124 réponses à ce sujet

[I SOLD MY SOUL TO BIOWARE]

It's a fish. 

[Jeremiah12LGeek]

It's a fish. 

 

It's true. I Googled it!

[bEVEsthda]

Wait, YOUR A GURL?

I genuinely thought you were a dude.

 

That's great. Please continue.

I just meant that the capitalization of EVE could be taken to represent a female name. It does not. It's a memento from EVE-online, the game.

[Dermain]

Wait, YOUR A GURL?

 

This is a good example of how two people can read the same sentence and come away with an entirely different meaning...

 

Also, way to be creepy EA... 

[RZIBARA]

My Last name

[Ren Roche]

I like the name Ren. Took Roche from my favorite Witcher 2 character - Vernon Roche. 

[MegaIllusiveMan]

I wanted to pick IlusiveMan for my YT Channel waaaaaay back, and it was taken already. Then, decided to go with MegaIllusiveMan. Been using it ever since.

 

Not too original, I know

[Killdren88]

Is your name a concatenation of kill and children?

I get that a lot. But no.

[The Valiant Misanthropist]

2 years ago, I was in a dark shitty place. I woke up every day wondering if I would be dead by the end of it. I was sick and I was alone, and felt abandoned by everyone I cared about. I wanted to die I had almost died a few times due to being really sick(which was ****** with My head) and had tried to kill Myself a few times, I hated everything, Myself and everyone and wanted to see the world just burn away. I was so ****** angry about everything, and wondering what the **** I did to deserve all the pain. Events on BSN were the catalyst to it it all. So I had deleted My old account with the intent of never returning. But then I remembered BioWare's DRM system and needed a BSN account. So I made one. There was a song I had been listening to a lot, and I just felt it fit as a name..

It was getting better, so I thought, but I'm kind of back in a shitty place again, though I'm more hopeless and suicidal then angry.

I've been wanting to change it, but I have no idea what I should change it to.

[HowlingSiren]

My RL name is Nina. A boyfriend once commented that it sounded like a police or ambulance siren: neeenaaaa neeeenaaa neeenaaa. I had to agree. And I like that siren has two meanings, particularly as I am also very fond of scuba diving and the ocean. So it just fit in more ways that one. 

[Reorte]

Planet in Elite (see logo), always a useful source when I'm short of a username. Still exists in Elite: Dangerous too.

[Obadiah]

A sidekick character of a superhero on an Anamaniacs cartoon that I saw... only once.

[FNX Finest]

That's great. Please continue.

I just meant that the capitalization of EVE could be taken to represent a female name. It does not. It's a memento from EVE-online, the game.

 

Guy

In

Real

Life

[Lady Mortho]

Goddess, because I rule with divine power and Mortho because I stole it from a friend on clone war adventures! 

[SlottsMachine]

This is a good example of how two people can read the same sentence and come away with an entirely different meaning...

 

Also, way to be creepy EA... 

 

Yeah, what I got out of it is that "EA the Ruiner" sounds like a badass name. *maybe I've been playing too much Shadow of Mordor*

[A Crusty Knight Of Colour]

I was already a longtime EA-hater. 

 

Wait, YOUR A GURL?

 

Did lol.

[Aimi]

Okay, so my explanation has lots of words and history so I'm going to spoiler it but you should read it anyway because it would make me happy and also it's EDUTAINMENT or something.

Spoiler

Eirene is a Greek word that means "peace".

The ancient Greeks had a goddess Eirênê, one of the Horai, whose presided over both peace in general and also the season of spring (eiar). Her sisters were Eunomia ("good order") and Dike (one of the many many representations of "justice") At Rome, there was a similar goddess named Pax. Eirene was usually depicted carrying a cornucopia and either an olive branch or the staff of Hermes. She also sometimes carried the god of wealth, Ploutos, in her hands, in the form of an infant. According to Pausanias' Description of Greece, the first person to depict Eirene like this was Kephisodotos "the Elder", a sculptor and relation of Praxiteles. A marble statue of Eirene, supposedly after the style of Kephisodotos - with Eirene holding baby Ploutos - is in the München Glyptothek. I saw it when I was a girl and I thought it was pretty cool.

I also think it's ironic (eironic?), because one of my academic specialties is military history.

Eirene was, and is, also a Greek personal name.

Probably the most famous woman from Greek history with the name was Eirene Sarantapechaina, or Eirene of Athens, who is the only woman to have ever been sole ruler of the Roman Empire. She married Emperor Leōn IV and had his son, and when Leōn died she managed to take control of her child's regency council. She ran the show reasonably effectively for years, crushing all of her internal opponents and keeping her son away from the levers of power. Early on, she met external military challenges with skill and efficiency, while in internal affairs she stage-managed the Second Council of Nikaia, which ended the first iconoclasm and basically defined the modern Orthodox church. And as a bulwark of her reign, she created an effective and efficient bureaucracy to shield her from criticism of not living up to the image of a proper Roman military dictator: a new kind of politics and symbolism for a new kind of ruler. After Eirene's internal enemies finally managed to convince her son to drop the regency and assert himself (well into his twenties!), he bungled the job so badly that she managed to ride a wave of dissension back to power, leading a coup to oust the erstwhile Emperor and take sole power herself.

