I had a long conversation with someone recently about how stupid our first screen names used to be. Even when I was little, I liked to have all my internet identities fall under the same pseudonym in the off-chance that I might run into someone I knew in a game or IRC chat room. Yeah yeah, I was a nerd as a kid, still am.
Due to my innate desire to have some sort of personal branding as a kid, I actually have not gone through that many reincarnations of nicknames. However my first ever screen name was pikachu12345.
This was probably due to the fact that it was grade 5 and Pokemon was very very popular, and the first time it was introduced in North America. Yahoo mail was actually a thing people used back then and the e-mail was also attached to my beloved Pokemon gifs website hosted on the now defunct Geocities.
After a while, I got bored of the Pokemon gifs site. Well no, I found out too many gifs on a website back then made your computer freeze so I stopped. Hotmail was becoming a popular alternative for Yahoo! and so I switched my username to anime_angel28 because my 13 year old self thought this was cute. I also might have been obsessed with Anime.
Embarrassingly (even though I became less obsessed with Anime), I used this e-mail/username until I went to university when it became commonplace to use your name for things. And so future employers would not think I am some strange Asian freak. In addition, sometime in high school one of my friends gave me teepoo as a nickname, and I begun using that for screen names in games and the newly rising social media networks.
The other nicknames no longer exist (nor do most of the networks I used them on) but I still use teepoo sometimes. When googled, it brings up a few things that are associated with me. An ex.fm account, this WordPress blog and probably some of my past work making anime wallpapers.
Only in the past few years, with the rising of Twitter did I really start using my own name publicly for things. In the era of social media, hiding behind a screen name is a thing of the past. If you’re afraid of people making a connection between your online/offline self than maybe you shouldn’t be on the internet. So, what was your first ever screen name?
Update: After writing this post, I decided to change the logo of the blog to reflect the future.
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The other day while grocery shopping I bought some Freezies. When I opened the package, I noticed something. There were a lot of red ones (and red are usually my least favorite). I even instantly tweeted at Kisko the above photo to explain my situation.
. Thank you Jenny for some roll on the floor laughing moments. Certain parts of the book (actually most of it) seemed so outrageious, but at the same time it was way too detailed and strange to be made up. Like the time she stuck her arm up a cow, or got stabbed by chicken.
Tiana Feng 
