The end of an era

I first got online in mid-1994 via the Prodigy network. At the time, even though my user name was the very impersonal KYFX39A, when I logged into the chat rooms (at 1.99 an hour, a significant fiscal misstep at the time), I had to choose a different name.

My first choice was Gypsy72. It combined the name of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 (aka MST3K) robot with my birth year.

After fielding many inquiries as to whether I was 72 years old, I switched to ladygypsy. It was geeky and a little exotic, and I held onto that name for the next eighteen years across every internet platform, email provider, and account I came across. I even bought ladygypsy.net in 2001.

I’ve posted about this before, but times change, people change, and words change. In the early 2010s the word gypsy started being regarded as an ethnic slur, and I was becoming very uncomfortable carrying it around. In the latter half of 2012, I started switching everything to kimberussell¹ including buying the kimberussell.com domain name.

I pointed it to this blog, but I never dropped ladygypsy.net. I just implemented a redirect.

Fourteen years later, I have changed almost every account to kimberussell. Anything that remains is an account I lost access to (Flickr, MySpace).

And as of last week, I no longer own ladygypsy.net. (GoDaddy continues to hound me to renew.)

Whoever gets it next, I wish them well.

For most of my time online, that name was me. From dial-up to broadband, from chat rooms to blogs, from anonymous handles to using my real name on the internet. Letting it go feels a little strange and a little sad.

Mostly, it feels a lot overdue.

The internet that created ladygypsy doesn’t exist anymore, and the person who created her changed too.

PS: It’s June! It’s JUNE! It’s the best month of the year! Happy June!!!

1. If I ever get divorce I’ll have a lot of changing to do. ↩︎