A Clan Without a Name

I never joined a hacker collective when I was younger, mostly because I wasn't a hacker. But I did have a dope-ass handle... XRISIS. Unpronounceable like my last name, Xrisis became my mask of anonymity on the World Wide Web. And then social media came along and destroyed privacy as we knew it.

It's fun to write about the early days of the Net in the Vinestead Anthology, when there was still an idea of anonymity. The fact that we gave it up so quickly and so easily just so we could promote ourselves as a "brand" still bugs me.

But that's a rant for another today. Today, I'm working on the pivotal scene for a group of kids whose loyalty to each other has been weighed on the scales and found wanting. They hadn't even picked a name for their group yet, and now... well, you'll have to read the book.

I'm afraid there is no going back to the days of obscure handles and what kids these days would call "faceless accounts." If you long for those days as I do, your only hope is to journey to an alternate reality I call the Vinestead Universe, where everything is exactly how it should be.