How it started (Part 2)

The previous post ended up being much bigger than I expected so I decided to split the two stories into different posts. So today's post is all about where the name Rekisu came from (in my opinion it's not as entertaining as the other story).

Rekisu is actually a fairly modern development, which came around only three or four years ago when I started becoming a more active member of the internet. I came up with the name alexnickolias for creating an account online, and that's pretty much what I've used it for. I've never intended for it to be my online name, or a name that people would use to refer to me. Instead whenever I've had to register something or create an account to view something I've always used the name alexnickolias.

So being a computer nerd I spent a lot of time around the internet reading forums and being on IRC channels, however I never really took a part in them. I would always enjoy watching people have conversations and despite my own opinions I would never actually put in. As time went on I started wanting to put in more and more, but what held me back was (yet again) the lack of a good name people could refer to me by.

Around the same time I was introduced into the world of anime fans. I first got into anime at high school, however at that time I only knew of one other person who was into really into anime. Towards the end of my highschool days I stumbled upon some people (who were literally friends of a friend's friend) who were also anime fans. Thus through them I got to learn the good sides and the bad sides of other anime fans.

In this group there was one person in particular who was studying Japanese, and during one particular meet up she decided to work out the Japanese equivalent of our names. The Japanese language actually has a whole alphabet called Katakana, which is used for writing/saying foreign words in Japanese. For example take the English word "cream": in Japanese there are characters for 'ku' ク, 'ri' リ, and 'mu' ム, so 'cream' is written as クリーム, literally 'kuri-mu'.

So on that day I was named レキス or Rekisu, funnily enough this isn't strictly correct (my name having an L and an X in it makes it hard to convert it to Japanese), Rekusu is actually the proper way to to turn Lex into Katakana. By the time I found out I had already gotten used to being called Rekisu and so I decided not to mention anything and just stick with it.

From here on it should be pretty obvious. With Rekisu being my 'second' name I decided to use it as my online name too. It actually works extremely well as an online name, Lex is an uncommon enough name as it is, and Rekisu seems to be even rarer (I think I've only even encountered one situation where the name Rekisu was taken). I use it whenever I expect people online to refer to me by name, so most people probably see it when I'm playing games.

So there you have it, now you know how the names alexnickolias and Rekisu came to be.