I honestly can claim this as my real name - a predominant nickname, anyway. I've carried this handle since about 1985 (long story involving a mobile earthquake of drunken excess that ended in a broken table at the Ft. Sam Houston NCO Club) and have used it as my name in my blog and a gazillion other online forums. All my old service buddies still call me Animal. Most of my non-service friends call me Animal.

A while back someone asked me, "do people call you Animal in real life?" I replied, "Hell, my wife calls me Animal."

Avatar names became popular long before there was a Gulch. It's all part of the game. What's tragic is when ideas crawl out of individual minds and into fists. That phenomenon accounts for all the bloodshed through all of history. Learning caution is as old as the chameleon's disguise.

Why do ideas and the values they encapsulate turn into conflict? Why do magnets repel?

As for pseudonyms being non-Objectivist, that is an unfounded claim. Ayn Rand was not her given name, either. She also stated that we're not bound to honesty towards hold-up men. Open forums are not secure. Even password-protected sites are porous. Caution rules. People we get to know closely and learn to trust are treasures indeed.

I show my real name in the member section and use it generally for business reasons. I am trying to sell my puzzles and appreciate helpful publicity.

One thing trump has done and that is to encourage us all to be ourselves and forget political correctness. Now I say what I think

I don't like to post my name publically either. Although, the Feds have me on a list somewhere. I write some volatile stuff, and I don't hide my dislike of he government. Objectivism has become an obsolete philosophy. In todays world of turmoil beneficial doctrines have been ground under-foot by our near fascist gov't. We no lomger have congressional representatives nor Senators that represents their constituency. We have political parties who rather pick candidates for us than we the people. To build a Galts Gulch would require enormous amounts of money and there is no individual here who has deep pockets. To hide a gulch from the outside world would technology that's not quite there. Look, we even found about the Chinese secret bases in the So. China Sea. A lot of us here has pored written works into the digital Gulch so see if anything sticks. If the whole world goes to hell, maybe then or if the earth gets hammered by a CME or EMP can we could gather together somewhere to start a real Gulch since everything else is in shambles. Also, I refuse to live under Marshall Law quietly.

I don't hide behind my alias for privacy reasons or to express ideas that I wouldn't say in a TV interview. The PRIMARY real reason I use an alias is to reduce the volume of SPAM in my inbox! Nothing more complicated than that.

In this day, it's important to note that every single piece of electronic communication is being recorded, every phone call happening in the US at this moment has a permanent image on a disk drive somewhere, and it can all be tied back to the source.

Is it still possible to communicate covertly? Sure. But if you are, then you know that already. Will it always be possible to keep secrets? Of course. Should we need to take extraordinary measures to protect our privacy? No! Spying is a HUGE infringement on personal freedoms, but one we're kinda stuck with... (much to my dismay).

Who am I? I ran for US Senate in Connecticut in 2012 on the Libertarian ticket. From that you can find my name easily enough.

Heck no! I signed up on this site to spend a couple of years talking about some movies...

...If I had foreseen the duration of my engagement here and the range of discussions, I might well have taken a pseudonym. (I rarely post on any other lists (LOTR & io9) and I have carefully implemented an anonymous name for the latter.) I do not do Facebook or any other social media, so my online profile is pretty much 'here'.

I sometimes think I should have implemented a nickname for this site, but since I did not - and Wm had told me his 5th grade English teacher story - I went in the other direction and reminded myself of my visibility by actually signing all of my posts,

Jan

Good question. Fivedollargold can't remember where his name originated, but thinks it might have a connection with objectivism.

this is my real name.

My name is Ric Hornsby but I have used the online name of Eyecu2 for many years and on many sites. In fact I first started using Icu2 on video games over 30 years ago.
Eyecu2 is an online moniker that I am proud of.

I use my nick name.

The first message board I was ever on was a college sports forum where everyone used an alias. I don't attack other posters or say anything on the internet that I would not say to anyone or at any place but it has become my habit to use coaldigger since the days of Prodigy on my Compac PC.