Ok, since I feel christmasy I'm also gonna share a dark little secret with you.
About 10 years ago, prior to the time of fast lane internet, I had a little online hobby, which I'll call chatting here for simplicity reasons. So I would spend my evening on that certain live chat room website, where you also had the function to creat little profiles á la myspace, change chat rooms according to the topic or obviously private message. Quickly I discovered that my boring old normal self didn't get satisfyingly enough attention, whereas other people would get a hell lot, which was a bore. Just for the sake of fun one day I create a different account and 'troll chat' with it. Especially that one time when chatted as a young lady (the chat names were automatically blue/red according to the gender, times prior to the globalism-feminism-genderneutrality, that we're now all so used to) I had a blast and it was too fun and addictive to drop. Over weeks I have created this crazy character, which I called "Marina" (a girlfriend of my sister), 19, that was working in a night club in the area (my sister did at that time) and blonde and an obvious party white girl. To create the image, I found a little website of a blonde college girl, who had a tons of pictures there, mostly on dorm parties and drinking cups in her hands. I had folders of pictures saved on my computer, to frequently update the profile picture, making it seem authenic. Most of the time I was spending making fun of others young people, classical stuff, from their grammar to their visuals, poking at where it hurt most in those insecure teenage years, calling out and revealing other people as "fakes" (which was the biggest thing back then, after all there were a lot of people who "upgraded" their visuals with other people's looks back in those days) and stuff like gossip and partly horrendous slander. After a while my character made friends there, likeminded people, who were mostly there to let out their frustration of the regular teenage day to day business on others, and deeper bonds were made (ICQ and MSN addings). That went on for several months, until at some point a slight doubt about the authenticity of my character developed and the fake question was being raised.
I developed a second one, this time with images of an Austrian girl's myspace, who regularely uploaded new pictures. She had a photoshop passion and would show off her pictures with perfectly green eyes or some other fancy effect. They supposed knew each other privately. To keep that charade up it meant double effort though. I partly has been online with explorer and firefox chatting with myself when there was audience, and also sometimes when there wasn't (as there was a loading history function), and the trust in them grew. So this second girl, who I forgot how I named, lets call er Maggie for now, was not purely evil, as Marina was. She lived a normal life of a young cute girl, closer to my own age (16-17), and incorporated lot of own real school experiences into her stories as anecdotes here and there. The feedback was great, everybody wanted to talk to her, flirt with her and be her. For the first time I knew what it must have been like to be a pretty and popular girl in school, it was amazing, addicting and I loved it. Maggie was very social, less troll and bashing, more casual and adorable. Marina started to vanish over time, busy with life and stuff, as Maggie not only replaced her, but extended the borders into much further. My pubescent closet gay self had for the first time the chance to publicly flirt with young attractive males, being the cute little girl, that boys actually fight over. I cannot deny the exitement that it sometimes gave me. It went that far that I would neglact my actual life and social contacts to go online and pretend to be this silly little girl. I had a group of admireres, who would bash someone, if I said it, and the hateful troll in me that create Marina back then did say it rather often, and it was hilarious at that time. I went so far with one guy, that he actually said he's in love with me. The next morning on the way to school I was actually still laughing about it, I couldn't believe what kind of tool I could make of people. I was plotting all day how I would continue it during Politic classes or whatever.
With the rise of my friendship circle this chatting became increasingly uninteresting, as I started to drink alcohol and go out, the life I already "lived" as Marina, and I intentionally blew this thing all up, revealing myself to that very same guy who said he had feeling for me. Luckily he took it with humour, now that I think about it, it could have ended with a sort of vendetta too. I gave him a short cam session though, so he could screenshot and slam me in that chat community for his satisfaction , or whatever. I did try to anonymize myself though, in my following online presence. For instance did I register myself with a false birthday, so no one can track me, and became really cautious about what I reveal about myself online.
What it left me, besides the hundreds of hours lost through my online addiction, an angry dad, a cautiousness about what I put online, two instant messangers, which through all those contacts became very useless, was a youth, that I lived through the eyes of three people. Which Is why I still carry it around, in all of my follow-up accounts.