Aliases

Using the alias cleanskies is not an attempt to hide my identity. If you're interested, my name is Jeremy Dennis, I live in the UK, I'm a cartoonist, and that's me right there on the home page, much as I always look (hair subject to change). Nevertheless, Cleanskies, as thrown together in five minute spaces between other projects, is a character in her own right. She has an astroturf balcony and a taste for japanese novels (in translation), she eats too much monsodium glutimate, and used to collect plastic dinosaurs. Now (as often happens with older collections) they collect themselves. Sooner or later, every alias takes on a life (or even a Livejournal) of its own.

All my alias names all have to do with the sky. The others are Himmel, developed years ago for playing on a MUCK (if you don't know, you don't want to know), and Welkin, a shadowy presence who melts into corridoors, just one bare step up from Guest. You'd never remember Welkin's face if you met them in the street. I rejected Himmel (German for sky or heaven) on the grounds that it used to get me anti-fascist comments from anti-bigot bigots who assumed that anyone sporting a German name must be some jackbooted ubermensch. Given Yahoo's broad church, it may get me even worse here. Welkin (one of the Anglo Saxon words meaning sky or heaven) used to get me bewildered questions from lost rôle players wanting to know if I was named after a character from Tolkien or Fritz Leiber.

Cleanskies is a forgiving name. It's short, and fairly distinctive. It creates its own look, and not a bad one, either. I worry that it might attract environmentalists, but it hasn't yet. Yeah, I like Cleanskies.