An online identity since 1997.
The name PsiNormal has been my online identity since the summer of 1997.
At the time, I was moving my personal website from my university's servers to Geocities. Like many people on the early Internet, I needed a username—but everything I wanted seemed to be taken.
So I did something that seems almost impossible today: I opened a dictionary and started reading.
Eventually I came across psi. Most dictionaries define it as the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet or an abbreviation for pounds per square inch. As a lifelong science fiction reader, though, I knew another meaning: psionics—the fictional mental abilities behind telepathy, telekinesis, and other "powers of the mind."
I've always been fascinated by science fiction, the paranormal, and parapsychology. While I enjoy the ideas, I've never claimed to possess any extraordinary abilities myself.
So I combined the two ideas:
Psi + Normal = PsiNormal
It's a made-up word that felt like a perfect contradiction—someone fascinated by the extraordinary while being perfectly ordinary.
Nearly thirty years later, it's still the online identity I've kept.
And yes... as far as I know, I really did invent the word in 1997.
This site is slowly being rebuilt after many years offline.
Eventually you'll find things like: