So, do you guys remember Disguised Goblin?

Well, that was me.

I'm DisGo.

It was an alt account.

I'm sorry to have deceived you all.

So, here's what happened. In early May of 2014, someone created a thread over in the Metaboard, jokingly asking if Goblins were still not allowed. I was feeling cheeky, so I made a fake account called "Disguised Goblin," took the art from Goblin Bully, sloppily threw an image of Majora's Mask on it to use as the avatar, and I made DisGo's first post:



It was meant to be a one-time, one-note joke. The thought of a goblin wearing a mask, but still VERY obviously a goblin, amused me, and that art for Goblin Bully works amazingly well, with the other goblin behind him holding his head, as if saying, "what the hell are you doing, Goblin?" It made me smile.

I was originally going to leave it at that. One post, one joke, good and done. But there's something about May of 2014 that you need to remember: I was about a month-and-a-half deep in The War of the Wheel at that point. It was eating up a ton of my time and virtually all of my creative energy at the time, and frankly, I needed a mental break. Disguised Goblin offered me one that I didn't expect. After sitting down to make the account and that first post, I decided to do something that I rarely do: I started a story with literally no prep, no idea. I wrote the first line: "Three goblins were sitting on some rocks." And I just went from there. I didn't know where the story was going, I just let it happen.

No joke, I wrote that whole story in less than an hour, straight through.

My first post as DisGo came at 4:26 PM my time. "The Pinch" was posted at 5:44 PM the same day. It was amazingly cathartic for me to be able to disconnect not just from WotW, but from the Raven "persona," and get lost in this brand new "Disguised Goblin" persona, and "The Pinch" remains one of my favorite things I've written around here. Again, I was approaching DisGo as a one-time thing.

But then something unfortunate happened. People liked "The Pinch." A lot. And people started liking DisGo, too. I honestly hadn't anticipated that, nor intended it. I was happy with the praise, of course, and glad people liked the story, but then the hammer hit the anvil, so to speak.

People started talking about DisGo joining the M:EM. Well, ****. Now, I had a problem. Obviously, I couldn't let DisGo join. He was me. We can't have two "me"s in the M:EM. That's why DisGo backed off so much on M:EMbership. All of a sudden, people's feelings were involved in this little jokey character I had created. I knew instantly that I had ****ed up, but I was in too deeply at that point.

If he had only written the one story and vanished, it might have been okay, but then I screwed up again. I'm not a big fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. I feel it is much too long for its own good. However, there is one quote in there that I think about often. He says, "No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." I have found this very true, in real life, and with alternate accounts.

So, one day, Barinellos said this, in Tevish's original "Amulet of the Planeswalkers" thread:


I had forgotten that I was logged in as "Disguised Goblin" rather than "RavenoftheBlack," so I carelessly responded with this:

This is not the way DisGo talked. This is the way Raven talks. I could practically hear a disembodied voice say, "You done ****ed up, Boy." And, because we had so much more traffic in 2014 than we do now, I couldn't just delete it. Odds were, somebody had already seen it immediately. I could see from the "Who is Online" box at the bottom of the page that Barinellos was still online, and he in fact responded to that post 11 minutes later.

So now I had to play it off as DisGo being interested in the Blade, which had implications I didn't like, such as DisGo being so interested in the M:EM that he was delving the Mothership! Now things were getting far too out of hand. I wrote DisGo's second story, "Birthright," just to cover up this slip. It's true what Walter Scott wrote all those years ago: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / when first we practice to deceive."

DisGo was meant to be a one-time thing, an innocent joke. I did use him to bump a couple of my threads, because I noticed that people were more inclined to comment on something the more comments were already there. I also used him to fill out numbers in a play-by-post game that didn't look like it was going to go (though the game itself didn't last long, as the mods made us move to the play-by-post subforum, and we lost half or more of the players...)

Anyway, I finally decided that DisGo was doing more harm than good, and so I retired the persona. Again, I probably should have come clean immediately, and I've literally been harboring this secret since 2014.

I am genuinely sorry if my deception hurts anyone. I know people liked DisGo, and had high hopes for him joining our ranks, and the fact that I've contributed to that disappointment, as well as the feeling of missing him, hurts me. I never want to disappoint or hurt any of you. As (I believe) the oldest of us (in chronological age, at least) I should have held myself to a higher standard.

It is possible that some M:EMbers already knew this, or strongly suspected. I know at least one Mod knew. It is also possible that nobody cares, now or then. But for anyone who does feel hurt by this, I sincerely apologize. As I said, the deception was never the point or the plan.

I'm sorry.

Ha! Pretty sure I wasn't around then, but actually that makes me feel better about The Pinch? Because it was, as you say, an incredibly inspired story, and discovering that the M:EM hasn't lost its author is a good thing.

Yeah, this would have been about a year and a half before you came to us, but of course, it still does affect you in some way, as it does involve the Archive. I'm happy that you like the story, and again, thank you for the kind words.

The first one came just four days after DisGo was created. theamazingsquid posed a question in the Welcome Thread in AF&S, and DisGo responded:

This, of course, could easily be read as a reference to his being a masked (Disguised) goblin, which is true for several of these, but of course, this is a reference to him being, well, me.

When Keeper asked DisGo about joining the M:EM, DisGo said, amongst other things, was this:

Again, this could have been a reference to him being a Goblin, but again, it meant me.

Luna responded to that by mentioning a chain of "secrets" that many of us had, to which I, as Raven, responded (in part):

Here, I was getting VERY cheeky. DisGo's secret was that he was me. Mine, being "no different from [his]" was a reference to the fact that I was him.

The next one is a bit cheap, but it was again in the thread for "The Pinch:"

It's cheap because the last part is a blatant lie, but the hint was in "I write a little, here." Again, this was just a tiny little hint at myself.

I thought there was one more, long after DisGo left, where I dropped in a comment, but it turns out it wasn't even me, so clearly wasn't a hint!

Still, this is just the sort of thing I do! I'm kind of like the Riddler, I think. Even when I do something I don't want people to know about, I sort of can't help myself from leaving incriminating clues...