Are you any good at faking?

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I'm always reading about internet fakes here and there. It's something I'm not capable of. One time on a forum I simply changed my user name from Ezra to Ambivalence, and even just that drove me nuts and I had to change it back to Ezra. I gotta be me.

What do you mean? Taking on another identity online? Sure, I guess. I've been on the internet longer than most people my age probably and when I first started interacting with people online I wouldn't tell tell them I was a young child obviously. Back when I first started using the internet it wasn't dominated by social networking and you didn't ever really connect a name to an actual face so it was pretty easy to just be someone else, I think a lot of people played a character of themselves.

Yes I am good at faking.

For all you know I might be an autistic woman from Japan.

Or I may be what I claim, an Australian male without autism.




In all seriousness, successful faking requires a good dose of social cognition, so I would assume people with autism are less likely to fake and/or wanting to fake and/or be capable of faking as an NT may.

I probably could act fake. However, I hate to deceive people, I believe it to be unjust.

Probably but I might not last since it takes a lot of imagination. I can remember doing that April Fools joke here two years ago and me and OOM faked a drama here and it got tiring and exhausting and I was glad it's only one day a year. It was fun still. I was also a moderator here for one day (not really, but it was fun pretending to be one and when alex gave me the moderator tag under my name to make my joke look real and OOM pretending I was abusing my mod powers to censor her). So yea I can be fake but I wouldn't last a day doing it.

What do you mean by fake?
If by fake you mean just use a nickname that it's not my original name, then yes i can.
If you mean act different or assume a different personality then i surely can't.

Oh, don't remind me of WP April fool's jokes, League_Girl. I still remember when it was said that we would have to pay to post on here...


On topic: I have never tried, but I don't think I could ever keep up a fake persona. It would take too much constant concentration not to be myself. I can downplay things but that's about it.

I would never use my real name on a forum though. I want to be behind a pseudonym (username) so I'm free to be open.

There is no way I can fake in real life. One of my brothers had a habit of rewriting his past to make it seem more interesting. He also apparently told the people at his job that a distant cousin of his had died in the 9/11 plane crashes =/ (My dad is American, so it wouldn't be completely implausible.)

I used to do it on the internet though, and never again. Back in 2000 my brother signed up with Audiogalaxy, a music-sharing site. He never used the site after that, but I took over his account (we shared a desktop computer) and rapidly became more addicted to the forums than I did to downloading mp3s. My username was androgynous; when people referred me to as a 'he', I didn't correct them.

My whole persona of being a male snowballed from there. Spent years pretending to be one. Weirdly enough, I lied about virtually nothing else (reduced my age slightly because I already felt self-conscious about it). But other than that, I made up nothing else. I didn't pretend to be interested in things I wasn't, e.g. football, having a laugh with the lads, etc. My personality was exactly what you see on WP: just even more horrible

The guilt ate me up inside and it got worse as time passed, not better. Eventually it reached a point where I just couldn't do it any more; I decided I'd rather face the music than carry on pretending I was a male. I 'came out' via a process of stages, i.e. telling a selected few first; then the forum at large; and, last of all, the forum that I had run for a few years (and still technically do).

I was very lucky. One or two were understandably horrified at first, but nobody spurned me and drove me away with pitchforks. A few claimed they had always suspected I talked like a 'girl', but others seemed genuinely shocked.

Anyway, for the record everything I've said on WP and any other forum I've joined subsequent to that time is as factually accurate as I can make it: sex, age, etc.

No, I'm terrible at faking. I couldn't pretend even at play-pretend games when I was a kid!

I used to "fake" that I was a male over the internet. Of course, as time went on I eventually realized that I was actually male, so I guess I wasn't really faking after all, but just letting my true self show.

Interesting.

So, ah, have you taken any surgical steps towards becoming a physical male? I did give surgery some thought at one point, but decided as a 5'0" female, I'd be a midget male. I'd still rather be a male to this day, but luckily for me it's not an unbearable urge.

PS: Sorry if this is going off-topic. You can PM me if you want...

"Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made." -- George Burns (1896-1996), Actor, Author, Comedian, Philosopher

No I didn't mean just a nickname, I just meant it's so extreme for me, that even not using my real name is difficult. But yeah, putting on an act. Like there's this one guy who acts all ghetto on another forum, but says he acts nothing like that in real life. I'm thinking people on the spectrum aren't as likely to be able to or want to do something like that.

Now I will say who I am on forums is like a modified version of myself. As in real life I'm very withdrawn and barely interact, but on forums I'm very open and outgoing. But it's still 100% me.



Yeah there was a role playing game in one forum, and I had no idea how to participate in it.

Pretty crappy at it - so it's a good thing that I don't see it as something important that I need to do.

Most people are not themselves when they are online. I have heard how people online who are not nice or are trolls are actually nice people in real life. Also people who say mean and offensive things or are very ignorant tend to not express those views in real life. Lot of people feel anonymous online so they don't really care if they hurt your feelings or not because they can't see your face or body language. Lot of people don't see the internet as real so they feel justified in making comments they wouldn't make in real life or to go online and bully people when they have had a bad day just to blow off some steam than taking it out on their kids and spouse. I have heard a joke about Internet Asperger's because lot of people's social skills level drops when they get on the internet. It also doesn't surprise me anymore if I see any bullies online express their disgust in bullies and say how wrong it is because apparently online bullying is okay but not in real life because it's the internet. You can shut log off the site or block them if it happens or easily ignore them.
People on the spectrum can still be fake because I have seen it before online. I would meet an aspie who is not nice but yet claim to be nice in real life. They do not see the internet as real life so they feel entitled to be jerks and say whatever they want or to troll. I never thought about this being fake. I just saw it as them doing internet behavior like how when I was a kid I would go to school and do things there I wouldn't be able to get away with at home because it was school behavior. That was why my parents got me out of that self contained class and didn't want me in a behavior class when my school thought I should be in that class. It was like I had split personalities.

I have done some role playing online and I quit doing it. I can do it but I find it so boring. I would rather be myself in role playing than another character and I prefer to not do it or else people will expect me to do it every time. Unless it's about my story so my friend and I are acting out a part for my story so I can write about it, I can do that.

Me too. I've got to be me even if that means ... whatever!