Personal Rebrand

For a significant part of my life, I've used "SillyFreak" as my handle on various online platforms. While pseudonyms are pretty accepted in the software world (and I'm still using one: "ensko"), I have recently felt that I'm no longer happy with my old user name. At best, the name is not very serious—literally silly—and at worst, the word freak would be seen as an ableist slur.

I don't like the potential that people might have a hostile impression when first interacting with me, just because of my username. Even if most people won't care, it's a reason why I have wanted to come up with something more neutral for a while, and I'm going through with it now.

One concern with changing an online handle is that of impersonation: I have built a lot of trust with people that know me under the handle SillyFreak. How do you know it's me? There's a few ways, or at least indicators:

• you'll be able to reach this blog post via https://blog.sillyfreak.space/ for a while. I redirect the old domain to the new one, giving you some assurance that the two aliases correspond to the same person.

• I'm renaming my accounts and not creating new ones, where possible. You will see my previous activity associated with my new name, e.g. on Discord, the Typst forum, or soon on Github.

At the time of writing, the migration process is not complete. I will gladly confirm my identity between accounts on different platforms if you're not sure you are interacting with the person you're used to.