AF is may be my online alias, but some people have asked me what it means, and I used to keep a quick note about this on my About Me page, but to better answer this, I’ve expanded on it and added extra detail.
I tend to think of this as a silly question because of the absurd answer it has, but I keep getting asked this and it seems to be the one holdover from having the long-winded alias it replaced, but then when I answer it I get the same question applied to the next one. So to answer this once and for all I have devised this ingenious little diagram to explain all my alias/names:
Well your probably thinking I’ve gone mad and this is all a waste of time. But then again I get asked that often, and explaining it each and every time is silly and time consuming. So why do I have all these alias? Well aside from the problem of having 7 Toms in a chat room and figuring out which ones which, I did not like using my actual name online for a long time and used my alias instead, the most well known of would be Alantai Firestar or AF.
It wasn’t until a few years ago I realized that all my work is unrelated to my name, and googling myself or my work would give two totally different results. So, wanting credit where due, I started putting my name on my work. I tend to use AF or Tarendai for forum user names now, and don’t use the mountain of other user names, although they do crop up randomly in places were I have yet to move on to new accounts or were it would be too troublesome to switch such as msn.
Other incarnations include AFDEV, Atlantia Magnifica (lulz) and AF. which arose thanks to youtube & co being unable to support user names with 2 letters in them.