Is there a story behind your online user name(s)?

There are so many interesting ones here. "humanadverb," for example, I love. I like "cscs" because I figure it could stand for just about anything -- for different things, depending on what mood you're in. Viviane's profile lists her "pseudonym" as "Viviane Fox," which makes me think of a glamorous-yet-hardboiled, ace reporter type character, to be played by Katharine Hepburn.

And then there are the people who use their real names, which I find equally fascinating. Does using your real name versus using a pseudonym say something about you?

The name I use here is pretty straightforward -- daughter of a NASCAR dad. I like it for political sites, because I think of it as encapsulating the mass of contradictions that underlies my political identity.

I also like that it doesn't immediately give away my political orientation. Many people online, when first encountering me, think I'm conservative, and it's interesting to see how their reactions to what I say can be colored by that perception.

"nascardaughter" differs from most of my other online names in that it identifies me as female. When I use names containing no reference to gender, I generally get perceived as male, unless/until I reveal otherwise. When I used to hang out in database programming forums, I would consciously strive to maintain the perception that I was male (although I never actually said I was a guy -- I'll have to try that sometime). Being perceived as "a girl" in those forums, I've found, can have a negative impact on the kind of advice you get, and in how your own advice is received.

Gender identity has an impact on how one is perceived in political forums too, of course. And for some reason, I've chosen to be clearly female in political contexts -- perhaps my political identity and my gender identity are so intertwined as to seem inseparable to me.

It's funny, "nascardaughter" is a pretty honest representation of my real world self, and yet she seems to take on a life of her own sometimes. For one thing, she says things to strangers that I would never say in real life to anyone but my most trusted friends.

And once, when my sister and I were discussing some arguments over religion I had gotten into here a while back, as well as commiserating with each other over the general suckiness of the Catholic Church that we rather reluctantly belong to, I found myself telling my sister that, unlike me, nascardaughter probably goes to Mass every Sunday.

In some alternate online universe, I imagine that she probably does.