Haha I think you sufficiently proved your identity. Most of the people who are pretending to be someone else are pretty obviously fake. That being said creativity is always good.
"Actually, I might end up participating in discussions more than filling in my own blog roll." This is actually one of the pieces of advice that I always give to new users. Before your blog starts getting attention, it is often much more profitable to comment than it is to post, both in terms of quality follower (as opposed to the bot and the spammer followers that we all have) growth and payouts. However it is important to have a nice balance between comments and lengthy posts but it is up to you to determine what that balance is.
Watch out for spammers who leave some generic compliment like "great post" or something. They are trying to get you to upvote and follow but they rarely, if ever, reciprocate the kindness so it is best to save your upvotes for people who you think deserve them. There are some scammers floating around too so stay away from shady looking links but that is true of the internet in general and I am sure you don't need me to tell you that.
The site can be a little weird and take some getting used to. If you are trying to look for tags, either to consume content or as a place to post your content, it is best to replace the tag name in the address bar with the one that you are trying to look for. Doing that will save you some of the headaches that I had when I started.
At the moment the price of steem is a little low and, as a result, so are payouts, particularly for newer users who don't have a reliable following yet. Don't let that discourage you. Things are slow for everyone when they first start. The low price has some advantages too. You get more SP in your payouts (and that is super important) and there is far less competition for attention with fewer people posting at the moment.
Sorry about the length of the comment but hopefully some of that will come in handy at some point. Judging by what you wrote, I think you will do fine here.
Good luck.
Such a long reply of advice! <3 Thanks especially for the tagging tip because I noticed the navigation was a bit strange.
And yes, yes yes. I have definitely noticed a lot of strange replies, so I keep coming back to upvote the real comments, especially in this first post. I'm sure that'll have to change that behavior in the future to make sure my vote has some power.
Also it's also a very good tip to just not click links which go off-site (Tumblr is so much more dodgy in that regard). I've already found a great community through Discord though, so I hope to support it as much as possible.
Thanks again. <3