May 1st

[jackjanderson]

A couple of unrelated points:

I'm sick. I've got some kind of virus, started coming down with it last night - temperature, congestion, coughing, sneezing and very little throat. No appetite and all my old bones are aching. Probably only a bad cold but it's a doozy of one. Today has most been spent curled up on the couch, watching Star Trek on Netflix and doing crosswords on my tablet.

I do not like my twitter name. It's currently flyingtojack. jackjanderson has already been taken which is annoying because that would be my preference. So, my question, as I'm pondering this, is: how do you choose your social media handles?

I mentioned in my last post that Samantha has been 'suggesting' that Lucy & I start blogging again. With Lucy, it's become less of a suggestion and more of a demand so I suspect Lucy will also start updating her journal again. It helps with her mental health, gives her an outlet and she enjoys being able to talk to people about fandom things. I know I do enjoy blogging when I'm doing it but always struggle to think of things to post so I went onto the Pinterest and found one of those 30 day writing challenges. I was going to answer the first one in this post but honestly feel like I'm about to go back to sleep, so maybe later

Comments

[redbird]

I mostly seem to use either "redbird," which isn't my real name or something people call me offline, and has the disadvantage that it's often already taken; vr or vicki when I can get them because I got there early or it's a relatively small site; and sometimes rosvicl, which nobody else ever wants and that a handful of people will recognize as me. (It was my username on the mainframe computer system back in college.)

And a couple of odd things in places where it seems to be the custom to use something that obviously isn't one's real name. I'm not going to identify myself, but Ask a Manager is full of regular commenters with handles that include movie and television characters, and a few in-jokes like "Guacamole Bob." (The site owner just wants people to use something other than "anonymous" and not to use sock-puppets, but is fine with someone changing their handle from, say, "Gene" to "Free Meerkats.")

[angelofthenorth]

Although my real name was available (it's quite unusual) I chose this because it's been my online handle for 16 years now, and it avoids easy links to my RL.

[wpadmirer]

Damn! I hope you feel better.

I chose my media handle based on my favorite writer. It's WPAdmirer which stands for Walker Percy Admirer.

[cosmolinguist]

My social media handles are usually puns based on my name. (One was a pun based on other things; my LJ one was about where I'm from which I changed it to not long after I moved away and wanted to feel that connection.) I seem to pick a new one whenver I need it, whatever sounds good to me at the time.

Hope your cold gets better soon!

[silveradept]

I am often able to get my preferred username, either smashed as one word, with different capitalization, or with spaces or underscores. These days, a lot of people are using email as their login and then letting us choose a display name, which makes it moot.

Feel better soon, we hope.

[marginaliana]

I chose this name (an alarming number of years ago) by discovering that 'marginalia' was taken on every single platform, so I decided to smash it together with the suffix -ana. I think I'd just discovered -ana because I was reading something that used 'Frostiana' about Robert Frost. I put them together and it looked cool and I've kept it on every platform since, because I like consistency. (Even though everyone always misunderstands what it means! But at least they can find me, which is the most important bit.)

I guess mainly I wanted something that was not related to my real name and was made up of words that would indicate a neat thing that I liked - a neat thing that was fairly classic. And I wanted something a bit elegant, too. Maybe whimsical, but not too silly. IDK, I think it depends on what kind of image of yourself you're trying to project. Who do you want to be?