User:Asheresque

I'm Marc Eliot Stein, a writer, software developer and peace activist in New York City.

I've been a part of the online creative community since the early days of the World Wide Web, when I began posting to USENET groups like rec.music.dylan and rec.arts.books. Though I originally posted as Marc Stein, I began using the pen name Levi Asher in 1993 when I wrote a satire about my workplace for the first major online fiction journal "Intertext", as I somehow imagined my co-workers would see the story and get their feelings hurt. I kept the pen name the following year when I launched my blog Literary Kicks, which is why I am still often known as Levi Asher.

I wish we lived in a world where we could all choose our own names, but karma did not make using a pen name easy for me. Though I was widely known as Levi all over the world, in my professional life as a website developer in New York City I was widely known as Marc Stein, and this became annoying in many ways. In 2015 I announced that I would start using only one name, the one I was stuck with upon birth: Marc Eliot Stein. I'm proud to have a Wikipedia page as "Levi Asher" representing the 20+ years of work I did under that name.

Lately I'm doing a different kind of work: I'm currently director of technology and social media for World Beyond War, an excellent global antiwar organization.

Wikipedia is the greatest encyclopedia of all time, and I read it constantly. I mainly use my wikipedia account to make corrections and small additions on topics I read about, which are likely to include Italian opera, New England Transcendentalism, the Napoleonic wars, existential philosophy, types of trees.

I use the name "asheresque" on Twitter and Instagram and a few other places. Even if I'm no longer Asher, I remain Asheresque.