Pseudonyms

by Arjun on 18 Oct, 2026

A history of how I have evaded my own privacy on the internet, and maybe some of my sense of self as well.

The Beginning: Arjun XXXXX

My name isn’t a very common one, especially my First Name + Last Name combination. My last name in particular can tell you a lot of things.^[1] For most of my life, I’ve rarely met folks with the same first name, or the last name. I could probably count the number of people I’ve met with the same last name who weren’t family on just the fingers of one of my hands. Both my first name and last name probably have affected me a lot, as these things tend to do in our society, but that story probably needs years of psychoanalysis to be articulated.

When you know there aren’t many people around named the same as you, it reinforces your identity. And then you start using your real name everywhere on the web, because that’s what/who you think you are. And then you start doing shit that you don’t want people to associate with you in real life, maybe because it’s a side of you that you never show to anyone in real life, or maybe because it’s something that would get you in genuine trouble.

Anyhow, my first online footprint probably begins back in 2017, when I regrettably made accounts and blogs and websites endorsing my name in full. Wanting to be found out. I was dumb. I was 13. 12 actually. I was born quite late into 2004 (which also relates to one of my online monikers, again voluntary evasion of privacy in full swing).

So a little bit about me well who is me I’m Arjun, Arjun XXXXX.I was born on DDMMYY at PHANTOM hospital 10:35 pm .Since childhood I wanted to become an engineer I’m deeply inspired by Colin Furze, Nikola Tesla and Elon Musk

~ My actual about from my first blog. (Censored, redacted and other dumb inside jokes added to obfuscate the information)

A quick search of my name with the right keywords tells you what I was into back then. Having my own toolbox was one of the things I was obsessed with, writing articles about what a “man” should have in his toolbox. All this while I was fashioning toolboxes out of duct tape^[2] and absurdly heavy duty cardboard boxes my dad would get me.^[3]

alt text

That kid also wanted to control a servo motor with a 433 Mhz radio module for an Arduino. Some un-materialized project idea from back in the day. I can't recall what I wanted to do with it, but I still have that servo and that module back home. Little has changed in that regard. Parts were collecting dust with ideas inside notepads, and still things are quite similar. Apart from that, the weird kid came up with something called "Broken Pyramids". After binging questionable documentaries about aliens on afternoon infotainment television^[4], and with a general interest in all things weird, he made some dumb edits on MS Paint on his mom's brand new laptop running Windows 10.

alt text

Life moved on. I found another place on the web: Quora.com. Thankfully, I don’t have any visible digital footprint from those days. I must have deleted all my accounts and posts in the privacy conscious days that followed. Browsing Quora.com is how I developed myopia and that hump in my neck. That is when the internet first sucked the humanity out of me. Post that, there was no going back. And the next door to knock on was Reddit.

u/PyramidBreaker1984

Anonymity, online monikers so random they can’t be traced back to me and personas I would never show in the real world. I was building a separate identity for myself, away from the real world. Behind names like “PyramidBreaker1984” which would fool people into thinking I was some sort of thirty-something-year-old. In reality I just thought it was a cool number. Terminator, the Ramones’s I Wanna Be Sedated and a lot of other cool things I was obsessed with came around in that year. It was around the time my old music evangelism was still pretty high, although on a downward trend for sure.^[5] PyramidBreaker1984 actually had a crazy run, with his posts being featured on the subreddit review of r/SaimanSays on youtube.^[6]

Later I dropped the 1984. I outgrew it. I was just Pyramid Breaker. For reasons unknown. It was on reddit that I found some trippy special edition uber cool ultra rare Pink Floyd posters featuring the pyramids of Egypt. And so they became a part of my identity too. Sporting those purple pyramids I hung out online in group chats populated with online trolls, fundamentalists, extremists and other anti social elements. I was never fully sold on their ideas, but their camaraderie was welcoming. And bakchodi is always galeech.

