For the better part of a decade, I’ve engaged with the Internet with a more-or-less consistent pseudonym, persona, avatar… handle… or whatever you want to call it. First I was the blogger, “Cubicle Dweller“, then “Cubey”, and finally “Cubey Terra” in Second Life. It worked for me, for the most part. Lately, though, I became concerned that I had taken a back seat to a fictional character. Just like when Leonard Nimoy published “I am not Spock” to reassert his identity as an actor rather than a fictional Vulcan, I wanted to set Cubey aside in the same way. I am not Cubey Terra.
So I killed Cubey. First I killed Twitter Cubey who had only a modest 200 followers. But Cubey wasn’t dead yet. His persona lurked elsewhere. So next, I killed Facebook Cubey, an avatar with a list of several hundred “friends” that he’d never spoken to, let alone actually befriended.