So I started a blog/What's in a name?

            I never thought I'd start a blog, but I guess not many people who do, do. So I'm 30 now and figure it's time to start sharing more. We'll see how this goes.

            So whenever I bring anything new into the world, there's always this thing about figuring out what to call it. This is always a problem for me. A lot of times things never see the light of day only because I can't find a suitable name for them. It sounds absurd, but a name is a sacred thing, and I can't bring myself to take it lightly.

            Some stories about names I use and how they came about:

What an inordinate number of gameplay hours looked like.

St. 78: Growing up, I played a lot of video games. I remember The Legend of Zelda as being the first game I ever played that required me to name my character. Now, in the first Zelda this was merely a reference to the gamesave file you used to play it, and had no usage in the game whatsoever. Nobody in the game ever called you by this name, but still, I remember sitting at the NES for a long time, waiting to start the game for the moment a cool name would pop into my head. Usually, I just go with the default character name, in this case, Link, but I remember once I hurriedly put in "ST. 78" because the grid of characters you had to use to input the name were arranged in such a way that the letter S and T were placed above the numbers 7 and 8. At first I thought this was dumb, but then when I pronounced it in my head - "Saint Seventy Eight" or "Saint Seven Eight", I liked the rhythm and the partial rhyme of it, so it stuck. I would then go on to use that as a default to go to in case I ever played a game whose main character didn't have a default setting for their name. I still use it to this day for my Halo profiles and whatnot.

The original p-twishus

p-twishus: I often use this name to refer to myself. It's my username for a lot of accounts on websites and whatnot, and a lot of people ask me what it is. When I was in college, I played Final Fantasy VII extensively. After going through the game using all the default character names, I started another one using made-up, weirder names, and these new names reflected the stream of consciousness/Dada phase I was going through at the time. Cloud, the main character, received my St. 78 moniker, but the other characters I had to make up. I told myself each one would be the first thing to pop into my head, so I remember Aeris being "+gratis+" and the other characters being named other weird things, and when I got to the Cait Sith character, he became "p twishus". I liked the Cait Sith character, because his character design was so out there compared to all the other characters - his body was artificial, and was actually made up of two bodies: a cat with a kerchief and megaphone riding a giant moogle. Anyway, because we now shared an important letter, "P" (there were times when, if multiple people in the room were named Joe, i'd be Joe P, because Pavelka is kind of a pain to pronounce, I guess. This ended up being simply "P"), this evolved to be synonymous with myself. If I ever had to pick a DJ name, it'd probably be p-twishus.

sleepgun: When I decided Hotmail was bunk and Gmail was the new thing for me, I spent MONTHS deliberating on my new email name. "rocketboy", my handle I picked for myself when I started my first email account in high school, was pretty tired. So I set myself up with criteria:

1. It had to be two syllables. When people asked my email, my answer had to be short and sweet. Ba-bam at Gmail. Done.
2. It could not have any other way to spell it, so that I wouldn't have to spend time spelling it out after I said it, so no numbers, no homophones, no clever respellings.

            Of course, I wanted it to pop and all, but those criteria were crucial. So I spent all this time looking through obscure Pavement song titles, lyrics, movies, etc.. It got kinda nuts. I started to get sick of it, so I settled on "sleepgun". I'm actually not entirely happy with it, but sometimes you need to do something you can't take back just so you can move forward. Sleepgun worked, because I liked the idea of something as violent as a gun, but the end result of that violence was something nice, like sleep. I realized later that there is such a thing as a tranquilizer gun, but hopefully people don't make that connection.

The Open Steppe: Yeah, this thing. I woke up at 4 a.m. today and decided that I would start a blog. I set it up, and lo, another naming screen. Sleepgun was taken. My head hit the keyboard, as I thought I was in for another few months of poring over possible names for my blog. I paced around my apartment for a bit, and this came up, and I just said fuck it. Once again, Irrevocability allows us to move forward. A lot of people can guess it's from Conan the Barbarian, and I just wanted to give a shout out to the guy who got totally dissed at that one barbarian feast. And I guess it's about standing before a new frontier. Or something. So yeah.