Keenan Cupped Her Hands, And In Her Hands She Held Worlds

Keenan cupped her hands, and in her hands she held worlds. In one world the fingernail creatures would hold constant parties. Well, we might question whether these were what we would call parties, since it was in linking arms and dancing and doing something that they called "whooping it up" that the fingernail creatures created the Z-formula from which they drew sustenance. And if they didn't whoop with fervor the output of Z-formula would be meager and nutritionally deficient. So what they called "partying" and "whooping it up" we might think of as analogous to tilling the soil and growing the crops. In other words, partying was serious business: what we would call "work." Of course, they had fun when they worked, but what they meant by "fun" isn't what we mean by "fun." For us, fun means we are enjoying ourselves, while for the fingernail creatures fun means winning the approval of one's fellows. So when the question arose, "Are we having fun?" the only acceptable answer, the one that wasn't taken as an insult, was, "Yes, we are having fun. We are whooping it up."

( This was just one of the many worlds that Keenan held in her hands )

Online Anonymity

Strange post by hilzoy at Obsidian Wings where she says she'd always imagined that by posting under "hilzoy" she was indicating to her readers that that's how she'd like to be known on blogs, as opposed to being referred to by her real name. She gets a bit pissy at Slate for publishing her actual identity.*

Anyway, the strangeness isn't that she wants her blog identity to remain disconnected from her identity offline (though I wonder what right she thinks she has to anonymity if she's going to blog about stuff that's related to what she gets paid to teach and write about), but rather her assuming that her readers would take her use of a screen name as a signal that she's suppressing her real name and wants everyone to go along. That seems pretty naive, and also misunderstands Web practice - unless it's my corner of the Web that's strange. Nearly all the people I run into online post under screen names when they're on message boards or blogs, and I doubt that more than a few of them are doing so to conceal their offline identities. Rather, they're expressing themselves, just as they would by having more than one icon or by wearing different-colored socks on different days. Actually, using one's full name seems a bit odd, like referring to oneself as "Mister" while everyone else is using nicknames: the reasons I used my real name on ilX from the get-go are that I wanted to be better known and that there'd be a conflict of interest in my posting about music and rock criticism and other rock critics while concealing who I am. But as I said, most people who use screen names in my online worlds aren't doing so to suppress their identities. I often know their real names, and where I don't I could probably find out easily enough.

( Andrew Rosenthal thinks pseudonymous posters are boring )

*Of course, if you become better-known under your blog name, perhaps you're suppressing your actual identity when you use your given name.