Saturday with Sach: Whats In a Name
NAMING - IN THE BEGINNING
I had the curious privilege of seeing the internet as we know it form into what it is today from my childhood. There was a dark time, a scary time, when the internet wasn't really a thing people knew about, or used. We had to do some scary stuff to get information back then. DARK things. Things like, "asking people questions in real life". Who even has time for that, right? How did we live?!
When it came time to have a presence on the internet, I went through a lot of names. The one I probably had the longest (before Sacheverell) was "Pretzel", a handle I used in a lot of MMOs and FPS games. What made me choose that name? I was probably hungry. Who knows. What mattered was that people knew me by that name, and it became a part of me. Our in-game names are, in a sense, who we are; it's not even what the name implies, or where it came from, but the association we bring with it. When someone sees our in-game name, they immediately think of us, the person - what we're like, whether we're friends or not, games we play together, all that good stuff. The nature of an in-game name isn't exactly rocket science, but there is one part of it that fascinates me to no end: the origin of a name.
WHO WE ARE TODAY, AND WHY
I would never ask of you anything I wouldn't do myself, so let's start with the origin of my in-game name, "Sacheverell". In short, it came from a love for tabletop games. Without getting into all the boring details, it was the name of an entity in a particular game that I thought sounded neat, had a neat theme, and it was fun to say aloud, besides. In my voice-acting work, it was handy to have a name that resonated in a catchphrase, and it serves that purpose well. If I had to name one regret over it though, it would be how much trouble people seem to have with it, both in spelling and spoken aloud: I've seen Sacherevell, Sachaverall, Suchaverel, and countless other variations. Out loud, it gets even sillier. A wise man once told me that I should've picked an easier name, and in many ways, he was right. If I had stuck with something simpler - say, Pretzel - there would be a lot less confusion. To be fair, I've seen a lot of people mistakenly call him "criticsquid", which seems to bother me a lot more than it bothers him. Though, the idea of replacing a citrus-based descriptor with the image of a film critic still makes me giggle a little.
WHO ARE YOU, AND WHY
Forget me for a minute, let's talk about you! What made you choose your in-game name? Is there a cool back-story, with some deeper personal meaning? Did you take it off a cereal box? Smash the keyboard with a hammer? No story is too awesome or silly! Let's hear about your in-game name!
I did.
When I was nine, my brother found it, and I thought it was dumb at first...
waking up in the middle of the night changed my mind.
Now, I wasn't supposed to be on the computer in the middle of the night, so I left the light off so as not to get caught, and misspelled the name I was going for: pianoplayer.
I've used it ever since, becuase its such a dumb screw-up that no one uses it.
This action of granting land to "Foreign Devils" caused a civil war in China about 250 years prior to the beginning of the story, causing China to split into the Northern Ming State and Southern Song Kingdom. About 50 years after that, the Southern Song Dynasty was overthrown by a shadowy clan of evil sorcerers known as the T'ang Ch'i (湯池), which caused the mostly ethnic Japanese & German Eastern Provinces to rebel and form the Seiryuu Kingdom (青龍王国). The story is mainly how Hikaro and his ronin band, the Rokunin Zoku (六人族 = "Six Man Clan") get embroiled in a plot by the T'ang Ch'i to bring down the Seiryuu Kingdom from the inside....
I might have to see about trying to finish up the story someday, but that's how I picked my name... I figured that it would be unique enough that nobody else was likely to have it...
Some names I went by for a short amount of time that just didn't stick: "WhatTheFrag", "SuperFrag" and "Gyr0".
but he lives on in my memory.
I always name my pet minecraft wolves after him that way he can play along with me.
Anyways, my MC name came after I got a demo account and figured out it would work if you played with mods offline. When I came to buy my Premium account, I had issues with upgrading my account, so I took the name of my series and one of my characters and mashed them together. Constant + Nexus = ConstantNexus.
EDIT: Pringlepop, You're a nerd? Well be glad that you are! That just shows that you like being different!
My father told me about a curious little crustacean, a miniature lobster of sorts, called a "Crawfish". At least, that's what he called it. Around other parts of the world they're called everything from crawdads to yabbies.
And soon after he told me about them, lo and behold, I caught one! It was scary for me, I was a kid who was scared of getting pinched by it.
Ever since then, crawfish have held a special place in my heart, which is where my various internet names come from. I used to think it had a space, "craw fish", which led to a lot of my names being "Craw_fish". Eventually I corrected that mistake, but that led me to discover that other people will have used that username on other sites. As such, I came up with what I use as my Minecraft, Steam, and all around general IGN; Crawfishness.
I had fun typing that.