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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3678 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So what's the story behind everyone's usernames?

I'll start, mine is derived from crow-stepped gables, a common feature of the architecture in my city.

It's just Artaxerxes spelled by someone on the left slope of the IQ distribution.

When I made my most recent Reddit account, it auto generated the username "substantial_layer_13". The name here is based on that of course, playing with the idea that while the discussions we have here are kind of frivolous and for fun, hopefully there's some substance there too.

Prior to that I was bigstrat2003 on Reddit, which is a username I've had in various places. It refers to when (2003 of course) I got my first guitar as my 18th birthday present, a Fender Stratocaster. I had wanted a "fat strat" with the humbucker bridge pickup, although as it happens I got the normal configuration. The original goal wound up being reflected in my username, though ("big strat" instead of "fat strat").

I used to work for a service desk, Oracle and Outlook were two systems/software we supported. I like the connotation of the two put together - in a way it reminds me to hold my tongue and take my words more seriously.

Duplex is a general technical term for processes which double back on themselves. At the time I was a blueprint scanner/copyist; lettersize documents are scanned double-sided by a duplexer built into the feeder tray, and printed double-sided by a duplexer which feeds printed paper back into the uptake path to have the backside printed.

Fields is part of an obfuscation of my real name. I mistook one translation for another when finding the etymology of my last name, it doesn’t even mean fields. (Ironically, some of my ancestors were in fact named Fields, along with some Millers, Mathers, Brewsters, and Kings.)

When I was watching My Little Pony and writing short fanfics for 4chan, Greene “Duplex” Fields was my “ponysona”, the name of a unicorn pony representing me. He was working at a bookbindery in Ponyville, and his “cutie mark talent” was document duplication: with a single spell and some ink, he could copy an entire scroll or a double-sided codex leaf (pair of book pages, basically) to another blank paper. He could also prep a page of movable type for a printing press at high speeds without typos on the first try, which is how he earned his “cutie mark” in the first place: two golden quills in a single inkpot.

Overall, the name represents my pride at being able to format documents in aesthetically pleasing ways, my ability to get a good printout on the first try even on unfamiliar computers/printers, the process improvements I innovated at the print shop which increased all the workers’ productivity, and my love of the scribal arts throughout history, from clay tablets to laser xerography.

My ponysona, Greene Fields, can be seen on my userpage being fitted for a formal suit for the storybook Canterlot wedding of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, orphaned heir to the throne of the Crystal Empire, and Shining Armor, Captain of the Guard. (The official MLP page for the wedding episode, a season finale, had a tool for creating original characters.)

I made a bet with a friend who was a runner. I'd finish a marathon without training for it, he'd have to back squat a percentage of the world record squat as a percentage of my speed versus the marathon record.

He ultimately welched and never even loaded the bar. He didn't think I would finish it at all.

My favorite book is Jane Eyre, but I was really confused about how to say her name for a while.

It's named after a sandwich I get here in Dubai

I really could not possibly say. It just popped into my mind in the moment where I created a Motte account. Bólido is Spanish for meteorite.

It all began with a sex-change accident in a time machine..

One of Heinlein’s weirder ones, right?

Portmanteau of Grant Woods painting and a royal dynasty.

It was coffee because I like coffee, before that it was MediumIsMessage because I like Neil Postman and McLuhan. Now it’s cafe because it rhymes with y2k and i’ve been enjoying some rare 1998-2005 aesthetics lately

It's a joke involving brand names.

I was reading "Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione" by Spinoza.

One of the earliest programs I wrote was a random name generator for the ABC 800, a Swedish Z80 computer from the 80s; grossly obsolete by the time I got it but could run BASIC* well enough.

My current handle was generated from that, initially for some elf character I made for a MUD that i kept reusing everywhere.

* From what I can remember it was some cursed de-Americanized version of BASIC that e.g. modified the keywords and replaced the standard "$" string symbol with the international currency symbol "¤" to counter American cultural encroachment. As a fun aside, when the Swedish keyboard was standardized it got prominently featured as shift-4 due to this, though very few people since have ever used it.

I like pigeons.

Love seeing pigeons when I go to the city.

I've been spending my life so far in the South of Germany.

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