Well, it's a lot of work if you invent and maintain a persona for years, Quo, for example, <snipped> perhaps, but I have a friend, cruikshank, from the GU board who took that id just to see how she would be perceived. She didn't post anything differently than if her name had reflected her real life self "short giggly fiercely intelligent Indian woman" but, she said, it was a revelation to her to be admitted to discussions of, for example, military matters as, initially at least, a peer. "My chance to be a white man of a certain bearing".

People do post differently when they think you are a man.

Apparently. I shall approach the next board with the monicker "lashes" or "sagging_slightly" to see how that goes.

Try having a conversation with yourself and get back to us.

That kinda reminds me of something I noticed when I used to post on another board, which is now defunct.

One poster in particular used to either entertain or annoy us by a simple technique. He or she would register under at least two names and sometimes poster 'A' would agree enthusiastically with poster 'B'.

At other times 'A' and 'B' would get into heated discussions.

The discourse was at times fascinating.

There was one incident I recall when this poster wrote something quite innocent but by mistake blew his or her cover. This was hilarious and I am sure other posters twigged after a while.

So much for mind games!

No, dbd33 is completely correct. cruikshank posted on GUTalk for years and never gave a hint of her real background. No-one ever guessed at her real persona. That includes me until I had the great pleasure of meeting her and her improbable husband, Bjorn, with their two kids at one of dbd's ex-homes much later.

The same goes for the other chap dbd refers to, Quo Vadis. But he became increasingly psychotic over the years and most likely today is languishing is an asylum or a Cabinet Minister in the UK government.

Another enigma I remember from those happy days in the pre-NSA internet times was a strange chappie called Expatpat.

I often wonder what happened to him.

dbd, do you remember pennylane?

pjlane, penniless Indian bicyclist, fantasy character sustained for years and in fantastic detail, by coshipi who later confessed to the hoax and continued posting as himself.

^so that's a yes then?

It is. A very strange hoax. Easy to carry off on that board though as there was such a diversity of characters. Here one could pose as a moderately happy resident of Oakville or a slightly miserable resident of Regina and people would believe it but as soon as one claimed to be somehow extraordinary and living in Canada, the game would be up.

At the risk of seeming to be in twilight myself, a shocking number of people from that board are dead now, dead before their time, wildem (banned, returned as Azor) who had once been a member of the Klan and who'd since moved to the right. sorcha65 who met aborealprimate through the board, had a child with her (not mechanically, due to them being women) and was gone within two years. Whicker, irritiable woman who spat dim sum at me in Brighton and who married her partner on her death bed in the short interval between it being legalised and her croaking. hoib too, though he was old enough to remember land lines. Marvelous Julie Burchill/LisaLSM carries on, of course, offering evidence for the maxim that only the good die young.

All very sad I'm sure. hoib, if you remember, was the first known talk regular to croak. They even wrote an obituary in the proper paper.

His real name was Herbert O'Brian, the original Wichitaw linesman. I for one will not forget him.

But back to coshipi. Did you ever figure out his username?

cosh(i.pi) reads as "hyperbolic cosine of the square root of -1 x the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter" to math geeks.

The funny thing is that it's also the wave function obeying Schroedinger's equation describing a particle moving in one dimension in infinite free space.

What a wag he was.

Is. He still uses that name on notthetalk.

He's still around. Alive and well. More alive than well this morning.

That you then?

Yeah. That was my username on GUT.

Well you are an enigma.