Identity online is a funny thing—it can be both mutable and permanent. The way you present yourself to different sites changes depending on those sites’ contexts and goals. You might be one person on a gaming discussion board, a second person on your neighborhood’s Facebook page, and a third on the Ars comment section. And because online communication is still primarily a written medium, that shifting presentation of self is encapsulated in the name one chooses to show to the world.

Call them screen names, nicks, handles, or something else, the pen names we employ are our online faces. A screen name is an identity you’ve chosen—a statement about yourself, represented in a handful of characters and often with a number tagged onto the end to make it unique (if Trinity, Morpheus, and Neo from this article's listing image were real-world Internet users, they'd probably have to call themselves Trinity99, WokeMorpheus1987, and NEO_WEED_BONER_420XXX [NEB]).

The choices that lead to the selection of a name are as varied as the names themselves, but we all tend to become attached to our nicks regardless of how serious or silly they are—just as we become attached to anything that we feel represents our sense of self.

Folks who have hung around the Ars forums for a while probably know that my forum handle here is “pokrface,” a misspelling of “pokerface” that often gets rendered as “porkface” (quite often, in fact). I’ve got my own dumb story about how I picked that name more than 20 years ago (which I’ll post in the comments below), but I stick with it in spite of the pork-themed gibes because, well, it’s me. It’s my handle, and I’ve had it forever.

Out of such silly things our online lives are made.

Listing image by Warner Bros