In 2002 someone with the creative username "dan crenshaw" posted three separate guides for the JRPG Suikoden 3. to gamefaqs.com. This consists of the most popular comprehensive guide to the entire game, a list of all the story scenes and endings in the game, and a list of all the things the private detective you can hire in the game can tell you about the underage anime girls that are part of your army (it's a JRPG).
After first going "Huh, that's weird" about the user name, I checked with the site howmanyofme.com to see if this was a common name. It is not. There are 13 Dan Crenshaws in the United States. There are 103 Daniel Crenshaws - which is his legal name - some of whom will be called Dan. Let's dive deeper.
The timing of these guides is just fantastic. Dan Crenshaw finished high school in 2002, presumably around summer, and these guides were written and published in the months after that and stopped being updated in ealy 2003, when his wikipedia article tells me that his university education was kicking off. Let's dive deeper.
Next step is a bit awkward because at this point I was losing focus and since I am not American I don't know your internet service providers, but he does leave an email adress, which is dshaw999@bellsouth.net. It does sound to me like someone with that adress in 2002 is probably in the south, which he was, but I haven't actually looked that one up too much.
Here's a link to the list of guides for Suikoden 3: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps2/536777-suikoden-iii/faqs The link for the post will have to be to a picture of main character Geddoe, the one-eyed mercenary that I am now convinced he has built his entire persona around.
Hmm inconclusive. I looked into Bell South a bit. They didn't serve Texas where Crenshaw grew up.
Afte doing the bare minimum of research that I absolutely should have done before I posted at all, it seems that the Southeastern Bell company did not serve texas at that time, but AT&T, which is the parent company of everyone involved aquired the Southwestern Bell as early as 1993, and they are headquartered in Texas. Could this have affected email adresses in Texas or am I just crazy? I will, by the way, never stop believing this no matter how much evidence I am provided with, but I would like to know if it is a matter of pure religious faith on my part or if there is something more to it.
iirc, this was the early days for 'broadband' where DSL via phone lines was opened up to many providers outside of the normal incumbency status quo these days, so he could of easily had DSL provided through some other competing Bell corp
So the theory is not completely dead? My main evidence is the timing. which actually seems to be perfect. So if the internet service provider doesn't actually disprove it we're just back to looking at the number of Dan Crenshaws + whichever part of the Daniel Crenshaws are called Dan, and we could probably exclude quite a few of them because we DO have an expected age for someone writing this in 2002, and it's not that huge of an age gap.
This here's a Southwestern Bell state!
He lived in Colombia when he graduated from high school. Which, interestingly, is a country that Bell South operated in at the time.
Could it be? :pepe-silvia: