Changing The Name

Last night, I clicked a button, and transfered Worlds In A Grain of Sand to a new address, where you're reading now. I did this for a couple of reasons, and while it will likely take a little while to get the traffic that I enjoyed on the prior site to get back to normal, I think this change will be a positive one. A little while ago, I wrote an article/commentary for io9, which generated a number of e-mail and comments. While I was thrilled at the response, good and bad, what bothered me the most was two people, one who wrote to me directly and another on another website who made a couple of judgements of my argument simply on the basis of my email alone, with the screen name JediTrilobite.

JediTrilobite is a screen name that I've used for over a decade at this point: it started off in 1999 on the TheForce.net forums, combining a couple of my favorite interests. As I got more into Star Wars fandom and other places in the Internet, I continued the usage- I started up a blog and generally used it as a sort of online persona. That worked fine within the massive Star Wars community on the Internet, but over the past year, I've begun far more serious work online, writing for io9 and SF Signal, where my real name is far more important. Plus, my interest in Star Wars has largely waned from my fanboy days back in high school. I still like it, but not unadbashably so. These days, I'm far more interested in history and popular culture, and when writing about these things, I found that it'll be harder for people to take my arguments seriously if they can't get past a silly email/ online handle.

Only two people really commented on it. But, out of the 35,000 or so people who read that article, I can't help but wonder what others might have thought, either other fans or other people who might have otherwise looked at my article differently. Plus, I always operated under the assumption that in some circles, JediTrilobite generally was associated with Andrew Liptak. I don't know if that's as much of a healthy association professionally, and I've begun to take a bit more of a professional stance with how I appear online.

Thus, Worlds In A Grain of Sand now has the slightly less fun handle, but that's not necessarily a bad thing either. As I begin to write more and more, and hopefully more professionally, it's essential to tie my writing to me, as a sort of brand (god, that sounds horribly pretentious), rather than some random online persona.