Identity At Camp Magic MacGuffin

Getting in the spirit of camp has not been hard. I’ve loved watching my fellow campers get into the Daily Creates and other various assignments.

One problem I have run into is that of identity. I have so many blogs, social media sites, and spaces that are mine that it is hard to find a way to make them more cohesive. Most of my accounts are “shauser” or go by the nickname of “Shannon” (I hope you can figure out that one) but, on umwblogs (where my main site for ds106 is hosted) I adopted the moniker “Neo-Rev”.

WWJGD?Here is the quick backstory on that. Back around 2008 our beloved Reverend, Jim Groom, temporarily left us on a missions retreat. In his absence I took up a bit of the identity of “Reverend” but put my own new spin on it, hence the “Neo”. Under those circumstances Neo-Rev was born.

So, I’ve got numerous names going on in comments and on posts. At the moment I’ve adopted a style that I saw Alan Levine do where he puts his name then @cogdog in parentheses.

I think this is where we see Gravatar coming in handy. It can be a central point for various e-mails and blogs by unifying them all under one account and having a picture for that account. If you haven’t signed up for one I’d recommend it. It is a good way for people who don’t like feeling they have multiple personalities find a way to unify them all.

I’m still debating about the name I’m going to stick to for camp but, for now you’ll have to put up with my indecisiveness. Also, recommendations or ideas are encouraged 🙂

5 thoughts on “Identity At Camp Magic MacGuffin”

  1. Struggling with identities is a problem I have as well. In many cases, I want to separate the ways I interact in the world into silos. Every time I do this, though, I find things jumping from one silo to another. Even within DS106 I stick to the mikeberta moniker, that I’ve developed into my brand for years, bumping up against my gaming moniker now in play in Minecraft.

    Gorlington, has been a fantasy character that was unaware of my “real world”. Now Gorlington is living in Minecraft and rubbing against my reality. I’d love to rebrand Gorlington as mikeberta but I don’t know how through Minecraft.

    Struggling with this seems akin to a MPD 2.0

    Here’s to you sticking to Magic MacGuffin and not getting so homesick you return home.

  2. I do not struggle with identities. I have six of them. No problem.

    Many moons ago I was wandering the mountains of the Yellowstone and I came acrost a faded and torn book. It just lay there partially hidden under a rock I happened to sit next to. I picked it up. No title to the book, just a few words on each page.

    The first page said, “You are here.” I laughed a good hearty laugh. It was like a joke or something.

    The second page said, “Stop laughing.” I stopped laughing out there in the high mountains. I was alone. But suddenly I was thinking maybe someone was watching me.

    I worriedly turned the page. It said, “You are the whole and you are nothing.”

    I didn’t laugh this time. Partly because I thought that was pretty smart even though I had no clue what it meant. And I didn’t laugh because I had heard a rustling in some shrubs not too far away.

    To make a longer story shorter, what raced hell bellowing and raging from the bushes was a griz. I throwed that damn book at him and started running for my life. Again.

    Not many years later, as I traveled the high deserts one winter, I come to think about the whole and the nothing and it settled on me that all of the me, the parts is what makes the whole. And that whole ain’t nothing, yet it is everything. I am going to go write a song about all this. See ya.

  3. @Martha I figured that would be the best way to frame his treachery 😉

    @Mike Yes, I want the silos there for myself too sometimes. I deliberately separate certain parts of my identity (like none of this gets posted to FB) and it is hard with all the separate usernames. I guess I have to embrace a bit of the messiness of it all. I plan on sticking around camp and I hope you do too!

    @Hatchet Jack That is a beautiful tale. I am going to print it out and hang it on my collage wall.

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