Was amused to see this item on New World Notes about Kingdom of Loathing... I don't play it myself, but it's where my name comes from, as (bad) luck would have it.
What passes for my mind, you see, went blank when I realised I had to make up a name for my Second Life avatar; as it happened, an idiot friend of mine was around at the time, and he suggested... the name of his KoL character. So that is how I came to be called Glorf. (My friend has a long and silly explanation of why his character is called "Glorf Pwlg", but I really haven't the strength to get into all that right now, and anyway it is extremely distasteful.)
We had been leafing through the recently published (at the time) reprints of the "Steel Claw" comic strip that day, and when I paged through the last names, I chose one in honour of the creator of the Claw, hack SF writer and editor Ken Bulmer. And that's how I became the Brady Bunch - wait, I'm not the Brady Bunch. Pity. That name would have been almost sensible.
After all, I thought, it didn't really matter, I would just poke about this whole SL thing for a little while, see what it was like, and probably just let it drop when I got bored with it....
Well, that was March 2010, and here I am, still not bored yet.
I'm not sure if there is any moral to this story, except maybe "think about your name, you may be stuck with it for longer than you think", and also "I need to start hanging out with a better class of people". (He doesn't read this, don't worry.)
Names are SO important, and we must choose them before we have any idea what SL is going to be like. This is why there are all those xXParizH1Lt0nXx.Resident types littering the landscape.
ReplyDeleteRest assured that "Glorf Bulmer" is a truly delightful name. It's rather cute, it's pronounceable, it's unique, it's memorable, and it can be used in polite company. Be happy in your Glorfness!
In one of my sillier moments, it occurred to me to wonder if the single-names thing had actually served to distort the SL economy, albeit in a small way....
ReplyDeleteLots and lots of stores operate lucky boards and lucky chairs that give out freebies to people based on their initials, right? But the initial is randomly selected, and so some of the time it will be something like X, which is not a common starting initial, and so the prize is likely to go unclaimed.
But, now, with the "xXParizH1LtonXx" types, as you say, X is no longer a rare initial! in fact, it may now be one of the more common initials in SL.
So more freebies are being given out - either sapping the cash flow of the creator (if you're a pessimist) or advertising their creations more widely (if you're an optimist), but either way having an effect on the SL economy in general...
I did say it was a silly moment, right?