From Good, an article by Amanda Hess on The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle.

“The other day I made a comment on someone’s blog and I noticed I was the only one that put my online pseudonym into the name field,”MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey once wrote of the changing nature of online self-identification. Haughey had found himself the lone alias in a field full of real-life, first-and-last-named commenters. “This is one of those moments when you notice you’re becoming a dinosaur,” he wrote.

That was 2003. Since then, the trend toward aligning our online and offline personas has only accelerated. Today, humans stake online claims to their real-life names before they can even form words orsurvive outside the womb. (via Kottke)

Here’s mine

Handle: HANDSOFFIT

Platform: AOL

User: Kevin Casey AKA astro_astro, astroblastro, kcasey, kvncsy

Why: Maybe fighting over the keyboard with my sister? I don’t remember why really, but it was cool in a Kid Vid kind of way. That was back in the chat-room days. (ASL?) I can remember being put off by the in appropriateness of someone asking “hands off what?”