh dear. It seems you should iron that medical interventions stuff out (legally?) in order to get them out of your hair.
The first time I mentioned to my parents that I happened to have been visiting friends who I'd met online:
My mom:"Are you sure that's safe?" [Never mind I'd already met them.]
Me: It's probably a lot safer than the housing searches I've done on Craigslist.
My mom: Yeah, that's probably right.
(b) why do you think they would give a shit who you are?
Oh, totally. I had a friend who was a fellow opera blogger and he was obsessed with his anonymity and I was sort of like "are you afraid that one of the 12 people who reads opera blogs is going to storm into your workplace and expose you as....an opera blogger?" He was pretty nuts about it. I once left a terrible show at intermission and gave him my ticket since he was in standing room, and later he nervously asked me "did you tell anyone you gave me your ticket?" It didn't even make sense.
On the other hand, I kept blogging pseudonymously, so what am I talking about? I guess it's not about fear of exposure or danger sometimes so much as fear of annoyance and awkwardness. Enough of the 12 people who read opera blogs read mine that people sometimes hinted at meeting up and I thought "well that's just fine unless they suck, and then I have to make small talk with them at intermission forevermore." And this was partly because the gentleman in paragraph 1 would often come up to me at intermission to chat, and over time, I found him to be fairly awkward. And a republican.
179: Oh, it's all sorted legally and the kids aren't annoying. What will occasionally come up is a question about details. Real example: Recently a family friend of my age blacked out, totaled his car, and then had the then discovered glioblastoma *mostly* removed. Given the two months extra some nasty treatment is going to give him, would I want that in a similar situation? As you might expect, "No fucking way!" was the answer.
I found him to be fairly awkward. And a republican.
Speaking of awkward Republicans, I just met John Boehner.
That's a great picture to have, teo!
181: Yeah, it came up last night when I was telling a funny story about something funny a friend had said--a friend I identified as "Neil"--and he flipped out about anonymity. I couldn't figure out what the embarrassing part was; was Neil supposed to be horrified that I was recounting an instance of his wit that I remembered five years later? If anyone remembers any of my witticisms and repeats them years later, I said, you'd better fucking use my name, or it's plagiarism. Neil would be flattered. He said it never occurred to him to be flattered by being talked about; it would just make him nervous.
That's a great picture to have, teo!
Isn't it, though? The whole thing was kind of surreal.
Why was he so intent on getting a picture with you?
He wasn't. We asked for the picture, and he was happy to oblige.
(I've uploaded the photo in question to the Flickr pool for the benefit of those who are not Facebook friends with me.)
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Hey, the new alarm system you installed in this house is simultaneously working quite well and not well at all, speaking from the perspective of ten-til-five-AM-and-not-on-fire.
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I feel like an orange shirt is kind of gilding the shitty lily for ol' weepy.
Could I have expected such treatment from you? Nay, from any gentleman, from any man of honour? To have my name traduced in public; in inns, among the meanest vulgar!
Traduced? Bunter, fetch my horsewhip.
I'm finishing one of those books this week. Some asshole recalled it, but I'm just going to pay the fine and read at my own pace.
If this is the the "screw over your pseudonym" thread, I want to say HOLY CRAP I JUST FOUND OUT WE'RE MOVING TO THE CARRIBBEAN!
Island of the steel drums, baby...
"if you tell anyone about this, say my name is Gerald or something"
That weird dynamic between Leo and that British guy on The West Wing suddenly makes sense now.
Alas, I'll be watching cricket, not baseball.
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Off topic aside to LB: Lemieux @ LGM with a post on the SC that is pretty much in line with your head-banging one* . So now I think we can say that The penalty for violating that constraint is that I roll my eyes and Scott Lemieux writes an irate essay includes both eye-rolling and irate essays about people over-interpreting the results as well as about the result itself.
*I think Serwer is entirely right about the alleged tactical genius of Chief Justice Roberts. I would estimate that roughly 99.9% of his victories are the product of having 5 votes on most issues as opposed to any strategic savvy:
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OT: This is just wrong. PBR tastes worse than every beer on that list I've tried.
PBR is terrible, and I suspect the author has only had skunked Yuengling (green bottles are a problem). But he does have Coors Heavy up high, which I totally agree with.
Agreed. Yuengling is much better than that--definitely a solid budget beer (but I am a Pennsylvanian and my opinion is invalid). Genesee Cream isn't great, but it isn't as bad as they claim.
I had no idea that Keystone and Keystone Light tasted differently. Perhaps a tenth of my father's caloric intake over the past twenty years has been Keystone Light so it's good to know he's at least mildly discerning.
159: I really loved your blog.
181.1: I feel the same way. I have an extremely loose anonymity on my bird blog and that's fine. If I talk about work it's to complain that work prevented me from looking at birds, so I don't care who reads it. I like keeping a separation between Unfogged and direct family members, though. I've told you guys too many secrets.
Does a scalp tattoo hurt? Asking for a middle aged guy who is afraid to ask the dude with his scalp tattooed.
People with tattoos seem never less than eager to talk about whether they hurt, how much they hurt, how much the next one will hurt, blah blah blah blah. They don't give up skin acreage to advertise Valkyrie Dragon Taxi Services, Inc., not to get attention, Moby.
