richter

I get a lot of folks asking me about my nickname richter, or probably more often, richtaur. So, here’s the history of my nickname.

Many a year ago, I was reading a video game magazine (I was probably a young teenager), quite possibly Nintendo Power but more likely EGM, because I actually had a subscription to that. Anyway, I saw the name Richter Belmont in the magazine, and for some reason, immediately loved it. For those unfamiliar with the name, he’s a character from one of my favorite video game franchises: Castlevania!

The name Richter in the real-world is probably more obviously associated with the Richter Scale, which is also another very cool reference. Those that know me well know I’m fascinated with natural disasters (tornados, earthquakes, and to a less natural extent, atomic bombs). Less interestingly, richter also means “judge” in German, which is neat (and like a good American, I have German blood in me).

It’s funny how my attachment to the name grew, because at first I thought it was pronounced “rich-tur”. When I found out it was actually pronounced “rick-tur”, I loved it even more! So over the years I plugged “richter” into various video games when they prompted me for a name, and sometimes people would see this and it kind of stuck. When the Internet was born and required handles, this was an obvious choice for me.

One of the problems with the Internet, however, is that it’s too damn popular. Richter is a relatively common name, and almost invariably taken, even by a site or service that’s not that popular. On a somewhat related note, I am known to troll idle in certain IRC chatrooms, where friends of mine will greet me in odd ways. One such derivative of my name was richtaur, which is basically a me-dinosaur (insert artist rendering here). And that’s where richtaur came from.

So, there is the (very verbose, sorry) history of my nickname/handle. I’m very happy to see that I’m the (as of this writing) 5th G result for richter and the 1st for richtaur! Nice! (Note: links removed because I think they killed my ranking.)

(Note: please don’t call me richter or richtaur in person. This is real life, people. I also hate the name Matthew. I understand that friends and relatives will always know and call me by Matt, and that’s fine, but I really prefer co-workers to call me Hack or Hackett. It’s not that I hate the name Matt that much, really, it’s just that I work with 10,000 other Matts. Thanks!)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.