The changing of the name

I’m a firm believer that an identity is more than just a name — however a name can reaffirm and support an identity. I also believe that establishing a presence in a medium (be it film, stage, books, newspapers, online) requires creating and maintaining a consistent identity. To this end I have had a web presence at kence.org for over 5 years now. The word “kence” originated as a horribly brutalized Cyrillic -> English spelling of my first name, not, as you might suspect, from a forgotten South African currency. The pseudonym has been with me since circa 1996. It is not a perfectly unique label but seldom have I had difficulty obtaining that username at various online sites.

LiveJournal is an exception. When I first created my LJ account for the sole purpose of accessing information in friends’ posts the username Kence was already taken. According to LJ’s policy, names are essentially not permanently transferable so Kence was right out. Since I wasn’t planning on actually posting anything I opted for “gairdeachas”. Gairdeachas is the name of my D&D character which sounds impressive until you learn that it is Welsh for “joy”.

Recently I’ve felt that I’ve needed an outlet for my ramblings and LiveJournal seems like a great place to put them – particularly some ramblings and rants that alas, I don’t feel appropriate for kence.org. The Gairdeachas account doesn’t seem like the place to put these as I have no strong ties to that identity outside of The Temple of Elemental Evil. To that end I’ve created a new LJ username: cpeel

With some tenacity we can hope to see some activity with the cpeel account. The gairdeachas account will remain desolate minus a forwarding to the new account. From this point forward please use the cpeel account for any LJ references.