kaolin fire presents :: thoughts :: biographies

2004::Feb::16

self is often explained through names. Who am I?

Lessee. I'm at work, procrastinating, with a major, insane deadline ahead of me. :)

But thinking about this, I remembered the handle/nick/nym/alias that I started with.

Back in the days of 300 baud.

((2400 was new technology then, and I upgraded to a 1200 very, very quickly)).

Firefox. Which is funny, given mozilla's 'firebird' got renamed to 'firefox' and I didn't even bat an eye of recognition. But that's where I started. Middle name of fire, and... dunno. My dad had some Foxfire books on something or other, I think.

That was age 11 or 12.

Then came the name 'scatterbrain'. I don't know if I started it, or if I was gifted with it, but it stuck and it was "me". More me than any name that's come after, I think. Other than the one I was born with, which just is. :) That started in or around Merlin's "compound", though it may have been related to dungeons and dragons.

My characters had a slew of names, but I never related to them such that those names became mine, or vice versa. I think. Unless (possibly, ish), the scatterbrain nick was attached to a particular valley elf I ran for six years or so on and off. But I don't think so. But I don't remember that character's name, and there was a lot of Scatterbrain there.

Meanwhile, I went through a number of names on various MUDs, and on my own BBS. The main one during this time was 'Blood Doll', from a snippet of misinformation regarding the term from White Wolf's Vampire (which I didn't play for another three years or so, where I learned my error. Oops.) Also malaclypse the elder (discordian), wight_zombie (yeah, whatever), mordekainen (???). Hmm.

I also cultivated a group of friends self-identifying as pronouns. I was 'me'. There was an 'I', a 'you', a 'her' and a 'him'. There was even an 'i' just to add to the confusion. I'll always be partial to being me.

Scatterbrain stuck, though I tried to use 'blood doll' more and more, as I thought it was 'cooler'. my first email account was bluddoll@uclink4.berkeley.edu. :) Then I stopped doing things that required nicks, beyond email. From bluddoll, I went to 'eruditio' (latin root 'to know'), then to 'cognosco' (latin root 'to learn'). And that's about it.

But what about nentwined?

Well, umm. :blushes: A friend and I were signing up for a cablemodem and needed an account name, and I'd been listening to a rather lame album with 'entwined' as part of the title, and had fallen a bit in love with the word. But 'entwined' was taken, so I dotcommed it to 'nentwined', and, erm, yeah.