This incredibly long section, which I'm sure you won't mind reading if you have a lot of time to waste, exists for the purpose of informing any curious individual who cares enough to read ten long paragraphs about how I came up with two names. As the saying goes, every name (or nickname) has a story behind it, and after almost two years of writing on xanga, only a handful of people understand how and where these names originated from. One reason why I've refrained myself from writing about this for such a long time is to allow other people to interpret the names for themselves and see what they can make out of them. But where did these names come from? Were they chosen at random? While one person believes that I had chosen them at random after coming home from a party one night, many others insist that there has to be a reason why I chose them. You can consider the rest of this section to be a waste of your time if you don't have a lot of time to waste or aren't interesting in knowing how I came up with the names. Nonetheless, you should immediately grasp the idea that I'm not good at choosing nicknames and never have been.
The first name that I should probably talk about is my username, apreci8_1337hax0r. This name has stirred some controversy in the past and I'm aware that there are people who greatly misunderstand what this name means. Those of you who have been on the internet long enough are probably familiar with the 1337hax0r handle, which is a nickname commonly given to people who are thought to be good with computers. It's not at all a unique handle and, for the most part, is so meaningless that anyone who harbors this nickname isn't actually likely to be good with computers. By taking a look at the layouts that are currently being used on my xanga site and on this angelfire page, one can easily get the idea that I'm not good with computers, and to show that the 1337hax0r handle is not being used to refer to myself, I decided to add the word apreci8 in front of it.
But why did I choose this name? While coming up with possible names for my xanga site, I was hoping to base them on the assumption that anyone who hated my xanga site would never bother themselves to remember the name. Having chosen a name like apreci8_1337hax0r, I knew that most people would only be able to remember one or no parts of the name, so they would either have to bookmark or subscribe to my site. However, these are things that anyone who dislikes my xanga site isn't likely to do. Also, it doesn't make a lot of sense if someone tries to say it in a conversation, so people aren't likely to take that person seriously. But consequently, there have been people who enjoy my xanga site and are unable to remember my name as a result of this.
I also chose this name because there isn't an easy way of assigning an abbreviation to it. The so-called "xanga celebrities" are often affectionately referred to by shortened versions of their usernames. People can give my site the abbreviation of "1337," but 1337 could refer to just about anyone who has that specific set of numbers in their username. The best that people can call me is Orange, but even that is pretty ambiguous.
In a way, the name was inspired and even suggested by friends. Since I'm bad at coming up with nicknames, I figured that anything that another person could come up with would be better than anything that I could come up with. At first, I thought it was fun to see the name on the subscription lists of friends; most of the names on their lists were traditional names associated with most teenagers and mine stood out to break the trend. One would probably think that I chose this crude name on purpose to garner attention from others and persuade them to click on it to see who is silly enough to choose such a weird name. I'm not sure if people actually do that, but I wouldn't be too surprised if some did. Anyway, another decisive factor in choosing the name involved an incident that occured during my freshman year of high school. I was reprimanded for tampering with the computers one day, and although I still don't believe that I'm legally able to discuss what I had done that day, I can assure you that it wasn't anything special. I did gain some notoriety for what I did, but I'm not proud of it because I don't want people to get the impression that I'm good with computers. The 1337hax0r part of the name was further suggested by a person after he had recalled the incident even though it had happened years ago and is not a good reflection of how well I fare with computers today.
Inasmuch as I don't particularly "apreci8" having chosen this name, I honestly don't see it as a crutch or a hinderance in any way. I realize that I can use my name to send an important message to the masses, but I don't know if people will actually listen to me. For one thing, I can use it to send the message that very few people ever get "hacked" and that such threats are either exaggerated by misinformed people or media reporters who are trying to sell a story. I can only think of a few instances on xanga in which a person really did get "hacked," and the perpetrator of the attack is behind bars now. However, I have never heard of any random person who became the target of such an attack. I would think that a person would have to be really crazy if he or she can find anything remotely useful to do with a person's blog site seeing that there are absolutely no gains to be made. After all, who would want to risk the possibility of going to jail for breaking into an ordinary person's account? It's quite obvious that those are well-known are going to be the focus of such attacks, so people who qualify for the Featured Content listing should worry about this more than those who do not.
In other words, you rarely have to worry about being victimized by such people. Very few, if any, users on xanga are capable of doing malicious things to your account, and the best that most people can do is argue over the internet with you in a childish manner. However, xanga isn't as safe as some people make it out to be and there are a few things that you need to look out for. There certainly have been people who have lost their xanga accounts due to the exploitation of weaknesses that exist in xanga's coding and I can attest that there are still people out there who are harnessing malicious scripts to steal sensitive information from other users. Until the xanga staff decides to repairs these coding errors, these scripts will continue to function and innocent people can lose their accounts if they aren't careful. However, this is not actually considered to be hacking, as it's just being perpetrated by an unskilled loser who is taking scripts that he or she didn't design to exploit a known weakness. Even then, such people on xanga are few and far in between. Perhaps it would be helpful to point out that it's against the ethics of a real hacker and that they should rarely the first to be blamed for anything that happens to our accounts.
Speaking of hacker attacks, the thought of preventing myself from being a target of such attacks did influence my decision to choose this name. Unfortunately, the name has actually made me an easy target for internet tough guys who think that I can provide a good challenge for them. Just four months ago, I had a confrontation with a member of one of the most notorious trolling groups on the internet. I suppose that it isn't too good to have a nickname that can attract the attention of miserable loons who have nothing better to do than to cause trouble on the internet. On the other hand, I did learn quite a bit about coding and am somewhat confident that I can stop the same attacks from occuring again in the future. I understand that this is one way how those anti-virus companies are able to write the anti-virus software that have saved our computers in the past.
Oh well, my xanga site is solid proof that you can still get very far by using a silly handle. So that's the story behind apreci8_1337hax0r. If I could, I probably would change the name because it sounds so incoherent and does not reflect the content of my blog. I guess you can say that it's "random" though. Some think that I should just change my username if I dislike it so much, but I don't want to throw away the hard work associated with the name.
The other name that is mentioned on my site is Orange, and surprisingly, this has received more inquiries than my username. I have received many amusing responses regarding the possible origin of this nickname, and one interesting theory proposed to me was by a person who thought that it was a variation of the word "ownage." This honestly did not come to my mind while I was choosing the name, but I can definitely see how somebody could come up with that.
But in truth, there is nothing special about the name Orange. Every so often, I made it a habit to change my name on the left-side module after changing a layout. Since I had an orange layout at the time, I changed my name to Orange and the name eventually stuck to me when so many people began to refer me by that name. Rather than telling every single one of them to stop addressing me by that name every time I updated my site, I figured it'd be easier to just stick with it. However, Orange by itself didn't sound so good, and a problem with that name was that some people actually thought that my real name was Orange. To make it blatantly obvious that it wasn't my name, I added the word Agent in front of it. Then again, there was also a problem with that name since Agent Orange was a chemical that was used to raze trees during the Vietnam war and led people to get cancer as a result of the expulsion of the chemical. Rather than offending the scores of veterans who were affected by it, I decided to add the word Secret in front of the name. It sounded a bit better and it's only fitting because I still have aspirations to become a private investigator in the future. Perhaps I can live up to the name if that ever happens, but until then, I'll just work on getting a degree and see where everything goes from there.
In a way, my site is kind of synonymous to Homer Simpson when he disguised himself as Mr. X and began to write about a bunch of crazy things that people would never think about, such as how a group of people were using flu shots to control people's minds.
As you can see, the name of Orange was more accidental than planned.