202: I once saw, and purchased, Genesee Bock. I don't remember anything about it except the really appealing goat on the can.
I once saw, and purchased, Genesee Bock.
Man, Derek would do anything to raise funds for a capital campaign.
I'm afraid that if I order Genesee, the bartender will think I lost my job.
203, 204: Aw, thanks! I miss it sometimes.
[T]he really appealing goat on the can.
I expect this sort of thing from neb, but....
I am always a bit anxious about people's reactions when they ask how I met my husband, since we met online, spent about 5 weeks with each other in person, and then I moved to the UK and got married. Even though at this point many of my friends have met their partners via online dating or other online methods, it's an extreme enough example that I'd raise an eyebrow at someone else doing it.
212 was I.
And I loved your blog as well, AWB!
212, cont. Just for clarification, I didn't actually get married after only 5 weeks, I managed to wait 9 whole months. And I meant that I'd raise an eyebrow *before* it happened to me, not now. (Man, that was a blog comment failure. Where's the edit button?)
207: Bizarre; I didn't know that existed. But it is an appealing goat.
209: You just need to conspicuously consume an expensive drink so that they average to the price of your normal order. "I'll have your finest single malt, neat, and a Genesee."
I just bought a box full of PBR and I'm not sorry. I'm drinking one now. It's extremely refreshing.
I know this isn't what you're getting at, but does anybody make actual beer boxes, like the wine boxes? I suppose carbonation might be a problem.
they make little pretend keglets, I think. I don't know if they are made out of cardboard or not.
I feel a little residual resentment that he would diss Natty Boh. From the land of pleasant living!
Oooh, I should have bought that instead. (Most of this is going to a barbeque tomorrow. Or at least whatever I don't drink tonight is.)
Unrelatedly, but in case anyone was on the edge of his or her seat, my stupid school finally caved and offered me a (temporary) full time gig. (AFTER all the stupid work is over, but whatever, I'll take it.) I put the contract in the mail today.
212 is adorable if it works. Marrying high-school sweethearts, too. `Works' to be defined by the parties directly involved.
to Academic Lurker and E. Messily congratulations.
@ Knecht
Somehow it doesn't surprise me in the least that you got your marriage in trouble over blog comments. You were leading my mental most indiscret unfogged commenter chart for a while.
@ AWB
I loved your blog too and am sad that it is gone.
Regarding beer I've recently discovered a supermarket which stocks severel sorts of Andechser and Trappist beer. Pricey though.
Marrying high-school sweethearts, too.
I know a guy who married his high-school teacher, if that's what you mean.
They closed my usual bar for vacation. I have to go to the healthy bar.
Weird. The air is completely clear.
Even though I haven't been here in a year, the bartender remembers me. I think because of the rusty nails.
Most bars supply their own glasses, but it's thoughtful of you to bring your own, even if they are stupid.
I can still feel the tip of nose, so that isn't funny yet.
I stepped on a rusty nail a few weeks ago but I don't think I got tetanus, so far.
Maybe the bartender remembers you because you keep giving him the tip of nose. Try tipping conventionally and you'll find you blend in more.
I hereby rescind my early comments in this thread which make it appear as if I did not make the best possible choices at every stage of my life which is unpossible by definition. I blame a weirdly presenting summer cold ... or maybe it's tetanus. Compartmentalization FTW.
200: Yeah, I've only had about half of those, but frankly, most of them taste too similar to my undistinguished palate to make hard and fast distinctions. I do like the weird banana-bubble gum aftertaste of Premium though. And Busch Light is actually one of the least awful awful American beers I've had. Rolling Rock tastes pretty good if it is oppressively hot outside too.
Anyway, semi-related to the OP, an old college friend who now lives in New Mexico called last night and during our tightly compartmentalized conversation I almost brought up that I knew this guy online who was from New Mexico but now had a job in which he flew about Alaska, since she had previously had an Alaska-flying-about job (as a doctor affiliated with some Native Health organization). But I was mulling how to do the whole "online" thing and the moment passed. Why I didn't just say "I know a guy", I don't know.
Rolling Rock Cold non-lethal liquids tastes pretty good if it is oppressively hot outside too.
"Hot Beer" would be a good name for a band.
Write a book right now you slacker.
When I was your age, if somebody wanted to write a book, they had to use a word processor that was marginally less sophisticated than those you can use, so you have no excuse.
A fantasy book about Snowden's 2020* run for president? I'd read that.
*He's too young for 2016.
I had a moment of reading 248 as "no strings attached" and being really confused.
247: Entitled South America, the Sleeping Giant on our Doorstep one presumes.
"Don't let them into our airspace! They might have the presidential candidate onboard!
Ask the bartender to feel it for you.
This is the worst beer currently sold on American soil.
Obviously the author has never had Cold Spring, made from sulfur water and taint.
So, I was chastised today for being too "acerbic" on the Book of Face. I can't tell if my interlocutor is... oversensitive? uptight? or if having our heart has just totally eviscerated my sense for proper tone.
Uh, "having our heart" s/b "hanging out here." Stupid autocorrect.
