oooh

[kindkit]

I'm one of the thanked patrons in this week's episode of RQG (which presumably means I will be for Magnus as well, since I think they use the same list for all shows for one week).

This means that during the outro, Alex reads out my name.

I haven't listened. I don't think I can.

(This is about 70% due to my crush on Alex and 30% due to my having got into fandom at a time of high secrecy, when everyone used pseudonyms and there was still a lot of fear around creators discovering fanworks and maybe suing you. My name on Patreon is my real-ish name [i.e. the name I use at work right now; it's not my legal name and it's not the name I'll have once I'm able to change to my "real" real name]. It feels weird to have that name out there at all, much less read aloud and posted in show notes and everything. Which is not a complaint--I could've been more pseudonymous on Patreon had I made the effort--but it still feels weird.)

I've been struggling a bit with pseudonymity practices lately, especially in regards to Rusty Quill, who are so engaged with fans. I've interacted a bit with them on Twitter, and I comment on Patreon, and I've signed on to the Discord although I haven't actually joined a chat there yet. I'm using at least slightly different pseudonyms on each platform, because when I joined fandom this was fairly normal, and also, when I joined fandom I had a scholarly career with publications under my legal name, and I wanted to erase my fannish tracks as much as I could for fear of weirdness. So part of me still thinks it is better and safer to have a different pseudonym everywhere, and part of me would like to be "me" across all those platforms, even if that just means using the same pseud.

(Basically, what goes on in my head WRT Rusty Quill is "Oh please notice me, oh, please hear what I'm saying, let's have an interaction OMG THEY NOTICED ME NOW I MUST GO AND HIDE AND ALSO YAY, THEY NOTICED ME!")


The Rusty Quill Patreon, by the way, offers really cool extras. Even at the lowest tier, $2 a month, you get early access to ad-free episodes of The Magnus Archives, Rusty Quill Gaming, and Stellar Firma. I recommend it if you can afford to.

Comments

[cyprinella]

The pseudonymity thing is hard! I've been trying to keep my fannish stuff to just this username and not cross the streams as blatantly, but with RQ being a totally different circle of people and my fannish twitter locked, I've had to use my public twitter account to interact and make friends with that name. I'd probably have to use the public name on Discord if I ever went there since that's what I'm using on Twitch as well.

[kindkit]

"Kit" used to be much more of a pseudonym for me, but since 2017 I've been using it in meatspace, when I got a new job and I wanted to begin it using a gender-neutral* name that would make transitioning easier. I ended up using it with my legal surname on Patreon (because I thought I had to in order for payments to process, and by the time I realized otherwise I'd interacted with people and it seemed too late to change).

So, um, if you ever join Discord and want to find me, I'm Kit L. there. I haven't actually participated on the chat yet, because it feels weird to me to just drop into a conversation, but I'm there. And I'm on Twitch (which I also haven't really used yet) as Elias_Birdchard, a name I was glad and surprised to find wasn't already taken. (Next choice would've been "Hannibirb Lecter," because like Mike, I apparently find the murderous cannibalistic bird doctor hilarious.)

(*It's not gender-neutral to me as my name; to me it's always been short for Christopher, ever since I rather pompously decided in 2003 to pick a Yahoo Groups user name in honor of Christopher Marlowe. But other people can read it as gender-neutral. Sadly they mostly read it as female instead, despite the most famous American Kit being Kit Carson, who was a man.)