Lemme tell you about someone I knew online a while back. Went by the handle of “guesst”. Turns out the handle came from a MUD he used to be on where, while waiting for character approval used the guest account a lot, so much that when it came time to choose a real name he transposed the vowels to create “geust”, then later “guesst”.

Now guesst didn’t really do anything that great. A couple of message board posts, a “Red Dwarf” fan script, and a couple of drawings and coloring jobs. But because I, as “guesst”, never signed anything with my real name I never really owned them. Yes, I was “guesst”.

Like I said I never really owned anything that I put the name of “guesst” or “geust” to because no matter what I created online I could never say to anyone else that I knew in real life “Yeah, I did that” “That’s mine” because it wasn’t mine, it was someone they didn’t know. I maintained that handle for a long time, only abandoning it recently, but one thing I did abandon a while ago was using the handle as a mask, I stopped attaching anything I created with the handle in favor of using my real name.

See, the most common argument for using a handle and never telling anyone your real name is to “protect” yourself online. That’s why I did it. But what was I protecting myself from? Success? Recognition? Yup, all these things. Was I really afraid that in mymyrid of neigh international online wanderings that someone would recognize my name, “Joe Larson” and use that to hunt me down to… what? Buy me a cheese burger? I know there are sickos out there, but most sickos are looking for a local target and (1) chances are most people you meet randomly online aren’t local and (2) if you’re over 18 chances are you aren’t their target anyways.

Which brings me to my disclaimer. If you are under 18 you should never give out your real information online. Definitely not your age, gender, and location, and probably not your name either, tho if you avoid the first 3 the name probably isn’t going to help anyone.

But aside from that, if you’re a reasonable young adult and you’re actually producing something that people are going to know you for you should probably use your real name on it because:

• If you put a fake name on it you’ll have to convince anyone you want to show it to like parents, teachers, coworkers, or real-life friends, that you are that person first before you can claim it as your own, and there may still be some doubt their mind.
• If you ever change your handle you have to go through the trouble of maintaining that assurance that the old handle is the same as the new handle is you. Too much hassle.
• In 5 or 10 years when someone wants to find you because they found something you did to be of value your “protection” will prevent them from being able to, and that’s just a shame. You never know how long it will take before someone finds something you did, and you don’t want to miss out on the accolades.

So that’s my rant. Sure, I still use “Cymon” as my handle on forums and whatnot, but that’s more to promote a brand. If I didn’t have this site to promote I’d probably just use JoeLarson as my handle. Still, even tho I use Cymon as my handle most people know me as “Joe”, and I’m tickled whenever I see my real name online. That means I’m doing it right.