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2024 Reader Question 184

2024 Reader Question 184 published on 18 Comments on 2024 Reader Question 184

The internet is a useful tool for uniting groups of people, but the problem with the internet is that you can be anyone on the internet. Mythical communities on the internet are mostly deep web and not easily found unless you know to look for them.

18 Comments

I don’t doubt some of the people we used to talk to on ICQ were mythical people. It was a different time. I’m still shocked how many people are willing to put their real name and face on the internet in this modern world. Personas and internet handles were so much more obscured back then.

There’s a reason why the username on my old Deviant Art is an ancient Egyptian word I came across in college. It means “one who’s name is hidden.”

This is also why I don’t have a facebook, twitter, instagram, or any other social media (unless you count DA or Discord, but neither of those use my real name or face!)
Back in the day I didn’t have that stuff because I thought “Who needs to know you’re constipated at 3 am? Private things should be kept private!” And now…well… Now, my younger self just seems even more validated.

My Twitter is one of the very few places you can find my preferred name, but I’ve had friends refer to me as a cryptid because I don’t post photos of myself usually. My cat, oh yeah there’s at least 20 of those floating on Discord across multiple servers, but my face? Never my face. Never my government name. You get my last name, but you still won’t easily find me. I’m an internet old and I frown at all these kids posting so many personal details.

Also I stopped using ICQ so SO fast because I got 3 different instances of A/S/L and went “NOPE”. Do miss hearing the typing sounds, though.

Yep, no Facebook, insta or Twitter. I have a lot of people upset with me a lot of the time for having no Facebook, as they insist that I can “just use it for communication”. It just seems too dangerous to give all that personal information out (and FB really does ask for a LOT of personal info these days), but apparently that decision makes me “antisocial”. I still communicate. Just more carefully.

It’s odd that the attitude to privacy has turned around so completely. There’s a great excuse to avoid all that these days though: You can argue it’s a mental health issue. Because I don’t know about you, but I know for a fact the stress of having my real name and ID online for everyone would definitely impact my mental health in a massive way.

Oh boy! Now to talk about being kamaitachi on mIRC. The only problem is I keep stabbing my keyboard with my blades. Does anyone have an indestructible keyboard they can suggest? I’d settle for blade-resistant.

the law does a deepweb raid, finds A warehouse has been ordering strange amounts of commercial items. One raider later and oh no.

Wait, what happens when Law inforcement gets called on an Avalon. I mean what would happen if swat are doing a homeless clear on a large abandoned building, only to find a freaking house in it selling literal magical items with a half dozen creatures looking at them like “OH CRAP!”

See, that’s only if you’re *sloppy*. They’ve probably had VPNs before everyoen else, have a few key folks working in backbone locations, and have magic to boot.

Plus, the secret is to not have your locations ‘abandoned’. Notice that the great big Avalon in a warehouse *has a security guard* outside of it. There’s probably an office with a phone and answering machine and everything. It’s not abandoned, it’s owned.

And a certain bugbear would be *delighted* to have a SWAT team to play with…

In places like the London Avalon, you either try to be near-entirely self-sufficient, or you have people in the government who can go “Yeah, that one’s not an issue”. Probably both, with a commercial business acting as a legal cover for the commercial products you’re buying that seem to disappear. Sales within the Avalon are still sales, so they no longer disappear, and you’re running a legitimate business, so your records are clean… with the possible exception of your primary business place of operation.

For all the other Avalons, they rarely have people living in them 24/7, and those that do are probably like Dogpatch & 100% self-sufficient, so it’s not really a danger. You have a standard business, probably with a food license (and maybe liquor license), while ensuring that there’s a few people in the Food Inspection Industry who can check the Avalon’s.

Combined with the fact that most of these Avalon’s are run inside of seemingly-abandoned buildings, you could easily be more worried about human developers coming along & getting the land declared abandoned, buy it, and start demolishing buildings.

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