I remember a conversation with an i.r.c. user who claimed he “imagined” users to have a certain hair color based on little more information than their i.r.c. nickname. Until I pointed out to them that surely that cannot be accurate at all, especially given that he imagined two different hair colors of the same user under a different nickname on different networks, he also did not even quæstion the accuracy of this and simply silently assumed it to be accurate.

It was really quite weird. He proffered an entire description of what he thought I would look like based on very little information which, needless to say, was mostly objectively quite false.

The user with different nicknames went even further and at one point seemed to expect me to be able to correctly assume what so-called “race” he categorized himself as, without having seen so much as a picture. Given that this same user had prior expressed surprise about my so-called “race” when seeing a picture, thus having assumed it wrongly prior, this was especially odd.