Ask Erik: Episode Fifty-Two

So, for today's Ask Erik we're pulling back the curtain a little bit and digging both into my own history and the blog's history.

To Erik: Your site is called Erik At The Gates, but the website is "packsjunk?"  What's up with that?

It was pointed out to me not too long ago that "packsjunk" sounds more like I'm doing a blog about Kardashian posteriors than anything nerdy.  Or intelligent.

This, of course, is not the case.

This might be hard for some people out there to believe, but for a long time a lot of my conversations in life came through "Internet Relay Chat" (during the 90s and early 2000s), and various MU* programs (MUSH, MUCK, MOO) which stood for...well, I never really knew what they stood for, but they were online text communications that people used for games, goofing off, and practicing their programming techniques.

Also, during the late 90s, I got caught up in some of the Pokemon craze as it hit America.  I played the original games (yes, both the red and blue ones) and I can proudly say I did, in fact, catch them all.  There was a chat room back in the day where people could discuss how they were doing in the games, and since I was a collector of many various things, I took the code name (by which I mean "chat handle") "Packrat."  

Packrat became a name I used in a lot of places, and even in some sites I signed up for a long time ago, because using my name at the start of an email address or website registry just seemed "boring."  And amazingly enough, it wasn't widely used.  I guess being a "pack rat" had some kind of negative connotation, but I just knew it to mean that I usually always had something to keep my interest and when I got bored of something, I could usually adapt it over to a new hobby.

As time went on, I was less and less able to use the name "Packrat" so I had to try thinking of variations on a theme.  When I started this blog, I struggled to think of something to call it, and in a fit of nostalgia and desperation I thought I'd call it "Packrat's Junkyard."  A place where anything could be dug up and talked about.

However, "Packratsjunkyard" felt long, so I thought I'd narrow it down to "Pack's Junk" for the web address and just keep the full name of the blog for the header.  However, once I decided to really sit down and take this thing seriously, I felt I had to rename it with something a bit more official, and "Erik At The Gates" won out amongst the other names I was thinking.

I still believe "The Everpresent Wordsnatcher" had potential, but I figured most people never read The Phantom Tollbooth.  Maybe I could've gotten away with "From The Mouth Of The Dodecahedron" or "The Terrible Trivium" though.

Anonymity and a dapper sense of style?  Perfect for the Internet.

Anyway, back on topic.  You can't have an apostrophe in a web address, so "Pack's Junk" wound up being "packsjunk" which is why I'm either trying to celebrate having a trunk that Beyonce could describe as "bootylicious" or I'm celebrating other ones.