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We Are Todd Howard - Resistance Is Futile

May 2, 2007 - 9:15am — Todd Howard

I received one of the most amusing and yet somehow unsettling emails of my life last night... after I cackled out loud for 10 minutes and then read it out-loud to my wife, I thought, "I have to blog this email..." Oh, by the way, so that you're not confused reading this, my middle initial is "M."

I came home from dinner Monday night to find this email with the subject line, as above, reading "We Are Todd Howard - Resistance Is Futile" in my in box:

Todd,

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Todd Howard. Todd W. Howard. Inasmuch as the only significant difference between us seems to be the inverted variation of our middle initial, I'm beginning to suspect that you and I are merely left coast/right coast reflections of one another. Dopplegangers. Ethereal doubles. Yes, I'll say it: good & evil twins. We have both worked in a variety of capacities in the Entertainment Industry, and have dueling IMDB credits. Moreover, we both have authored books and thus have dueling Amazon.com listings. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that your name immediately precedes mine on the registry for repeat aggravated-assault offenders (I've never checked simply because I just get so goddamned agitated at that spiteful institution). I used to begrudge you for not employing a pseudonym or your mother's maiden name or something, and for the fact that you had gotten the jump on toddhoward.com, and for the fact that your production credits outshine mine at present and that I consequently have to say, "No, I'm not that 'Todd Howard'," but I'm beginning to understand the beautiful truth of the matter--that there is really only one of us so far as these matters are concerned, that with our shared resume comes a shared glory that is so much more than either of us could have known on our own. Granted, I'm the one who is benefiting from this arrangement at present, but I swear by this email that you will one day have strangers buying drinks and making advances (and perhaps serving extradition warrants) by the fruits of my labor.

In Solidarity,

Todd

After I stopped laughing (too much Roman Bean Soup and Moroccan Pork Chop I think...), I started to search for this guy on the web, and to my surprise I kept finding me, and could not really figure out which of the few other Todd Howards he might have been... There are other Todd Howards, I've been aware of many of them over the years. As my surprise eponymous emailer points out above, I was able to snag toddhoward.com—but not until waiting two years with toddmhoward.com under my belt and toddhoward.com being registered by yet another of us. One day I got a call from my good friend saying "hey Todd, happened to check network solutions today, and toddhoward.com was available, so I immediately snatched it up for you." Sweet. Landed. Little did I know that Todd W. Howard would soon be stewing over my acquisition as I had for over two years. Hmm... I really need to re-design that CV site... a lot has happened since I built it, and it's pretty boring looking, I need a mint digital portfolio with all my stuff on there... that's another project. Ever hear about the shoemaker's children? Yeah, they're running around barefoot.

Todd Howard, Video Game Mogul

Another amusing story is that there is a very famous (in the realm of video gaming and game design) Todd Howard, who is the producer of the Bethesda Softworks video game "The Elder Scrolls." From wikipedia: "Todd Howard is the current executive producer for Bethesda Softworks, creators of The Elder Scrolls universe and video game series. Todd has stated that Bethesda's philosophy for the Elder Scrolls games is to allow people to "Live another life, in another world." Now I never would have known about this guy. I like games, but hadn't heard of this one till I got the following email from "Michael" one day:

Hello, sir, this is just another letter from a kid who spends way too much time playing your games, so I will just ask my question, and leave you to your work. So far, I have been unable to locate a recipe for "Skooma" from the Elder Scrolls III, and I was just wondering if there actually was one. Of course, there is no urgency about the subject, but an answer would be greatly appreciated. But, if that is not possible, perhaps you could help me contact someone regarding where I could locate such trivial information. Thank you very much for your time, and take care.

And then a few weeks later this one from "Cole":

I have a suggestion for for a new game. Its a bit like The Elder Scrolls but instead of using medival tims use in the present times or possibly the futur. The character you start off with should be a super hero. You can build your way up by doing good thins and bad things.

Thanks for your time.

I replied to both gamers, and let them down easily... but the funny thing is, they wrote to me from my toddhoward.com "contact me page" which is on my resume/cv site, and nowhere on there do I say anything about Elder Scrolls, yet they both assumed I was him.

Todd Howard, China Texas Guitarist

This Todd Howard has a myspace page, and like Todd W. Howard above, I was steamed when I realized myspace.com/toddhoward was taken by this guitarist... I had to get myspace.com/toddhowardmusic part of me was even like "aw crap, I hope no old high school friends find this guy and think I shave the sides of my head, smoke menthols and play a curly maple tele... that would be horrible. Fact is this Todd Howard is way "cooler" than me. This guy would have picked on me in middle school, I know it. Who knows, he could be the guitarist collaborator I've always been looking for to play with Chalk. Imagine the name... "Todds 'n' Don: Live at the Paradise!"

