T w e n t y S i d e d
Time is moving weird.
The first three months of the pandemic move in a weird blur. Logan comes home from college, makes some crochet, learns to draw an apple, makes some online friends, and then it’s suddenly 2021. The new year is celebrated and nothing really changes. People sort of start going out a little more, but it’s not a feeling of safety, it’s a feeling of a slow building blind spot to the issue.
Michael’s parents get sick twice, and only start taking things seriously when one ends up in the ICU. They both live, but suddenly their Facebook posts are a lot less about overbearing government, and a lot more about wishing friends happy birthday. Other families aren’t so lucky. We know this song and dance.
Logan starts ‘going out’ with a girl in one of his Discord servers, but he doesn’t mention it to either of his parents. It’s nothing too weird, she’s not a lot older or younger than him, and she’s from a similar family background. She’s not a member of any religious organizations that would make them being together strained on either family. It’s just…he calls her Lots. Not ‘a lot’, but, Lots. A short form of her screen name, Lotsofcans. Her ‘real’ name is Elizabeth, but by the time he found out her proper name it was alien and strange to him. He tried switching to it, but they both admitted it was too weird.
The username was from when she was a very young teen with her first email account. She picked the name because she used to drink a lot of Pepsi and when she picked her first screen name, her desk was covered in empty cans. She doesn’t drink Pepsi anymore, she’s ten years older than when she did that, and her palate has changed. On most platforms, ‘Lotsofcans’ is taken, but Discord doesn’t have unique usernames yet in 2021.
Calling her Lots isn’t the worst of it though. To talk about Lots in any capacity, he’d have to also mention some other friends in the group just to give context. He doesn’t know how to tell his parents about ‘Slurs’ (Inventivenewslurs), ‘Captcha’ (Captchalater) and ‘Bobbert’ (Justbob).
He’d also have to mention that Lots lives in Virginia, and her current side-hustles include driving Uber Eats, and having men (and women!) on the internet pay her to do ASMR of a scary clown saying various requested things. Those things are almost entirely funny and harmless, but some are strange and beg some questions. Logan is supportive of his maybe-girlfriend’s budding clown-related…content, but he has no idea how to even begin to tell his parents anything about her.
They’re very early stages anyway, he doesn’t need to tell them about her until they’re really serious. Although, even if they do get serious, he’s not ever telling them the clown thing. Unless she wants him to, he’s not ashamed of her or anything, but if she did want him to tell them about the clown thing, that might be a red flag? So, maybe there’s no universe where ‘telling his parents his girlfriend is a sexy scary clown’ needs to happen.
He’s spending too much time on the ‘AmITheAsshole’ subreddit, and it’s turning every interaction he’s part of or witnesses into a moral dilemma. Before the quarantine Logan was a really carefree and confident kid, now he’s spending way too much time online and getting more and more anxious. He’s becoming a habit mediator, for his parents, his friends, even total strangers. Every moment of every day for him is taken up with wondering if he made the ‘morally good’ choice in whatever his last interaction was. He’s playing real life like an EA RPG but he can’t see the stats for how moral his player character is, he just has to hope. Invisible stats you fixate on is bad enough in a video game where you can look up a guide and keep notes. In real life, no nerd on Fandom can ‘help’ you stay moral.
He struggles through the first squabbles of his new (and first!) relationship. Most of their first disagreements are because they’re both moderating on the same server, and Logan can be a people-pleaser. He wants to only ever boot people who the masses agree should be booted, accidentally giving in to herd mentality instead of using the leadership skills he already has. He’s so focused on wanting everyone to like him, he is ignoring what has been up until this point one of his greatest strengths. Basically, Logan is experiencing being twenty-one years old. Sorry buddy.
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This post sorta hit home to me, making me realize that Logan and I are around the same age, and how fortunate I was that most of my friends used their first names (self included.) Perks of being in D&D servers I guess.
There are a great many people who know me as Moon or Shu. Moon was my first online handle and still tends to be the one I use by default, even now two decades later, simply because its my account name for so. Many. Things. Shu is more recent and the one I tend to input now. Shu is who I am to my guild in WoW and the longform, griffynshu, is my name on writing forums.
Oh, and sometimes I get called Kovel by my DnD group, my character’s name. This mostly happens at work, as one other player and myself work together, and we regular aren’t paying attention and use character names for each other. Our coworkers are amused by this.
I’m enjoying reading about these people’s lives, but I do want to note that this no longer has much to do with the Sims.
That’s because it’s clearly a paid promotion for the upcoming Lockdown Fun add-on of the game.
Yes – if the entire story thus far were published in one volume, there would be very little indication in the early chapters of what the later chapters would be about. I would not be surprised if the Logan sections now equaled the word length devoted to the preceding century of family history.
Write what you know? That’s my guess as to why. (:
The key is in the “Overthinking” part of the title!
Living in the living-on-the-internet era sounds terrible. My parents had me and a mortgage when they were 21 / early 20s. I had university and a lot of internet usage for entertainment, YouTube, but not much social media – certainly didn’t know anyone by an internet handle! Think I’d have just spent a similar lockdown on Facebook to any university friends, spending time with my family, and playing a lot of video games – just like the long university summer holidays.
I too need to stay away from AITA, I get too invested. Reddit is a blessing and a curse.
I tend to visit Am I The Angel, where they tend to point out the obvious plotholes in fake stories or shake their heads at the antagonistic hive-mind of the commenters.
Also Am I The Devil, which focuses on those obvious ragebait posts. “I kicked my puppy into an old woman, AITA?” sort of stuff.
As someone who almost considers their internet handle their real name, I can relate to this post SO much. XD In fact, I happened to grow up during the era when the internet was JUST starting to take off in the 90’s, so in a sense I was part of the internet’s “Wild West” generation where we were one of the first people to start creating wide public content on the Internet. Part of that was that we were among the first to really start using unique internet handles, and my handle still dates back to those days. In fact, if you ever run into a “Zaxares” saying something on the internet anywhere, chances are good it’s actually me!
Perhaps it’s the point, but using the name “Lotsofcans” as an ASMR (clown) camgirl certainly carries a particular implication of the content of her channel!
I’ve used Philadelphus as a handle almost since I was first online, which in multiplayer games with voice chat (not that I play a lot of those, the only one being Team Fortress 2 for several years) reasonably gets shortened to “Phil”. I haven’t been playing online multiplayer for a few years now, but back when I was I once reflexively turned around IRL upon hearing someone shout “Phil!”
That’s rough buddy.
Being a young adult sucks almost as much as being a full-fledged adult when your crippling doubt about your misgivings evolves to defeated certainty.
Oh dear Logan … I’m actually absolutely thrilled at how many “young people these days” are actually pretty consciously aware of their own strengths, weaknesses, preferences and so on. I was not really clear on a lot of them until well into my 40’s, and even now I’m pretty blurry on some of the detail. These days, I know teenagers who are more self-aware than their parents, and it’s kind of awesome. Except I really wish their parents could catch on to this trend of actually thinking about their “feelings and stuff”, and modulating their behaviour accordingly, instead of reflexively inventing reasons to justify their reactions to whatever happens without acknowledging their own particularities. Nope. If I dislike something, it must be because that thing is objectively undeserving.