Friday, October 8, 2010

BA Shared Topic: Whats In A Name?


With all the anticipation and preparation for patch 4.0.1, I've been negligent of my blog for a couple of days mainly because I've been trying to farm useful in game pics to use in upcoming posts.  Well I guess I haven't really been negligent because I had intentions of improving my content for readers.  Anyways, I still want to talk about some patch related stuff but I guess now I need to debate if it would be worthwhile since the patch is so close.  I'll worry about that later though.  In the meantime I'd like to participate in this week's Blog Azeroth Shared Topic from Llani of Pocket Heals!


First I'd like to say that this is a very good topic so props to Llani :).  For me, when it comes to creating names for my toons I always try to be random with hopes of coming up with something unique and witty.   I mean who doesn't want a cool name that people comment on all the time in trade.  Then after some time passes and I realize that my creativity isn't quite up to the task I end up either meshing together phrases or words people normally use that I find funny or just using random phrases that no one would think to use for a name.  Basically there is no logic involved which I like because I like to think of my naming system as my very own random name generator without the role-play element and weird syllables and silent letters.  I'll go into further detail about the thought process (or proposed thought process of all the names that seem like they were literally made on a whim) of my toons beginning with my alts.



Mizzleman I came up with Mizzleman mainly because a lot of my other real life user names are renditions of a nickname I had in high school and I figured I'd make another.  The nickname I'm referring to is Mike B.   I got the name my freshmen year of high school from my section leader in band.  I'm not entirely sure why but it kind of stuck.  It really literally followed me throughout my high school career.  I don't have a 'B' anywhere in my name and people tend to ask where it came from a lot but I just tell them that it doesn’t matter because I liked it and it sounds cool lol.

KrownroyaleKrownroyale is the name of my death knight and doesn't really have much story to it.  I just wanted to try and come up with a unique dk name since a lot of people created generic dk names when Wrath first launched and there were not many clever ones on my server.  There were a few though.  Anyways Krownroyale remains pretty unique today at least according to wowarmory.com on the US servers (as well as Mizzleman, check it out for yourself) which is surprisingly shocking to me.


Knowomsayin This is an example of one of those instances where I just meshed together a phrase.  I guess this name actually does have a bit of a background now that I think about it.  During my college career when I was first exposed to facebook, mypace, and twitter, I started creating shortened versions of phrases due to the way I talked and my accent.  Whenever I posted something or texted someone I always thought about how what I was saying would actually sound if I said it.  Because of that my social media dialogue and my texts evolved into something entirely different from the way I actually write.  This is cool because it all fit in the new "slang" that developed because of social networking sites.  It's also unique in a way even today because all of my friends at one point or another can always hear me saying something depending on what I write.  Anyways, one of the phrases that I shortened was "Do you know what I'm talking about" which I wrote as "Knowomtombot" which was how it sounded as I said it sometimes.  I believe I do have a toon named Knowomtombot on another server but I don't count him because I hardly play him.  I do intend on recycling the name for a new toon though in cata.  Errm back to the original subject.  So Knowomtombot came from "Do you know what I'm talking about" and respectively Knowomsayin comes from "Do you know what I am saying?"


Schwagganator I absolutely have no idea where this came from.  It’s just another result of my very own random name generator.  Awesomeness!  It's also pretty unique at the moment as well.


Bluburykush:   Some will find this funny and some or most likely many probably won’t.  But at least let me explain some things first.  I’ve already said that I sometimes like to mesh phrases that are funny together for names.  Well I kind of got this idea from seeing some of the names of the toons on my server.  I found out through the course of playing all these years that a vast majority of the players on my server are avid… Well I’m not exactly sure how to say this but let’s just say a lot of the players like to partake in “elevating the masses” or “cooking with potbelly Joe” (I had to Google common phrases and I found this .  A lot of the references are really entertaining).   Anyways a lot of players have names that tend to reference to one of their “hobbies” and they’re mostly just simple phrases that look weird at first but when you recognized each individual word they can be pretty funny.  When I created my first dranei toon it happened to be after a memorable 25man ToC raid where every so often someone would blame their sub par performance on the fact that they were “under the influence” and other raid members would make relevant comments.  Needless to say we wiped quite a few times but we did complete the instance and the only reason I stayed and actually enjoyed myself was because of how social the raid was.  It was interesting banter to say the least.  So sometime after this when I created the toon I didn’t have anything in mind so I thought because of the blue skin I would just randomly make a reference to you know what.  He’s still a fairly low level toon because I’m waiting for cata to level him.


Sukisukinow Sukisukinow is my only bank toon and my only female toon.  She’s level 1 so I doubt anyone will ever get to see here unless for some reason I decide to level a warrior.   Another result of my random name generator really.  


BigbodyBigbody is the first character I actually leveled from 1 to 70 through BC and then to 80.  Back then when I had to come up with a name I really had no idea what to choose and it’s kind of hard to try and remember my thought process from back then.  I do know that I got the name from a reference to a car from a particular song.  Ahh now it comes back to me.  So since I pretty much started playing WoW while I was in college, it’s not too surprising that the inspiration for my first toon’s name comes from a college experience.  I remember freshmen year hanging out with a group of my friends in someone’s dorm.  That one particular night we were talking about our respective high schools and somehow got on the subject of music preferences and what songs we all knew.  One particular song that half of us knew and the other half didn’t resonates that night because we spent part of the night trying to teach our friends that song.  The name of the song was “Knockin Pictures Off The Wall” and one part of had “bigbody” in it because it was referring to a wide bodied or wide framed cars and or trucks and SUV’s.  I remember explaining that and a lot of other things but for whatever reason that line of the song always stuck in my head.  When I made my first toon I figured that would be as good as any.  Coincidentally later on I found that Bigbody would be fitting for a druid tank according to some of the people I’ve played with but I don’t intend on having Bigbody tank since I have another toon for that.


These are basically descriptions of the origins of all my toons and as you’ve noticed they are in no way related to the class or race so I figure I will label all the names with the colors that identify the different classes in game.

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