Comments on: Of Names

By: Greg Moore

Greg Moore — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:12:21 +0000

Greg Moore was a famous Nascar driver who died when I was about 14 in a horrible, horrible accident now viewable on YouTube. The next day a classmate looked me in the face and said pure deadpan, “You died yesterday.”

“Oh.”

Also, when I was a freshman in college, our government professor was handing back tests and struggling with just about every single name since 90% of GMU students have names like Kierdekisvadikegaggen and Achbarmed Hussainilini. When he got to my name, I was thinking, “At last the guy gets a break, easy name like Greg Moore.”

But he was like “Greg…is it ‘MORE’ or ‘MOO (like the cow sound) rr’?”

I was flabbergasted. I wasn’t even sure which was the right answer.

By: James Roper

James Roper — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:22:05 +0000

The reason why you could never come up with a good nickname for yourself is that you forgot the first law of nicknames, you can’t come up with a good nickname for yourself. A nickname has to be given by other people, otherwise it will just be lame. Self titled nicknames are either too try hard, or too ambiguous that no one understands it.

If you want a good nickname, the easiest way (but not the only way) to get one is to do something really stupid in front of a lot of people. That’s bound to land you a nickname, it won’t sound try hard because it will be at least slightly insulting, and when people ask you how you got it, you’ll have a good story to tell them.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:18:57 +0000

My main problem is having come up with a nickname early on, but no longer wanting it. It represents a significantly earlier time in my life and is somewhat unprofessional (spiritgod21 is the nick), but it’s everywhere and migrating from that nick seems almost impossible. I’ve got a lot invested in it between email, Slashdot, WordPress, et. al.

And, unlike email addresses, you can’t usually just change nicks; you have to shut down the account and open a new one :-\

Aside from all that, I really like the idea of incrementalism. It’s something I’ve been considering a lot in regards to writing (novels and/or longer works); focusing on scenes rather than books or chapters, and allowing yourself to skip between different books/projects as you feel inspired to. Otherwise, you end up locking yourself into a project and, while you might have a great idea for another one, you end up losing it because you want to continue on what you have in progress (even though you’ve hit a wall).