Once I was Danger. Now I am Dead.
I have a lot of names these days. It's a symptom of the electronic times, when everyone wants you to have a name, but they don't always want it to be the same one. Back when all this stuff started for me, fifteen or so years ago (Hah! We had Bulletin Board Systems and only one person could log in at a time and it was 300 baud and we liked it!) I had a jumble of no-longer remembered names as I searched for an identity while also searching for the latest underground BBS that had illegal phone codes and commercial games available for free download. Given the, uh, questionable nature of some of our youthful activities, it was out of the question (and so uncool) to use your real name, so it was time to start making them up. The name I first came up with was simply Stranger.
I was Stranger on the Round Table BBS. We had a King and a Queen (who could read everyone's email) and I got to be the scribe. I wanted the special ability to revise people's postings after the fact, to improve them. Fortunately, they never figured out how to let me do that. We had parties, after which I would write stories about the attendees, sometimes trashing them. The main trashees were too needy to be mad at me -- instead, they just wanted to make sure I wrote about them again after the next party.
Then I moved away from home and got all grown up and started using my real name. Which served fine until I jumped into multi-player gaming last year and was back to trying to find an identity. So, in a play on my name, I chose Dangeron. I liked it because it had multiple potential meanings -- "Danger Ron" or "Danger on". This was a unique name, and fine except for being rather inaccurate. I'm about as dangerous to another gamer as the swamp rats in Star Wars were to Luke Skywalker. I make for good target practice, and that's about it.
Then came the MPlayer reviewing gig. I already had an account on MPlayer as Dangeron, but it wouldn't do, because when they made me a reviewer they had to stick the letters "Reviewer-" in front of my name, and the software wouldn't accept more than sixteen characters. Computers have progressed the world this far, but they still can't deal with seventeen character names. Hmph. Okay, well, time to find another name. Something at least one character shorter than Dangeron and yet something that still makes a play on my real name and has a deeper meaning.
And so Deadron was born. At first I didn't like it, now I do. It's more accurate, for one thing. I spend a lot of my gaming time being Dead. And Reviewer-Deadron is exactly the right number of characters.
From Stranger to Danger to Dead. This is the map of my life.
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