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!
which he would spend hours on making them perfect and portable. he made good speakers and made them nice but even though that was his dream job as he was a musician and wanted to help other musicians. it never quite met it goal and we went into deep times with my father losing his job at GM. we tried living off pension for a while at which my father devoted his time to his goal and tried to make it big. he never accomplished is goals and only sold 4 bass cabinets. the only one he had left was one called "the mighty hoewailen". times got tough and he wasn't making enough money to justify the costs of making them. times got tough and he got a job in construction, but he still had his one speaker, "the mighty hoewailen". so as time went on and my father continued to practice his guitar, as he was a professional musician. the cabinet always seemed to be there and I would walk past it every day. and the name kind of stuck. times got better he got his job back and things were looking up when I got a minecraft account. my father looked at the bass cabinet and told me to make my name hoewailen. as that speaker was the last thing he had of a time he tried to live his dream. and for that I was proud to take the name hoewailen and slowly it became me.
EDIT: Happy Sachurday!
Chanku and Golker were combinations of my first name with Goku, as when I came up with it I was playing Byond DragonBall RPG's and I came up with those names as I loved the name Goku, and the ring is rather nice. I still use it, Chanku more than Golker.
Another name I use is Chancraft. the name was(and still is) for my YouTube channel. Chancraft is, again, a combination of my first name and Craft(as I was making a Minecraft centered channel). However there is more behind Chancraft, as I was a fan of FluzCraft, who was an awesome YouTuber(who disappeared somewhat.), and I enjoyed his work so much that I wanted to make a 'tribute' to him.
A few other names I used are Oracle, Phoenix, Sapien, Sagittarius, Origin, and Oblivion. I use Oracle, Origin, and Oblivion less now, but I still sometimes use them. Phoenix, Sagittarius, and Sapien, are all pen names I have used(although I use the name Aqua-Phoenix) And none of them have special meanings or why I made them some names I use(Sapien is pronounced Say-pee-in). The name Chanku18 was the name of a youtube channel and the name of my Twitter account, before I stopped using it. Chandler182 is a version of Chandler181 which was suggested by google when I was creating my first Gmail account.
I have had a couple more usernames for stuff when I was much, much younger; before I was Kyte. My very first username was (and this is kinda embarrassing) "Cyberbubbie", which is the word "bubbie", of which my sister apparently called me when I was first born because she couldn't pronounce "baby" (this is apparently a pretty common thing, oddly enough) and "Cyber" for obvious reasons. This eventually turned into "cyberawesome", which was the name of my somewhat old email address (I'm not saying the site it's at out of fear of random emails). My second was "Blackshadow", an alias I used when I used to play Kuma games.
To start off, I pronounced it exactly as it was written, "Corner Underscore G", and I was happy with it for quite awhile. Eventually, when I started branching out into a few more sites, and started saying my username more, I grew tired of saying such a long name, so I started not pronouncing the underscore, just saying "Corner G", and to date, that is how I pronounce it most of the time.
Everyone says my name differently, and what is even more diverse is people's abbreviations of my name. Some people shorten it to "Corner", some people shorten it to a simple "G". Myself, I find 'corner' just makes me picture a corner, which is just weird, and 'G' sounds like some gangster name..
Even broader than people's shortenings of my name is the context it can be put in. It was a long time ago that I started using this as my username, and since then I have pictured many things that relate to the context of "corner G". I have pictured the corner of a square 'G' shape, I have pictured someone "cornering" a G, I have even pictured a face in the corner of a room thinking "gee...". I know that other people would have also come up with some weird interpretations of my name, since "corner" is just a weird word for a name.
Corner is a word that seems weird to have in a name, "G" seems like some gangster name, and the name was from a long time ago. If I could change it, I certainly would, I have a lot of better names in mind. However, I used the name in so many sites, and built a reputation in so many places as "corner_G" that if I changed now, I would basically become a newcomer again, who nobody knew.
Going on through the years, I kept the name "Kali" (the A is short). When I made a Youtube channel, I added "graphy" on the end to represent my favorite font, Lucida Calligraphy. And thus, Kaligraphy was born. I've been called Kali, Kayle, Kalio and Kalig, but I go by Kali more often.