Her reign as Empress wasn't quite as successful as her regency, but the mere fact that it happened at all was what was remarkable. Dogs talking and all that. The entire Roman imperial edifice was geared around an Emperor-as-military-dictator. That's where the title Imperator came from, along with all the rituals that had survived eight centuries from Octavianvs on down: raising a new Emperor on soldiers' shields, military donative bonuses upon accession, style of dress, language of command, and so on. By comparison, while women in the Roman and Byzantine paradigm were not exactly excluded from being shown in a military setting, it was never in the same way. An Emperor went out and conquered enemies; a woman, if she were involved in war, was only ever viewed as a protector, participating in the defense of, say, a city under siege. Even something as seemingly minor as an arrival ritual for the ruler worked entirely differently for a woman. And this was all indicative of the overall mindset among Roman and Byzantine subjects: it was fine, even expected, for a woman to wield real power behind the throne, and virtually unthinkable for her to do it in her own right.

But she did. And she did it without resorting to stupid devices like referring to herself as an "Emperor" in official documents (no matter what Wikipedia says...there's a longer discussion about that, but whatever). She even managed to orchestrate military campaigns a few times, and reasonably successful ones they were. By the time of her sole rule, though, she was older, and more tired, and her political skills were clearly waning. The mistakes mounted, and her usual allies either got less competent or less reliable. She spent five rocky years at the helm before yielding to a member of her own bureaucracy in retiring to a convent.

She was, unquestionably, an awful human being. Those brilliant political maneuvers resulted in a fair amount of death in the cutthroat world of Byzantine court intrigue. She even had her own son blinded so he couldn't be used as a talisman for another coup attempt, putting her in the running for "worst mother of all time". Eirene was in no way a role model, and I'm genuinely happy that I have very little in common with her. But, y'know, she was also an incredibly important, and undeniably interesting, historical figure.

For the longest time when I was an undergrad I wanted to do my diss on her. There are a lot of pejoratives thrown at people who do gendered history in the academy, especially people who call themselves "feminists" who basically just do biographies of famous ladies from the aristocracy. All too often, those end up being hagiographies with very little claim to "feminism" at all, except boilerplate comments about how difficult these famous ladies had it in comparison to men. (The ultimate example of this is Elizabeth I of England, who might have one of the most obnoxious fan clubs in all of academia.)

Eirene...well, she was of a piece with those histories, sort of. But on the flip side, you could also do a quite profitable look at the mechanics of gendered power on an institutional level in Roman life: how and why "empress" was usually defined differently than "emperor", and how that tied in to the overall structure of Roman court politics. And unlike navel-gazing French countesses, Eirene as Empress was a crucial figure in the lives of her subjects; her Council of Nikaia and the way she resolved the first iconoclasm controversy had a direct effect on all the churchgoers in the Byzantine Empire. Which was most of the people in the Empire.

And, in fact, you could say that Eirene and her allies basically created the modern Orthodox rituals of icon veneration, which didn't really exist beforehand. Eastern Orthodoxy's chief distinction from the rest of Christianity rests on two things: firstly, icon veneration, and secondly, the hesychasm-to-theosis/ousia-energeia-distinction theological knot. They still do that stuff in Russia and the Balkans. So, Eirene's Nikaia council? Kind of a big deal.

But then my professors were like "lol [real name] that's silly, there's no market for medievalism". Which was true. So I went modern. I don't regret it, but I still think Eirene is super interesting.

Other Eirenes are sometimes cool I guess. Like Irene Adler from the Sherlock Holmes stories. I guess she was okay. And Irene Cara sang that song from Flashdance. But the goddess and the empress are the ones was thinking of.

[ObserverStatus]

In 1993 I came to own an abandoned oil rig about 65 miles off the coast of Tripoli via adverse possession. I declared the platform and the surrounding waters to be the sovereign state of Patriot Platform. From there I made enough money to get by thanks to the ad revenue from my pirate television station. I used to have a pretty sweet thing going there until people got desperate enough to start fishing on my territory during the Arab Spring uprisings. Bastards were stealing the fish right off my long lines. In 2012 I applied for Patriot Platform to join the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in order to get someone to help me kick out the refugees, but they only granted me ObserverStatus.

[BroBear Berbil]

It's a creature from Star Wars, and the namesake of a Huttball team in SWTOR. I liked how it sounds and I just needed a username to replace the one I'd been using since I was 13.