The Origins of Starshine Editorial up for evaluation

I've just posted a new editorial on the origins of my screen name and online personas.

Find it here.

Thank you for once again giving me the pleasure of reviewing your writing. I always find what you have to say wholly enlightening, your introspection and ability to explain outwardly what you are feeling inwardly is done extremely well. I only had a few comments below.

On a side note, I think you should give yourself more credit, as I often see you being hard on yourself when I don't think it's necessary. Yes, your syndrome means you have to work harder at things that most of us take for granted, but you seem to be coping incredibly well and are a great member of this community and I have not yet seen you say anything that would ever make me think you're  socially challenged, in fact I would go so far as to say that, because you so closely monitor your communications because you know it's a challenge, you end up achieving even better communications than most members of the community who don't give a second thought to the ramifications of what they post.

I've just posted a new editorial on the origins of my screen name and online personas.

Find it here.

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I've spent the last 40 days or so trying to keep a particularly severe Asperger's Syndrome ritual at bay. Like all others before it, it relates to memories I cant quite remember or trust and irrational fears stemming from uncontrolled mental images. To keep a long and boring story short,(you don't need to say boring, even if you feel like you should be self-effacing, don't try to dissuade the reader from reading your excellent work!) these rituals generally consist of ruminations, intrusive thoughts and perceived threats similar in a lot of ways to obsessive-compulsive disorder. If I sound blasé about it it's because this is nothing new. I've been dealing with rubbish like this since birth but it's been a long time since I've had to contend with one (an episode?) as stubborn as this. Usually my rituals fade after a few days or are replaced by a completely different one. But whenever I am faced with one as bad as this, my tactic is to try to rationalise it in my head or find some way of identifying with it. It was this tactic that led to me giving my Asperger's an identity all of its own which ended up consisting of its own personality, mental representation and eventually an online persona.(excellent introduction!)

My time at school was when things were at their worst. I wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome until the final year of secondary (high) school so had no way of explaining where these obsessive rituals or communication problems were coming from whenever I got into trouble or got into a fight with someone. In my attempts to escape it (define "it", describe exactly what you were trying to escape-the symptoms of the syndrome or the trouble it caused, or the unknown?), I would immerse myself in games, films and music. Never anything particularly conventional or mainstream, usually foreign art films or alternative music since the furthest away I could get from reality the more comfortable I would be. The artistic side of media tends to make this possible. Despite their success, I've never considered the animated band Gorillaz to be mainstream, which is partly why I adopted the name 'Starshine' after a song from their 2001 debut album. (I don't quite understand how not being mainstream got you to adopt your screenname.) Gorillaz have long been known for making alternative music a strange fusion of rock and hip-hop but manages to sound like neither hence the unique and interesting sound they produce. The song Starshine is comprised of little more than the same set of guitar strings played over a synthesizer which slowly fades to an echo as the song goes on. Its lyrics are also minimal consisting of;

Starshine, they ain't gonna find me

Starshine, never gonna find me

Stand easy with myself,

Jumping up, I'm low, low, low, low

Show me down, fast now

It's very possible these five lines could be just random nonsense.(I really like how you ponder the nonsense as a possibility, I often wonder if some lyrics are just there because they sound neat but don't have any direct meaning!) On the other hand, it could be a reference to some profound philosophical text. I don'tknow, but what I do know is how I interpreted it. The music, combined with Damon Albarn's haunting vocals and the lyrics themselves formed the basis for my indentifying with these rituals and thoughts that were festering in my head.

The way I read into it was that there were two individuals present in the song. The first was Starshine who, thanks to Albarn's echoed and distant singing, seems to be calling out from a mysterious void as if taunting at never being found or caught. This came to represent my Asperger's Syndrome a voice from within the mind, compelling the sufferer to perform rituals or flooding their head with unwanted images. The sufferer is unable to locate or punish this voice for the damage it's done since it has no name or visual representation no identity. The second is the sufferer. The line 'stand easy with myself' in particular carried enormous resonance of someone wanting to be left alone or trying to convince themselves that they could live a life without the influence of this mysterious voice they carried around. It was something that didn't have to be part of them, something that could be fought and left behind. It immediately recalled memories of my mother as she would try to encourage me to stop listening to it (by "it", do you mean the song or the mysterious voice? It's a tad ambiguous in this sentence) and just move forward. Easier said than done of course, but it was sound advice.

