Lindens! Unlock the mystery of SL!

Everyone comes up with questions they want to know.. like the story of the birds on the former webpage and where sims (used to) get their names (alleys in San Francisco if you didnt know).

Well. I want to know (actually a few people want to know and *made* me post and virtual knifepoint) where do the last names come from? Do you guys throw darts at the phonebook? Are there monkeys in a room and thats what they type? Please. Inquiring minds want to know.

A brief etymology of some of the more interesting names I recognized:

1. Fairlight ("Der Lugen Pilsener," German crack/demo group from the glory days of the C64, I was THIS CLOSE to chosing this as my last name)
   
2. Kothari (Koth, from Bab5)
   
3. Valen (Also from Bab5, chose it because it makes my SL name closer to my full nickname)
   
4. Escher (MC Escher, drew some crazy cool stuff)
   
5. Fats (Fats Domino, musician from the '50s)
   
6. Femto (like a trillionth, only smaller I think)
   
7. Greenacre (Green Acres is the place to be, folks are closer there genetically)
   
8. Groshomme (big man)
   
9. Kato (Kato Caelin, OJ's stoner friend)
   
10. Hanks (Tom Hanks)
    
11. Monde (A tout le monde... it means "world"
    
12. Pasteur (French guy who figured out how to make cow's milk safe to drink)
    
13. Protagonist ("good guy" in a story)
    
14. Rand (South African currency, Dutch name, add an 's' to the end and you get one cool guy, augahglhaglhaglh)
    
15. Roark (Mickey Roark, I don't know anything about sports)
    
16. Roentgen (measure of radioactivity)
    
17. Romulus (brother of Remus, founder of the Roman empire; or the home planet of the Romulans in Star Trek)
    

Fairlight ("Der Lugen Pilsener," German crack/demo group from the glory days of the C64, I was THIS CLOSE to chosing this as my last name)

Ahhhh omg memories! rofl I am not the only one to remember shows your age too


Cotton ~ A nice soft love to touch little fur ball but damn its seedy rofl!

Cotton ~ Synonyms BABY, cater (to), cocker, coddle, cosset, humor, indulge, mollycoddle, pamper, spoil
2
Synonyms FAWN, apple-polish, bootlick, ||brownnose, cower, cringe, grovel, honey (up), kowtow, toady


Cotton ~ see avatar for a cotton picken good time

I know *some* of the names are the lastnames of the devs themself. I won't say who, because I was instructed not to tell his/her lastname.

While technically accurate, I believe there is a more specific reason:

The main character ("good guy" in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is named Hiro Protagonist.

Snow Crash is early cyberpunk, and quite possibly the first book to explore the concept of a virtual world (the Metaverse) that people would jack into in order to get away from their real lives and/or be something that they couldn't be in the real world. Participants could claim parcels of land and build whatever structures they wanted to in the Metaverse. The more talented could also program their creations with artificial intelligence. (Is any of this starting to sound familiar yet?? I thought so.)

For any of you that are hard-core lifers and haven't yet read this book, I highly recommend it. It may very well be the very seed that eventually grew into what we know as SecondLife today.

That book is the basis of the community. The devs of SL read the book as they were planning the structure of SL.

I had suspected something along these lines. I would even suspect that this prompted the entire concept from the beginning.

Rand might also be in reference to Ayn Rand... objectivist philosopher and author of Anthem (the Rush album 2112 is based on it), Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and others.

Well, the character from B5 was "Kosh", and Kothari seems to be a fairly common Hindu (?) name.
Maybe Valen is from B5, but there are other possible sources.

Guillame also means "monkey" in French.

Stone is another word for rock.

Maybe that is too simple....




fen-

There is also Antagonist available too I believe - Protagonist and Antagonist are both literary terms (I think we all got that pounded into our heads in freshman english but it's useless info we forget - like all the names of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence !). The protagonist is the main character of the story, event, who it focuses around and the Antagonist (antagonizes!) is against the Protagonist and does not want, or simply impedes, the protagonist's way of achieving their goal or purpose.

I always thought they were simply trying to get a bunch of names from lots of different cultures, like, Asian names, Jewish Names, European Names, etc

I feel the urge to say that in my school they never once taught us who signed the Declaration of Independence.

"Valen" is from "Bab5?" Gee, never heard of it...

=Sinclair

Jones is.. umm.. well

Nevermind.


I was looking for why and how these names not really where these names come from. This is interesting stuff. Some I knew or assumed and some I didnt. Any of these names could have been picked or any of thouseands more for similar reasons.... How did they come up with THESE names over others? Whats the method?

"Guillaume" is just the French equivalent of "William".

What I'd like to know is, will the current trend of naming sims after colors continue indefinitely, or is there a new set of names that's going to go into rotation? I like the alleyway names; the color names are a bit too prosaic for me.

i agree with sin about the colors, except for blue/grey which strikes me as a little too funny to be an accident
btw : allright chip! finally found a rush fan!!!
(and no im not canadian)

I suspect that "Cellardoor" was included in the list of surnames because that word plays a key role in the movie DONNIE DARKO. At any rate, that movie was why I chose it for my SL name.

not all sims will be named after colors, but all colors will be named after sims. What? Oh sorry, just confusing the issue.

Actually, each landmass of servers makes up a full "rack" (collection of servers). The servers on each rack will have a theme - SF alleys were first (as previously discussed), colors is the rack we're currently in.... who knows what'll be next....

ACK! You answered but not the first question!

What method is used to choose AV SURNAMES for the list?

Starseeker is a um... person who looks for stars... yeah....

Oh well... I like the name anyway... especially sence it's been retired... makes me feel special.

I'm personally waiting for last names like "Dent;" "Prefect;" and, of course, "Beeblebrox" ...oooooh yeah, that'd be snazzy

Valen was a Minbari historical figure in Babylon Five. Add "ce" to the end of the word and you get Valence, which is generally a charge, a force. It has meanings in chemistry and in other fields of study.

When I had to pick my name I really didn't care too much for most of the choices. I think my first question was "Can't I just go by macb rather than having to pick a last name?"

Apparently, I couldn't. So I picked Beach as a compromise. Since I am moving to the beach, not a bad one at that.

I read somewhere that they will be retiring the last names after some number of people have selected them. Thats an interesting concept. That means that whatever scheme they have used to pick names so far will probably have to be changed a few times to keep comming up with new ones. 10 years from now (let's hope) we will all have very unique names that are simply unavailable to those clueless newbies. YAY!