An actual blog post.
This website was made to be a creator’s online archive, a centralized curation of what I decided to publish on the Internet. But it’s not my first time creating a blog for myself. The only difference, this time around, is that it is dedicated to an online persona that was never meant to manifest in this way…
Let me explain.
“NefariousEllie” was a high-schooler’s attempt to hide behind an identity of her own creation. Removed from a branded good-girl perception because she did not want to get into trouble with authority or participate in adolescent shenanigans with her peers. She lived in a strict household and learned to move with calculated steps and gestures, mind-read non-verbal parental frustrations and expectations, and behave with enough reverence and emotional suppression to get by each day.
“NefariousEllie” was born from internal rebellion against an environment that cultivated fear and suspicion of those who stood out too much, favoring the mundane and the homogeneous. A young suburbanite imagined a different life to escape into that offered freedom of expression and evolution of personhood. She held onto the hope for that future. And then, the Internet happened.
As explained in introduction., the name was originally created for AIM. But I also used “NefariousEllie” for other online accounts like Tumblr (pre-Yahoo sale, when David Karp was still around in his tech-guy plaid attire) and Deviantart (pre-whatever it is now, but in my time, it had its janky buttons and web design that made posting my crappy poetry a fun experience). For over a decade, I just wanted to live a quiet online existence, lurking on news feeds and timelines – despite having a name that implies loud, public disruption and chaos.
The idea of creating an “online persona” started about three years ago, as I was finishing grad school. In thinking about my transition from student life to holy-crap-I’m-an-Adult-adult life, I wondered why I still carried “NefariousEllie” with me when I became more active on Twitch and Simstagram. Why did I hold onto a name from my high school years? Why can’t the girly just be laid to rest, when I’m supposed to be in the “real world” now, with Big Adult responsibilities disconnected from the online space?
That’s what I plan to investigate in the next few years(?), through other projects that I’ve outlined in notebooks. For now, I have my Sims and my streams.
Nefarious thoughts. 