After a while on other games people would just call me "hi" and that was annoying (cause in my mind I always said it as "hai-jiu-wu-ba-ling" and not "hi") and some games/forums/accounts didn't accept numbers in the username, so I changed it to "Aotr" which is the name of my main Dragonfable character at the time. I've been using it since.
As "hi9580" I'm always cold, logical, stubborn and ridiculous at times,often putting sense into topics that are considered insensible to the general public, "hi9580" is always female on all forums for some reason (it's almost like a inside joke i'm playing on myself).
"Aotr" is always that super generous guy that helps every everyone whenever possible, often going to great lengths to give out in-game money, but also likes to troll whenever possible and rages quite a lot.
It's almost I have a split personality for each of those egos, I'm just in complete different mind-set when using either, so those no need to put those qualities on.
Later that school year, I was at a small party with my friends were we were playing Halo or something over two X-Boxes. On my friend's X-Box, he had a profile named Coco Hutzpah, which I decided to use. After several hours of jokes and catchphrases and repeatedly killing my friend with the username "The Dilldozer," we all had a bunch of memories.
When I bought Minecraft, I remembered that fun night of CTF and repeated puns and I went with coco_hutzpah. Yet another friend was rather annoyed that I used a name that he (thought he) created, so you will often see me as Hutzpah Chicken on Steam. Otherwise, I'll make something up on the spot for Half Life, such as "Cock Blocker 9000" when I play as the robot or "Samuel Mo Fo Jackson" if you get the joke.
trialsboy
This was my username when made my first account on the internet, at Sploder. As a hobby, I compete in a motorcycle sport known as observed trials. My parents usernames were trialsdad and trialsmama, so I decided to follow suit and called my self trialsboy.
CGPM
This, as I'm sure you've guessed, is an acronym. It stands for Computer Game Programing Master, back when I thought I knew what I was doing with game programing. This is actually completely unrelated to Sploder.
CGPM_cory
This is a mashup of the previous name, CGPM, and my first name in real life, Cory. It was created when I tried to make a Minecraft account and CGPM was already taken. I don't like it anymore, but it's the thing above my head in Minecraft to this day.
Mecharon1
This is my current username, and has a bit of a history. One day last year, in gym class, I was running suicides and and thought of this piece of relative genius: the beginning of the word macaroni, as in the legendary side dish macaroni-and-cheese, sounds very similar similar to the word mech or mecha, which is a large, mobile suit of tank-like armor according. What if those two were... combined! Here are my notes I wrote as soon as I got home. The 1 on the end instead of an i is because somehow Mecharoni was already taken on WattPad. Finally, Mecharon1 is always capitalized, except on Instagram where it won't let you.
sirMecharon1
This is what happens when being in a rush and Mecharon1 already being taken on YouTube. If I was given the chance to change this, I would most likely change it to theMecharon1, Mecharon1official, or something of the sort. Prepending sir was a horrible decision, and I hate it.
No offense, but yer mum pulled a bad prank on you then… Moon cricket isn't the nicest of terms...
Heh. "Talco" is a Spanish word aswell.
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My name is a remix of "Kadokawa". If you watch Anime you should know what is that about, but let's take the history:
I had a Anime forum called "Mundo Anime Forums", it was pretty popular for some time, at the point that I was able to take a domain (www.mundoanimeforum.com as I remember), then, in that time (2009) my nickname was "Davicitox1999" (Yes, my name is David, I was born on 1999, my mind was lazy to invent something good I think), but, when I was registering in some forum (I don't remember exactly what forum) I decided to take a good nickname and I thought about it like for 3 days, until I said "Damn, better to press keys in the keyboard to see what happens". I writed "Kodejh" as I remember, so, I remembered some anime that I watched that saids "Kadokawa" and I wroted into the username field "Kodehawa". This is my nickname since 2010 and I don't think about changing it, since it became a part of my life.
P.S: My nickname is spelled "Kodejáwa", if someone wonders.