Miscellany

Who are we online? Only what google says we are? Actually, it's cool I was looking today, and if you google "todd howard" now I actually do come up first, the elderscrolls guy comes second, and Mr. Mentholz Howard comes up third... but still no sign of T-Dubya. My IMDB listing "Todd Howard (I) (Editor, The Trouble with Boys and Girls (2003))" is first (glad I got that in while I did too... hate to be "Todd Howard (VII)". There are three other Todd Howards listed on IMDB, one is The Elder Scrolls guy, and one of the other two must be my emailing duelist. He says we have dueling amazon.com listings too, but I only see -- wait a minute... I just searched for "todd howard" on amazon, and found someone selling a copy of my black and white indie flick The Trouble With Boys And Girls ON AMAZON on VHS Tape for $79!! WTF! I wonder who on Earth the seller JEANF is?

Ok, Now it all comes home to roost. This must be my karma for downloading GBs of music in 1999. Although, no matter how much I hit Napster in the early days, I never tried to sell anything that was not mine to sell. The thing about the Trouble VHS being for sale for $79 that bugs me, is that even WE never sold them. We only gave them away for promo purposes... I think maybe we sold like 2 or 3 for $20, but that was someone who INSISTED on paying us for them. I guess in the long run it doesn't actually bug me, the more people that see the movie, the better, I mean we did work on it for 5 years after all, and it's got a lot of heart. I just don't think they'll get $79 for it. Maybe $15 or $20 on DVD... Is JEANF living in the late 1980's?

How Many Of You Are There?

OK Now I'm ranting. It's crazy isn't it? Our names on the internet. There is this website I heard about the other day called "How Many Of Me" Their intro text says: "There are 301,746,362 people in the United States of America. If everyone in the U.S. lined up single file, the line would stretch around the Earth almost 7 times. That's a lot of people. The U.S. Census Bureau statistics tell us that there are at least 88,799 different last names and 5,163 different first names in common use in the United States. Some names are more common than others."

Ok. Here goes... how many of me are there, how many dopplegangers, how many ethereal ghosts, how many dueling banjos?:

HowManyOfMe.com
Logo There are
353
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Wow... that's really surprising. I expected to see maybe... 100, or even 120, but 353 Todd Howards, that's amazing. It's actually amazing that I've only ever been confused with two that I know of, and have only ever heard from 1. Probably not famous enough. I wonder if I blog some really weird crap about video games and video game design, I wonder if I would get Todd "Elder Scrolls" Howard in trouble. See that's the thing... it's really easy to confuse people who aren't really paying attention. Which is probably why identity theft is so rampant. People just aren't paying that much attention.

Ok this is really revealing... I was looking at my listing for my book Who's Afraid of HTML? on amazon, and there was this link down below that said "NEW! Text Stats! I've never seen anything to... revealing. Apparently I needed to learn to use more syllables and write shorter sentences. Too funny. There's even a book concordance there on amazon now, where they tell you the 100 most common words to appear in a book, and if you mouseover each one, you can see how many times it appears. Apparently, I used the word Todd 60 times in my HTML book. Hmm. I can think of about 5 times when I used it off the top of my head. It must have been in an oft repeated URL or something.

A Solution?

I sent "the Todd W. Howard email" to two colleagues the night I received it, and one of them even suggested I blog about it, and discuss digital identity and I would love to discuss that topic. I feel like I need to do a little more research about it before discussing it here, but it really raises an important thought. Who we are, online, is only really governed today by who feels moved to say they're us. It could be us, but it could just as easily not be. All we need is an airtight system for digitally signatures, in an encrypted format, for our cyberspace e-missives, our blog posts, our YouTube videos, our MySpace pages, our World of Warcraft avatars... a way for someone to verify, in a few easy seconds, if the person they are talking to, or reading, or working with, is actually who they say they are. Doesn't mean you can find out WHO someone is that you are talking to just because you want to, but will let you verify if who they SAY they are is actually who they are. Seems like someone invented a really good system for doing that almost, what, 15+ years ago, by the name of Zimmerman... but the government wanted to put him in jail for that. They deemed his computer program for creating a public and private key encryption/decryption scenario a "munition." They tried to get him for violating the Arms Export Control Act. The US Government has long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls.

This is a huge topic, and seriously, thanks for sticking it out through this rambling post if you made it this far. What are your thoughts? How many of you are there? Ever get a really disturbing email from yourself? Love to hear about it.

/signed, The Real Todd Howard‚Ñ¢

p.s. If you know how to find "Skooma," let me know, or if you have a spare "e" key for a computer keyboard so I can email both Michael and Cole back and help them out. LOL!