100 Article Posts on [Unnamed Blog]!

Hey, everybody!  We’re having a party here at [John-Michael Gariepy’s Unnamed Blog]!  100 posts, and 13,000+ views!  Oh, and my Klout score just passed 40!  Klout thinks I’m a Networker!  Thanks, Klout!

If I could only invent a name for [Unnamed Blog], though.  I’m supposed to be ‘the creative one’.  But, you know, there’s only so many good names out there.  And I refuse to call my blog something plithy and game-related like “John-Michael’s Critical Hits!”.  Besides, someone else must have that blog name.  Yup.  Found it.

Coming up with a good name for what you’re doing is tough.  Dave and Josh made it look so easy with our old blog Guilt Free Games.  A little alliteration, with a pop music name that simultaneously tells you a lot, and tells you nothing.  Tiiiiiiin Roof! Rusted.  Aah, baby, that’s where it’s at.

Naming yourself isn’t a problem limited only to blogs, of course.  Do you remember a time when you could name your Atari 2600 game ‘Boxing’ or ‘Adventure’?  The music industry is full of names that can’t be used, because someone, once, decided to cut an album under the name “Actual Size“,”Money Back Guarantee” or “Choking Hazard“.  By the way, I didn’t come up with those names by going to a website with a list of weird band names.  I came up with three band names on a theme, then did a Google search for those inevitable band websites.

I love the internet, but damn, sometimes it raises the bar.  There used to be a time when you could name your band ‘The Platters’, ‘The Comets’ or ‘The Crickets’.  There was a time when a band name like ‘Jefferson Airplane’ was really out there.  Now, with the internet, people would give you a high five for snagging such a straightforward name.  In fact, since abstract band names have become the norm, creating purely random album covers has become a fun internet past time.  You know what I’m talking about?  Oh, let’s just make a couple together.  All you need to do is:

1. Go to Wikipedia’s Main Page and hit the “Random Article” button.  That’s the name of the band.
2. Go to The last entry on a random entry page on thequotationspage.com.  Take the last four or five words from that quote.  That will be the title of the album.
3. If this was 2007, I’d direct you to go to Flickr.com… but most of those pictures are protected from deviants like us now.  Mangle.ca, however, creates a list of random images from the internet, and that seems fine.  Take picture number three.  That’s your album art.
4. Go to Lunapic.com and assemble it all using their free online photo editor.

All Right!  Let’s do this thing!

It’s funny how the mind forces associations.  The brain wants to find patterns between words and pictures, and is happy to be lenient.  So what if the final image is of an Arabian horse, and not a pony?  You wouldn’t look at the dragon with a fish on his head and say “Oh, those must be the parents of failure” without some prompt from the ‘album title’, so why is it so hard now to think of them as being anything except ‘the parents of failure’?  Weird.  Despite the fact that Nunca! Nunca is Spanish, (It’s actually a book of poetry by Alejandro Carrion), I didn’t swerve from the formula stated above.  Well, okay… I did refresh images once, but that’s because the image was of a topless woman in a chain mail skirt (and not a very good looking one either.  She was leaning on an exercise bike, which probably didn’t see much use…), and wasn’t safe for work.

I wish I could say that ‘due to the abstract nature of most artistic endeavors today, choosing a name for my blog is a simple endeavor’.  But I don’t want something random clogging up the message, even if I’m a super big fan of creating something from pure random restrictions.  Otherwise, this blog would, right now, be called “John-Michael Gariepy: Be Certain and Be Ridiculous”.  Or, at least that’s what fed back to me when I pushed the ‘random quotation’ button.

So I guess we’ll all have to wait for this blog to have a proper name.  The blog’s clearly got direction with a fair number of board game reviews, a book review series based upon contrasting two different books simultaneously, the start of an analog random dungeon generator, and a log of sporadic DC Adventures.  What does one call that?  I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll figure it out before article number 200.