The years or months with the trolls went by, with their own highs and lows. Alongside this I found another community, of healthier, more sociable people, not as mentally unwell as I was used to. I was still PyramidBreaker. It took PyramidBreaker some time to get all the trolling out of his system. Eventually, PyramidBreaker went back to his occult, conspiracy theorist roots and started an internet cult worshipping Sunny Deol^[7] as the allfather after being too moved by a reaction image shared by a troll on twitter.

alt text

The Sunny Deol phase meshed with the PyramidBreaker phase. This was the time I was beginning to fix myself. Alt accounts were created. PyramidBreaker was shortened to Prism, (Prisms and pyramids were all I was about back then, studying engineering graphics)

I literally learned blender to wrap a pyramid with the face of Sunny Deol for "spiritual reasons". Why? Well there was a Discord emote of a pyramid with Modi on it that we all loved. So I wanted one with Sunny Paaji on it for my server. The Sunny Paaji server was a mix of both worlds. Friends from both circles joined. And the two circles intersected. But that's when the identities split. There was a prism and then there was an arjun in the chat too. Same person, two accounts for two different circles.

Eventually with time, either I grew out of these shits or I was stuck in them or whatever but prism was abandoned. The passwords were deleted from KeePassXC, the proton mail account linked to everything was deleted and the identity was cut off. Maybe PyramidBreaker is somewhere still there inside me. His shit is still out there on the web though.

Arjun 9124

After my trolling arc was finished, I realized I don’t want to lead a dual life. I am who I am and it is what it is and I want to be the same person I am in either of the lives I lead. I want to be one person with one life. So the policy of privacy evasion was renewed to keep myself from sliding down the slippery slope of online extremism.

The new moniker was Arjun9124. With his modest hardcoded html site, arjun9124.github.io. What’s 9124? Another number. But this time it’s related to me. This name has stuck around since then, making sure I don’t have another bout of the same online adventures I had back in the good old days.

arjvn.xyz

Later in college, I found a job in the campus placement drive. Post that, it was nothing but 8 months of pure bliss. Being a NEET^[8] is what I would have called this back in the trolling days. During those 8 months, I finally did what I had always wanted to do, ever since I was 10 years old. I made my own website. Well, I’ve had websites for a long time, but I finally made a proper website with a proper TLD. No subdomains, no piggybacking, my very own website. I remember being fascinated with websites ever since I was a kid. Back in the early 2010s there was a boom of companies like BigRock and GoDaddy selling their services to set up a website for your business starting at 150 rupees. From what I knew based on asking adults, like my mom and my dad who were fairly tech-savvy in their younger years, websites were expensive. Seeing those cheap rates I wanted one for myself too. Funny enough, my newest juvenile shitty TLD—which I would have loved when I was younger, but which now feels just a little immature for me—was just 180 rupees. In 2026. For the first year at least. That’s what you get for sacrificing spelling and a general sense of trust that comes with the dot coms, dot nets and dot orgs that everyone has seen. I’m pretty sure most old people don’t even know that you can get a *.xyz domain.

Footnotes

[1] Where I lie in the social stratum, the name of my village, what my ancestral occupation (ख़ानदानी पेशा) was

[2] Duct tape back then was a niche and premium hobby supply, could only find it in 5m rolls manufactured by Pidilite.

[3] Those were some crazy ass cardboard boxes with like 8 plies and a layer of woven polyethylene fabric to reinforce them. I recall eventually cutting up the toolboxes to craft a plate of cardboard body armour. It was tough enough to survive a few minor tussles, maybe even the CJP protests.

[4] Giorgio Tsoukalos, you really messed with my mind back then. Probably the reason why I kept falling for dumb propaganda across my teenage years.

[5] A Filthy Frank video I wish I had seen sooner.

[6] “Thank you, u/PyramidBreaker1984,” said Saiman Says. On his YouTube channel.

[7] I might set up an E-Shrine for Sunny Paaji.

[8] NEET: Not in Education, Employment or Training. Education: Whatever little credits I had left were merely ornamental; Employment: I was waiting for a formal offer for like 6 months; Training: Once you get a full-time job offer, the internship ki prabal iccha inside you just dies.