What If…My Collection Was Lost and I Can Only Buy Back 10 Games…2023 Edition | BoardGameGeek
Someone did a Reverse Kondo
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I had a math prof who lectured with chalk in one hand and an eraser in the other.
Fortunately, he provided a pretty good paper copy of what he lectured, and he was mostly working a problem out on the board.
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I write notes on paper, but the expected life of them is a few days tops. I take meeting notes in a google doc, because that’s the standard practice at ork I also scratch drafts of stuff on paper, and transcribe them into not electrons, usually with substantial expansion and revision in the process.
What do the wink tablet users use these days?
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Working at home, I take my notes in folding Emacs, unless I’m writing a document or a wiki page. Working in the office, I do the same, unless I’m in a meeting or talking to someone, when I take notes on paper, and put them into Emacs ASAP.
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Diana Wynne Jones went to lectures by Tolkien.
He muttered into the blackboard and did his best to pretend the students weren’t there at all.
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As my username being Japanese in origin got mentioned on the AI generated picture thread…
I’ve been meaning to explain my username… I have no personal connection to Japan at all. In fact the username doesn’t originally have any association with Japan for me…
The name came from a roleplaying game that provided lists of names for different cultural backgrounds within the game. Mine was supposed to from an Arab inspired culture… at least I thought it was. I thought it was a variant on “Yasmina”. Funny enough my character was from the Japan-inspired part of that fantasy world but her family came from a different place so I chose that name–I played her for ~10 years and her adopted daughter for another 6.
I only much later found out about the name being Japanese in origin. Back in 2000 I didn’t do any research when I chose this name. Nobody was talking about cultural appropriation–the term had not been coined yet. And also I had no idea that randomly chosen usernames would stick forever. So… I get a lot of Japanese spam on my gmail address as a result and I warn kids that they need to think about usernames they choose for Steam and other places because they will be keeping those for a long long time.
My username is stuck to me so much, that I have accidentally signed into work related stuff with it and confused my colleagues. But we’ve played games together on BGA and now I know all my colleagues usernames as well. I have friends I met online that call my by my username when we talk…
PS: even my partner thought until today I had chosen the name specifically for it being Japanese… 
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I figured it was just a coincidence, but nice to hear the backstory. I wasn’t sure it was even your main username, as I think you have yashimii or something on another site?
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yashimii is from the Wii… where you had the miis and I needed an alternative when yashima was taken.
Yashima has been my main online name since I’ve had online names. You can find me on a variety of services under that name.
I’ve always meant to travel to Japan but my cultural or rather popcultural affinity to the culture and country is probably just average. My partner has more fascination than me certainly. And I am no huge fan of Manga or anime–I’ve read almost no mangas and seen barely a few of the most well-known anime… I was quite surprised to encounter “Operation Yashima” when we watched Evangelion a few years ago.
edit: my earliest encounter with anything Japanese was … when I read some books by Swiss-German-Italian author Federica de Cesco (who is apparently married to a Japanese photographer) who wrote some children’s books about Japanese mythology. This must have been around 5th or 6th grade. I actually still have those books. These are among the only children’s books I kept. Because they were awesome and I loved reading about Amaterasu and Susanoo 
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For years, my usual online name was shen-an-doah, which was a track from the Pitchshifter album that was beside me when I needed a username.
Without the hyphens, it’s a river in Virgina, so I’d occasionally get people thinking I was from there.
I used the same method to get this username.
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My email address includes “ma3a”, which is from the Tron 2 game in 2003. And is a computer reference to Maitreya. No deep reason behind it and now I’ve been using it for 20 years.
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I was registering an account in the old SUSD forum and I need to think of something hipstery
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My firends at the time thought I looked like Norm in the Twix adverts on at the time and I was angry about it.
Thanks 14 year old me
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Maestro is the call sign used by a character in a novel I was reading when I needed a gaming handle, which I kept using when joining a league for the upcoming (at the time) X-Wing vs Tie Fighter game. Since I made my own squadron, I was the CO, thus I started using COMaestro as a username, as Maestro was almost always already taken.
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I used to be Benjemima (as in Puddleduck) - a nickname given to me at uni, but not one I ever really felt a connection to.
When I started saying “benkyouno ben” (Ben as in benkyou) to explain how to pronounce/write my name, that stuck.
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So the AI reading of CO maestro wasn’t far off! Just a different CO acronym, and a different language for maestro…
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I was called Norman throughout secondary school for the same reason. I feel your pain.
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My brother was a competitive Battlefield player (in Vietnam, he and his partner were ranked in the top 10 players worldwide for their class). When he arrived in Canada, he didn’t speak much English, and defaulted to the Argentine “Che” for a lot of stuff (it’s sort of a generic “hey” or “dude”) and therefore his nickname was Che.
Coincidentally, the same reason Ernesto Guevara was known as “Che.” An aside.
Anyway, so when my brother invited me to play in his guild, I picked a nickname that corresponded to Che… Cienfuegos (literally “Hundred fires”), one of Che’s top lieutenants. But nobody knew how to pronounce it, and more importantly my brother kept calling me “Marc” and nobody knew who he was talking about.
So I swapped out the hard-to-pronounce nickname for something that tied to Che but was also, conveniently, very phonetically close to my real name. My brother’s partner gave me an email address with that nickname, and I’ve kinda stuck with it ever since.
Helps that I’m a left-wing socialist, sure. But that’s coincidental to the nickname.
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Ooh, I love a good “why’s your username?”
“pillbox” was the name of my first ‘server’ (I use this term loosely; it was the FreeBSD server I setup using my first PC after I built my second PC in 1995). That server earned the name pillbox by cutting me while working to remove/install hardware in the computer case; it was a play on pillbox (the military fortification) combined with people using the term “box” to refer to a computer/server.
Back then, I spent a good amount of time idling on various IRC channels; from my desktop computer, I would use my primary handle, but over time, I began to prefer irssi in a screen session via SSH; when I first setup irssi on my “pillbox” server, I just chose pillbox not realizing that I would eventually switch to using it full-time instead of mIRC.
Now, several decades later… I sometimes regret the pillbox name because to most people, it implies (illegal?) drugs which is not something I’m into.
Fun fact: “pillbox” is also a type of hat and a formation in Go.
My preferred handle before ‘pillbox’ was ‘3millionCHEESE’ (with the somewhat obligatory follow-up remark, “That’s a lot of cheese!”). On a lot of sites/platforms, usernames are not allowed to begin with a numeral (so there are a few places I used ‘millionCHEESE’, which is really only 1/3 as good). This is why my avatar is generally a wheel of cheese.
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Mine is pretty straightforward. “Tomm” because “Tom” was usually taken and “Thom” felt a bit too Radiohead.
Sometimes “MajorTomm” if it was a wargame (and/or “Tomm” was taken), and it had a nice Bowie connection.
I couldn’t get any variations of that on Twitter/X so I went with the preceding words in Space Oddity.
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I’m using a pretty obvious variant of my names, which I use in many places, and have for 30 years. And god it makes me feel old to be doing something for 30 years…
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