pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



shel
@shel

One of the big rules of SomethingAwful that you were wise to follow was to never use a name you used anywhere else, due to the whole HELLDUMP thing, and if you did reuse your SA name it was only to be a part of some SA-specific clique somewhere. You were still a goon off-site and you knew what you did there would follow you back to your SA reputation. So you better not be a furry with the same name you use on SA, etc.

And then when most of us all left SA because we grew out of it and also the "GBS 3.0" era made it suck ass more than ever before; most of us made efforts to not use the same names we used on SA because we didn't want our embarrassing terrible teenage forum discussions to follow us into adulthood. SA was such an awful place in many ways, you definitely didn't want people associating you with whatever weird shit you said on there at age fourteen. The only people I know who have kept using the same names they used on SA are people who made content for the Let's Play subforum because it became a recognizable brand off-site for Twitch streaming and the like.

The end result is that I am well aware that an extremely significant chunk of my friends online and IRL all used to go on SA and even frequented the same subforums, and even the same megathreads; but we all refuse to tell each other what our old usernames were. Nobody wants to be associated with who they were on there because it's embarrassing and none of us are those people anymore. We're all furries now, not self-deprecating losers accusing each other of being furries.

However this leads me to always suspect that there is a strong possibility that I have been interacting with more or less the same online social circles, the same individuals, for like 15+ years continuously and we all just keep changing our names so we think we're different people. It's especially been funny now that I'm IRL friends with @micolithe who does still use the same name they used on SA; so there's this weird lop-sided dynamic where Mico will reference something from like over ten years ago that happened on SA and I'll be like "Oh yeah I remember that. I was there :)" but they don't know that because they don't know what my username was on SA and I'm sure as fuck not sharing it with anyone. Especially after KF tried to connect me back to my old SA account and because I have aggressively not given any hints as to what I went by they instead failed and targeted some random other person thinking they were me.

A huge chunk of early Twitter culture was shaped by the gradual exodus of people from SomethingAwful to Twitter after we grew out of being self-deprecating, and now there is an exodus from Twitter to cohost as we grow out of being hostile to each other. People keep saying "Cohost feels like 2011 Twitter again." I have to wonder is that just because it's actually all just the same people on our third+ name changes????

It's a funny thing to speculate about, and a mystery that, I want to be clear, I never want to have solved. I definitely don't want to learn that my favorite online friend had called me a sperg in BSS or something.

Also for clarification I never said any slurs on SA or anything but I was still a teenager and it was still pretty embarrassing I did a lot of oversharing and got probated several times for getting too invested in dumb arguments.


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in reply to @shel's post:

Unless that was subterfuge and I'm claiming to have been someone else (in earnestness I legit don't remember telling you my old username. I feel like I'm a spy in a movie who has been had right now. Obviously don't say it in public)

I was on SA for ages. About a year after I left I checked my account and it still showed my posting rate as over 10 posts a day. I still am friends with people from the GBS Ladies Chatting thread, the politoons megathread, the YOSPOS cat thread, and others, but since I have switched usernames like 3 times since leaving there it's doubtful that they remember quite who I was on there.

me hating my name and making a new name for every site (though even i stayed away from SA) means not even i remember my old name and also i somehow accidentally had perfect opsec so when i made some very stupid decisions it never got back to me irl. now i’m imminently findable and i think thats funny.