Fandom Sunshine Day 2

[argentum_ls]

The sunshine_challenge today is to reflect on one's fandom name.

I shall do my best.

I honestly can't remember how I found fandom, though the initial steps had to have been on CompuServe in the early 90s because that's where just about everything in my internet life began. There was an active RPG community there which I threw myself into because a) I'd just gone off to college and desperately missed my high school RPG group and b) I learned that anyone who game mastered on the forums could get free access. In an era where CompuServ cost $8.95/hr, this was huge. I don't remember if I was required to have a handle there or if it was just what all the cool game masters were doing, but I do remember trying on and discarding a number of possible names.

The one that stuck came from a person I made the mistake of calling a boyfriend. He was convinced that he was a reincarnated Gold dragon (why I didn't take this at a hint to run, I'll never know). Though he didn't use it as his name, he was Lord Gold, which made me his Lady Silver.

When I made the jump to the internet proper, I started with my college email account and real name because it's what I had. In short order, though, I started collecting every free email address I could get my hands on, none of which required my real name to be associated with it. I still have and use one as my now most enduring sock. Presumably the others are still out there, though I haven't checked in ages.

Then I started the Tomorrow People lists. The server the lists ran from required an 8 character handle for the account. For lack of anything better, I went with ladyslvr. That email address quickly went from my list-only account to my primary account, which meant ladyslvr became my name for every log in everywhere. (Surprisingly, a lot of people assumed the major missing vowel at the end was an "a," which made for some awkward conversations with airlines and phone companies.)

Around 2004, I started to fade from fandom. I resigned from running the lists and closed the account a few years later, thus ending Fandom Round 1.

In 2011, Teen Wolf premiered, and I threw myself head first back into fandom, initiating Fandom Round 2. In the interim, LJ had risen (and was starting its decline, though I didn't know that yet), AO3 had been born, and I had established myself personally and professionally such that I did not want any connection between my fannish identity and wallet identity. This led to some challenges as my names were inextricably linked. Also, I was still in contact with many people who knew me from FR1.

There wasn't much I could do about point two except swear people to secrecy. The facts that I'm Facebook friends with most of the original Tomorrow People fandom, I've met them in real life at fannish events, and I've also shared non-fannish activities with more than a few didn't leave other options.

Given that, point one was also largely moot. But, I wanted a new LJ that was fandom only, which required a new name. And I was thoroughly sick of the LadySilver name, which made for a stronger reason to seek a new name. After some deep thought (10 minutes of pondering, maybe?), I turned in one silver for another and went with Argentum--not making any connection until months later to the Argent family in Teen Wolf. Alas, Argentum was taken, so, in lieu of appending numbers on the name, I appended my fannish initials. There's either an underscore or a hyphen between the two bits, depending on what the platform would accept, unless there isn't.

And then I made my AO3 account with the LadySilver name. sighs

So now I use everything interchangeably.

If you need something to call me, Argentum and LS both work great. Please don't call me LadySilver. I hate it. And, if you know my real name, I kindly ask you to not use it in fannish spaces.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I'm just going to link back to my post for this event every time anyone asks from now on.

[argentum_ls]

Same, though I doubt I get asked anywhere near as much as you do.

Sunshine Challenge ☼ 2019

[oldtoadwoman]

Oh, man, I had the same experience posting stuff under my college email address so I was real.name@real.university.edu everywhere and only in hindsight did it occur to me that maybe I didn't want future employers to know so much about my hobbies. I started gobbling up the free emails wherever I could, not because I was smart enough to think ahead, but because the university had a hard limit on your email usage each month and I kept using up my data before the end of each month.

Also, sympathies on the reincarnated dragon. Sometimes it's hard to tell who is simply having fun with bonus roleplaying, who is messing with you but not in a fun way, and who just takes themselves way too seriously. I had one friend (someone I met first in person at a mutual friend's place) who would be very silly about roleplaying and tried to get people to play along all the while pretending she was serious, right until you did start to play along with her joke and then she'd instantly switch gears and start making fun of you. "I can't believe you actually believe that stuff." This was a grown adult; I think she was already forty-five when I first met her. I think she'd built her whole persona out of being "the eccentric one" and had to knock everyone else down a peg. I hadn't heard the term "gatekeeper" at that point, but that's totally what she was. After that, I was pretty skittish about fandom for a while, not because of the cliche of Internet fans but because of fans that I knew in real life.

Re: Sunshine Challenge ☼ 2019

[argentum_ls]

only in hindsight did it occur to me that maybe I didn't want future employers to know so much about my hobbies.

