The story of the pseud
Mar. 19th, 2005 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantI'm really enjoying everyone's comments on my pseudonym poll, and will answer as soon as I can manage it. Several people pointed out that I neglected to tell the story of my own pseudonym.
My first interactive internet experience was in 1996ish on a bulletin board called Table Talk. The rules said to sign up using your real name, so I did, but I quickly discovered that the fear of being googled up by someone inappropriate (my mother, my boss, one of the subscribers of my publication) put a definite chill on my posting. Eventually I said to myself, "Well, I can lie about everything that's even remotely controversial -- or I can lie about my name and tell the truth about everything else."
Since the primary appeal of TT to my secretive self was the ability to tell the whole truth, I decided on the latter.
When I made my first contacts with slash fandom, I was still using my TT pseud. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cesperanza probably remembers getting a timid little LOC from me under that name.) This was fine as long as all I was doing was sending feedback. But when I started writing, I got nervous.
On TT, I had shared all kinds of identifying details -- my location, the name of my publication, my high school, my alma mater, my infant child's first name. Somehow it hadn't seemed too dangerous at the time, but I'd seen the kind of traffic slash lists got, and I wasn't prepared to have that many people know the name of my college dorm.
I had a bit of an advantage when it came to choosing a new pseud: I'd already been a voracious reader in three fandoms, and I'd seen people switch from real name to pseud, and people change from one pseud to another, and people enter a fandom that already had someone by that name and end up having to be "Cat_UK" or "Cat1974" to distinguish themselves. So I knew a lot of what I didn't want.
- On TT, I'd had a first-name-last-name arrangement, and people kept saying, "That's an unusual name. Is it a family name?" so that I felt like I was perpetrating a fraud.
- There was a woman on TT who was using a pseud in a foreign language, and she ended up changing it because, again, she felt like she was trying to fool people into thinking she was a gypsy when she wasn't.
- I didn't want just a first name, because the internet is a big place, and even if I'd chosen Hepzibah or Kelanie, there'd be sure to be another Hepzibah or Kelanie in some fandom or other. Or, worse yet, there'd be some big new slash-friendly program with a character named Hepzibah or Kelanie.
- I didn't want a fandom-specific name, because there was a Sentinel writer called XFreak, which suggested to me that people did indeed sometimes switch fandoms.
- Forgive me, those of you who did just this, but I didn't want a pseud that sounded like I was thirteen when I chose it.
I looked around at Sentinel and Voyager pseuds that I thought were cool -- Torch, Legion, Chaomath, Lyrica, Voracity -- and I thought, Hm, there's a pattern there: One word, familiar and easy to recognize, intriguing but not in that Magnetic Poetry way.
Having come up with those standards, I don't remember even considering any word other than Resonant. I liked it mainly because it's sound-oriented (as I am), familiar but uncommon, and not really connected to much of anything.
When I started doing chat, it was natural to abbreviate it to Res rather than make everybody type out R-E-S-O-N-A-N-T, and then I discovered the connection to the Latin "res" ("thing"), and I liked it even better.
What I didn't anticipate was that putting "resonant" into google would get me 2.8 million sites about audio technology, and putting in "resonant slash" would get me a bunch of stuff about remastering Guns 'n' Roses songs. (Well, it used to. I tried it tonight and discovered that now it mostly gets you me, which makes me insanely happy.)
And now I understand why I got so many comments, and why so many of them were so long. It's fun to talk about your name!
My first interactive internet experience was in 1996ish on a bulletin board called Table Talk. The rules said to sign up using your real name, so I did, but I quickly discovered that the fear of being googled up by someone inappropriate (my mother, my boss, one of the subscribers of my publication) put a definite chill on my posting. Eventually I said to myself, "Well, I can lie about everything that's even remotely controversial -- or I can lie about my name and tell the truth about everything else."
Since the primary appeal of TT to my secretive self was the ability to tell the whole truth, I decided on the latter.
When I made my first contacts with slash fandom, I was still using my TT pseud. (
cesperanza probably remembers getting a timid little LOC from me under that name.) This was fine as long as all I was doing was sending feedback. But when I started writing, I got nervous. On TT, I had shared all kinds of identifying details -- my location, the name of my publication, my high school, my alma mater, my infant child's first name. Somehow it hadn't seemed too dangerous at the time, but I'd seen the kind of traffic slash lists got, and I wasn't prepared to have that many people know the name of my college dorm.
I had a bit of an advantage when it came to choosing a new pseud: I'd already been a voracious reader in three fandoms, and I'd seen people switch from real name to pseud, and people change from one pseud to another, and people enter a fandom that already had someone by that name and end up having to be "Cat_UK" or "Cat1974" to distinguish themselves. So I knew a lot of what I didn't want.
- On TT, I'd had a first-name-last-name arrangement, and people kept saying, "That's an unusual name. Is it a family name?" so that I felt like I was perpetrating a fraud.
- There was a woman on TT who was using a pseud in a foreign language, and she ended up changing it because, again, she felt like she was trying to fool people into thinking she was a gypsy when she wasn't.
- I didn't want just a first name, because the internet is a big place, and even if I'd chosen Hepzibah or Kelanie, there'd be sure to be another Hepzibah or Kelanie in some fandom or other. Or, worse yet, there'd be some big new slash-friendly program with a character named Hepzibah or Kelanie.
- I didn't want a fandom-specific name, because there was a Sentinel writer called XFreak, which suggested to me that people did indeed sometimes switch fandoms.
- Forgive me, those of you who did just this, but I didn't want a pseud that sounded like I was thirteen when I chose it.
I looked around at Sentinel and Voyager pseuds that I thought were cool -- Torch, Legion, Chaomath, Lyrica, Voracity -- and I thought, Hm, there's a pattern there: One word, familiar and easy to recognize, intriguing but not in that Magnetic Poetry way.
Having come up with those standards, I don't remember even considering any word other than Resonant. I liked it mainly because it's sound-oriented (as I am), familiar but uncommon, and not really connected to much of anything.
When I started doing chat, it was natural to abbreviate it to Res rather than make everybody type out R-E-S-O-N-A-N-T, and then I discovered the connection to the Latin "res" ("thing"), and I liked it even better.
What I didn't anticipate was that putting "resonant" into google would get me 2.8 million sites about audio technology, and putting in "resonant slash" would get me a bunch of stuff about remastering Guns 'n' Roses songs. (Well, it used to. I tried it tonight and discovered that now it mostly gets you me, which makes me insanely happy.)
And now I understand why I got so many comments, and why so many of them were so long. It's fun to talk about your name!