What's in a name

When I was a young child in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my parents hung out at bars and bowling alleys. I was mesmerized by the fact that the adults all had nicknames; some called them "bar names". They were charming to me. In the bar I grew up in (another story for another day), patrons referred to each other not by boring grown-up names like John, Bob, or Donna, but rather by bar names.

There was Soccerball. Phantom. Toots. My dad's bar name was Zero. Sometimes the adults called me Little Zero. An anecdote my parents used to share was that when my mom introduced my dad to her mother, she only knew his bar name, and introduced him as "Zero" and my grandmother thought that was bizarre. My dad quickly corrected her and introduced himself by his real name, Ray. My mom was shocked.She had never heard his real name before.

Those of us who have experienced the entire arc of the internet within our lifetimes all have a story about our first screen name.

In the early days of connected computing, when we dialed into BBSes with our telephone modems. We were prompted to create an identity; a screen name.

I was a kid the first time I was confronted with this choice; I believe I was 10 or 11 years old. At the time, I was obsessed with a video game I had only seen in a magazine, because I didn't have a computer that was capable of playing it. The game was called Time Bandit, and the graphics and colors were astounding to me. I read the article about Time Bandit so many times the page fell out. I wanted an Atari ST computer so badly, and it was just because this game existed on it. I had no idea what the gameplay was like, or what it was even about, but I knew that it was a thousand times more colorful and higher resolution than anything my Atari 130XE 8-bit computer could ever achieve, so I wanted it.

That became my first online handle. Time Bandit became my identity in the world of BBSes in the metro Detroit area, and many people came to know me as Time Bandit (mostly adults: It was a strange time!)

Over the years as I aged and grew out of names, one name that I picked when I was 13 has stuck with me for most of my life. If only I had know the gravity of that choice back them, I may have gone with something different, but I chose primesuspect (or prime for short) back then, right at the cusp of the internet era.

Through a convoluted series of events, I ended up becoming the head of a large internet community named Icrontic (which was a completely fabricated name, made by a 14 year old in Florida, and it was a play on words or a joke about cron jobs in Linux), and my name prime was sealed. Just like Zero, there were people who didn't know my real name, just "prime". When social media came around, my Twitter handle was just naturally "primesuspect", and yet another community got to know me as that name.

The name never really had any actual deep connection with me but it stuck. It was very simple, brief, easy to spell and communicate, and just felt natural.

So here I am, prime. I answer to it as naturally as I do my real name.

When I joined Bluesky a couple years ago, I couldn't find my usual name and I took the opportunity to use my domain name instead (which at the time was delightfullyweird.blog), but "delightfullyweird.blog" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and most people's names don't have a TLD appended to the end (just waiting for some bay area sociopath to name their kid "jimbo.ai" or something).

I've always been fascinated with made-up names. One story that always stuck with me was the absolute invention of the storied global brand Kodak. Kodak was a name made up by George Eastman and his mother Maria by playing with an Anagrams set and basing the name on Eastman's decision that the letter "K" was a "strong, incisive sort of letter". I have also always been fond of the name "Atari". As an Atari kid myself, the name has always had special meaning to me. Its origins in Japanese, the simplicity and balance of the word itself all feel special to me.

The Japanese language itself is influential to me, as a casual hobbyist learner for most of my adult life, I have always been fond of the LEGO-like structure of Japanese syllables and how they fit together in a way that makes sense.

I spend a lot of time naming characters in RPGs, and actually put effort into keeping them thematically consistent, lore accurate, or otherwise believable. I'm not the guy who names his World of Warcraft character "Buttholyus" or anything like that. I'm not against meme or joke names but it's not my personal style. Several years ago I named a character "Kanoki". I liked the simplicity of the word, the ease of spelling and saying it, and the vague feeling of being a word from another place or time. It could be so many things, but ultimately like George Eastman I think I just like the strength of the letter "K", I like that it could be vaguely Japanese (or, honestly it could come from any number of cultures). I think almost any human can pronounce it, it's unambiguous and clear. It reminds me of Atari. It reminds me of Kodak.

There aren't too many instances of the word "kanoki" out there. A small cafe in Fukuoka, Japan. A cemetery, also in Japan. A tech blogger. My World of Warcraft character. Not much!

I finally settled on it and registered kanoki.net to secure my domain and my online identity for what appears to be a new phase in my life. I don't expect anyone to call me "Kanoki" and I certainly never expect to have it feel as natural as my real name, the way I do "prime", but as I continue to walk forward through life, shedding bits and pieces of my past, it felt like the time to have a new online presence was here, so I snagged it. It doesn't "mean" anything, but it feels like a word and a name I could get comfortable coalescing around. I changed my bluesky handle recently to reflect it (it's definitely better than delightfullyweird.blog!) and I'm not sure what else I'll do with this word yet, but for now, hi!