B1C24

Name

I hate naming. I really, really, really hate it.

This is why I'm on the third revision of the book and I still don't have last names for any of the researchers (except Robbie Striver/Barnes, I guess). I don't even have a last name for Road. If I get my shit together by the next (and final 🤞) round of revisions, I'll have some last names for them; otherwise, I'll come up with some worldbuilding reason for why no one in my AI mid-topia has last names.

Edit from the future: I'm leaning towards redacting the last names.

Unfortunately, things are not so flexible when it comes to me. In our world, everyone has names, and I don't have the worldbuilding power to change this, so I need to come up with a first and last name.

I want to write under a pen name, because (1) I like having the option to be anonymous and (2) I want some compartmentalization between my IRL self and my writer self. In my ideal world, my pen name would just be " " but we live in a society, and that seems kinda rude to everyone else, so I'm going to brainstorm some names here.

I asked Claude to generate some names with "mid" as inspiration:

Names with subtle "middle" connotations:
- Alex Threshold
- Jordan Equinox
- Quinn Horizon
- Taylor Meridian
- Casey Crossroads
- Drew Balance
- Nova Dawn

I like some of these as character names (e.g., Quinn Horizon) but I'm afraid that if someone tried to refer to me by any of these, I'd simply collapse of embarrassment. How about something less cringe-inducing? Initials seem promising.

Names with the "average/mediocre" concept:
- B. Below
- C. Plus Writer
- Al Most-There
- Medi O'Carr
- A. Verridge

Okay! I'm kinda liking A. Verridge. Let's lean more into initials:

Three-letter options:
- MID (the most direct reference)
- AVG (for "average")
- MEH
- JOK (Just OK)
- PAR (as in "par for the course")

It's not on the list, but I also like "JK [something]" as in "just kidding [something]" because it also sort of ties into the book. Maybe "JK Smith" as in "jokesmith"?

"Rain" is a loose anagram of my real name, and I also like it because it links to "Road" (my detective) and "River" (a character from Slow Horses, a series I love, whose name was the inspiration for Road's).

How about

  • Rain Parre – Rain "PAR"
  • Rain Smith – leaning into how anonymous this sounds
  • Rain – not sure I have the personality pull off a mononame
  • Rain Fell – lol
  • Rain Verridge – hmm... maybe something to this?
  • Rain Oliver – Agatha Christie's self-parody novelist is called Ariadne Oliver
  • Rain Jerson – Ariadne Oliver's detective is Sven Hjerson

I like Rain Oliver, and I don't want to keep thinking about this, so let's lock it in.

For the record, this process took 45 minutes. I'm sure I could keep going to optimize the name, but I've had enough so I'm stopping here.

Update from a few days later: Rain Oliver is growing on me. It has a "cellar door" quality, where cellar door is one of the most pleasant sounding phrases in English. I looked up the Wikipedia article for cellar door and came across a list of criteria that pleasant sounding phrases have:

  • Three or more syllables (e.g., goss·a·mer and mel·o·dy)
    • âś… yup, we've got four with Rain-O-li-ver
  • Stress on the first syllable (e.g., gĂłssamer and mĂ©lody)
    • âś… yup, especially if you say it like "ray-noliver"
  • /l/ is the most common consonant phoneme, followed by /m, s, n, r, k, t, d/, then a huge drop-off before other consonants (e.g., luminous contains the first four)
    • âś… yup, we've got an L, N, and R
    • the only consonant that's in the name but not in the above list is V, but 3/4 being on the list ain't bad
  • Short vowels (e.g., the schwa, followed in order by the vowels in lid, led, and lad) are favored over long vowels and diphthongs (e.g., as in lied, load, loud)
    • ⚠️ "rain" has a long vowel (or diphthong? not sure) but the other vowels are short
  • Three or more manners of articulation (with approximant consonants the most common, followed by stop consonants, and so on)
    • âś… not sure what this means but Claude says yes

Meaning

This book presents one story about what a future with AI could look like. Therefore, I must add a disclaimer: I make no claims about how likely such a future is. I picked this future because it would be fun to write about, not because it is likely or unlikely.

In particular, I think it is fun to write about emotional upheaval in a world where all physical needs and wants have been fulfilled. For example, Crystal asks at the end of this chapter:

You say paradise, but how am I supposed to prepare my kids for hundreds of years of this?

I think the answer to this is to do hobbies and be happy. If I were lucky enough to end up in my own book, I would do this and be very un-conflicted about this. I know ~none of my characters really represent this point of view, because they all have to be slightly kooky to be interesting characters, but they're wrong.