The sound and imagery of a depressed world invoked by Gorillaz became a metaphor for my own mind...

This interpretation was how I came to know this voice. Before hearing this song, I was struggling to understand what it was that I was experiencing or what I could possibly do to stop it. It wasn't something I could see in my head and recognise which essentially meant that I was at its mercy. After all, how can you fight what you can't identify? But by giving it an identity, it turns into something tangible, something that can indeed be recognised which allowed me a more coherent understanding of what I was up against. So I christened it after the song - Starshine - the enemy, the evil and oppressive tyrant that was trying to take over the mind. Perhaps an evil general leading an army on a relentless mission of dominance. After that, the rituals themselves took on a new form and became battles against him with the brain becoming a mental battlefield. It wasn't long before I even gave Starshine a visual identity to help. I struggle to remember where the image came from or what inspired it but it consisted of a man dressed in black military fatigues black and white camos, boots, a black short sleeved military vest with fingerless gloves. Since he was a manifestation of my own mind I decided that he would look identical to me in terms of body type and facial features but with black spiked hair to represent his status as an evil alter ego of mine. He could be best described as an out of control rock and roller with Gulf War syndrome - the entire opposite to my outwardly nature.(I find it fascinating that you chose to identify your online screenname with your "evil alter ego", is it only because the name was unique to you and was usable as a screenname, or is it a more sinister and subconscious way of saying that who you are online may be the anonymous, difficult to identify evil persona to whom you're giving a voice? I'm just curious if you've thought of why you chose to name yourself this, but I'm likely thinking to deeply about it. I know you answer this a bit in the next paragraph, and I guess the name has two meanings: the voice inside that you're battling against, but in the next paragraph you make it a seemingly braver version of yourself in addition to the "dark passenger", a reference to what Dexter calls his other self, who isn't afraid to join a community, and I find this to be a very interesting dichotomy! :))

After deciding on this name, I began altering my screen name to Starshine to correspond to the imagined identity that so many of us adopt whenever we go online. It became my email address, Steam ID, GameSpot ID and anywhere else that would allow me to use it. I thought that if games and online services were representative of a virtual world and that my in game avatars would be a fictional manifestation of myself entering a crowded community (something I rarely do in reality), it would make sense that it would be Starshine who would be in control of them since he also occupies a fantastical world. Indeed, he does make himself known in games. His terrible communication skills, team working and common sense all symptoms of Asperger's Syndome - have gotten him, and therefore me, into trouble countless times. It's the reason I have yet to complete a raid on World of Warcraft for example. Occasionally I would attach 'M2A2' to the end of his name which also originated from a Gorillaz song entitled 'M1A1' but was adopted more for convenience than anything else. The reason for using it was not all games allow the creation of specific characters with their own fleshed out identity created by the user - Call of Duty and Battlefield 3 being good examples, as opposed to MMOs that allow growth and development along story driven lines.

Online gaming - the mind downloads to a computer system becoming a new online persona...

So there it is. The origins of Starshine. I've been gaming since I was around four years of age but was a late bloomer to online gaming. If memory serves, I entered my first online match some time in 2002. Since then I've encountered online names of many shapes and sizes. I often find myself wandering where the origins of those names lie. I know there are many, many gamers out there who simply choose the first name that comes to mind but I like to think that screen names, more often than not, are indicative of the user's life or some event that can transcend reality and enter the virtual world. I think that's one of the few sure fire ways we have at the moment of bringing our real lives into a computer game and a powerful message for the relationship between the mind and the computer system. Appropriate as Aspies are often said to have more in common with a computer than a human being.

 

Starshine_M2A2