Oddly, and perhaps ironically, it turned out that all my main employers since have been all in on me being fannish and have actively encouraged it. Still, there's no way I could have known that at 19, and it certainly is not a situation I should have assumed.

Also, sympathies on the reincarnated dragon.

Thanks. I don't think he was playing. There were so many issues there that I'm lucky I got out.

I'm sorry about your experience with your "friend." She sounds like a classic bully. It really hurts when people you trust betray that trust, and she definitely was with those games.

Re: Sunshine Challenge ☼ 2019

[oldtoadwoman]

The stuff I started writing when I was young would have been fine, just silly and embarrassing. But there's a chain of… If you know I wrote A you know my real name and you also know I wrote B under a fannish name which means you know A and B are by the same author you still know my real name. And if you know I wrote B, you know I wrote C under a slightly different fannish name and then it's easy to see where C was written by the same person who wrote D. So even though pennames changed over the years, it was still possible to connect the dots from innocent gen-rated sci-fi under my real name to explicit slash and I've had some super prudish employers over the years. I only recently figured out how to contact Fanlore and got them to take my real name off their website. I'm still a little paranoid about talking about my early days in fandom because everyone in my first fandom knew my real name.

Re: Sunshine Challenge ☼ 2019

[argentum_ls]

Yup, yup.

I know exactly what you mean.

I don't have a lot of explicit works since it turns out that's not what I like to write or read, but there're still plenty of other reasons to want to keep one's identities separated.

smut smut smut smut smut

[oldtoadwoman]

I swore I was never going to write an explicit story because all the euphemisms for penis sound stupid and all the glowing descriptions of perfect sex always feel fake. So to emphasize my point, I wrote a story where two characters debate which euphemism to use with one character suggesting different words and the other explaining why they are all stupid. I got the euphemism count up to thirty, I believe. :-) But instead of working it out of my system, my next thought was, "What if they had really awkward bad sex?" and that story idea turned into my first actual explicit story. So I not only now have several increasingly explicit stories (you always want to outdo the previous scene), but nearly all of them hinge on the joke of "How can I make this as stupid as possible?" It's just not the sort of thing I'd want to have to explain to someone outside of fandom.

[kellyfaboo]

About a decade or so ago I went whole hog on my fan/OG online ID and started using it for everything that wasn't strictly professional. Then I locked down a lot of social media accounts tied directly to it because I'm trying to get security clearance and that's step one.

So I look, quirky and fannish, but that's about it.

But it is embarassing when RL finds your sort of 1337 username.

[argentum_ls]

At least you've always been a mostly-lurker. That helps with the locking down.

Nothing wrong with being quirky and fannish, especially in fannish spaces :) Though I get how weird that can be as fandom again swings toward the "tell us everything about yourself!" side of the pendulum.

Good luck getting the security clearance.

[kellyfaboo]

Oh, yes. Lurking is the place to be.

And I basically adopted a new online name about 5-6 years into online life and everybody who "knows" online me, knows that me, not college era me.

I also spent more than a decade of that iteration of online life working in online spaces so I was very conscious of what I a google search would find.

[silveradept]

It's always interesting to look back on our previous decisions, and then find out just how much they stick around, even when we're finished with them.

I hope that your boundaries between Fandom periods and your non-fannish life stay firmly in place.

[argentum_ls]

Alas, those boundaries have always been very porous. As long as I can keep things mostly compartmentalized, I'll have to be happy.

It's always interesting to look back on our previous decisions, and then find out just how much they stick around, even when we're finished with them.

So true. It's odd which things can have lasting impacts on one's life and which don't, though they seemed like they should have.

[enemytosleep]

I am pretty anonymous online, but I do have a small number of LJ buddies whom I have met IRL (cons, visited homes, etc) and we all keep each other's dirty fandom secret. I hope your crew is as loyal!

And I'm sure this doesn't do much to help, but when I saw Lady Silver my brain went to the old Western 'Hi Ho, Silver" ... so maybe there is a way to rebrand the existing name? I'm so sorry that your username has such an uncomfortable history attached.

[argentum_ls]

I hope your crew is as loyal!

So far! It's good to hear yours is. I think most of us in fandom "get it." It's really just the one or two bad actors I worry about.

y brain went to the old Western 'Hi Ho, Silver" ...

HA! There's an old association.

I'm happy with the overall switch to Argentum. I'm only annoyed at my own lack of commitment to the change, which has resulted in me now having multiple versions of the same two names used interchangeably.