Patrick Tulskie

A screen name is something you use to communicate with friends and the internet at large. It is who you are when you sit down at the keys and get to spreading your word. Some people are more than comfortable to step away from this screen name and get out there into the real world. Afterall, that screen name has done nothing but chat on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or something else along those lines. Sure it might have a few frags in Counter Strike, but unless you are playing competitively, no one really calls you by THAT name.

There are the other people that dwell on the internet and use it for socializing or a means of communication with people in the outside world. Social networking and building communities and websites with a “screen name” can draw away from what you have actually accomplished and steal away some of the recognition you deserve.

About 10 or 11 years ago I was sitting there at my computer sending emails back and forth between a friend when they suggested I get an AOL Instant Messenger name to chat with instead. I didn’t understand because I thought AOL was a service one had to pay for. Well I decided to check it out, signed up for a screen name, and got to chatting. It was good.

Over the months following that I registered several screen names in an effort to establish what would later become my first online identity. I used yahoo to search for “something you do” and came up with the word “jive”. Since I claimed myself to be the master of everything I do, JiveMasterT was born (where T is the initial of my last name). This name rode with me for probably 9-10 years. I used it to describe myself in an online world in communities, forums, chatrooms, etc. It was me, and I was JiveMasterT. It was a symbiosis. Hard to believe that’s how it happened.

I’ve recently begun operating in larger social environments and developing connections with people in the real world that I’ve met through the internet. It really began to hit home when I was doing the administrator work for WRXModders.com under the name of JiveMasterT and participating on other Subaru forums with that name as well. Local people would get together for a meet up and everyone would refer to me as JiveMaster or Jive and while this was fun at first I just wanted to be know as Patrick. Shortly after that, it dawned on me that if I wanted to put anything from one of the sites I’ve constructed as JiveMasterT on “Patrick Tulskie’s Resume” that it would lose a lot of the impact due to such an unprofessional name. JiveMasterT was taking credit for my work. JMT was no longer in symbiosis… it had become a parasite.

Throughout the past few months I’ve begun killing off JiveMasterT but it hasn’t been easy. So many people know JiveMasterT and they do not know who Patrick Tulskie is. Fair enough, but that’s something I’ll have to overcome with time. JiveMasterT marked a period of growth from my very young days to about March of this year.

In these days of internet anonymity, many people like to have this blanket over their identity. Myself, I’d rather not. It forces me to be more careful about what I say and what I credit to my name, but it also gives someone instant access to find out about my accomplishments and things that I’ve done, built, constructed said, suggested, etc just by searching through google.

As of today I’ve converted what accounts I can salvage and will attempt to be converting more accounts as time goes on. Sure JiveMasterT might live on in some form or another, but his public presence needs to die so Patrick Tulskie can be free.

RIP JiveMasterT 1999-2008