Blaugust 2023, Day 1: Bajor League Faceball

MY TEETH ARE SHARP, MY TYPERS ARE TAUT, AND MY MUG IS FILLED WITH AN ENERGY DRINK FROM AN EASTERN-EUROPEAN COUNTRY THAT NO LONGER EXISTS, WHOSE CANS BOAST “FIVE CUBES OF ENERGON PER ALIQUOT”, “NOW WITH ANGRIER MOLECULES”, AND “SOLID STATE”. LET’S DO THIS.

Before we begin, I’d like to shout out my pal of many years Jacq over at History Will Say This Was Just A Book Blog, whom I threatened, cajoled, and blackmailed into joining into the festivities.

I Have Returned For Blaugust and You Only Have The Bageler to Blame

That public service announcement done, let’s crack open Blaugust’s shell and see what’s wrigglin’ around in there; there’s an official prompt list available that I’ll be using until and unless I have a reason not to, but y’all know me, I like just a veneer, a wee patina of modification to give things that Bageler Bounce, so I’m gonna roll on the table every day for which prompt to use.

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#25: How did you get the name that you regularly go by online, and what if anything does it mean?

As most people do I’ve got more than one nom d’online; I try to reserve The Bageler for anything actually Bagelerelated, both to have that kind of informational hygiene and separation and also because it’s a dumb name that I both love with all my heart and regretted the moment I registered the domain. Most circles know me as The Major From Bajor, a reference to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s own Kira Nerys, who was a Major in the Maquis guerrilla freedom-fighters of Bajor and the original one-person Antifa. The name format itself comes from a tweet I twoot many years ago that a friend told me they thought about all the time:

AS TO WHEREBY A BODY COMES THE RIGHT TO CALL HIMSELF A BAGELER, for this we can also blame Twitter, and my desire to subvert the professional norms of my then-workplace, and also my inability to notice that autocorrect somehow thought “Vite” was both a word and the word that I wanted:

I…guess maybe I was eating a bagel at the time? And so, much as with America, a joke candidate won and ruined Democracy forever.

As a bonus, allow me to include a list of my embarrassing usernames from bygone eras, the ghosts of accounts past, which aren’t nerdier than naming yourself after a Star Trek character but are a lot more brazen about it:

• Kid_Charlemagne (NeoPets, reference to the Steely Dan song of the same name, not the possibly fictional king ((also a half-reference to Hal on Malcolm In The Middle, who used it for his pirate radio handle)))
• MartinTheWarrior (General use, reference to Brian Jacques’ Redwall novels)
• IceWolf709 (My very first email, courtesy of AOL’s name-generator; I may not have been aware that I had a choice in whether to accept it or not)
• DontTugOnSupermansCape (My second email on another now-defunct platform, reference to my then-favorite Jim Croce song)
• El_Ahrairah (GameInformer’s forums, reference to that brief, miserable period in my life where I thought I’d be able to force my way through Watership Down and before I decided I could just enjoy the religious and linguistic stuff and be kind of peripheral to the book itself)
• OceanOfFeldspar (High-school era AOL Messenger, and I’m not embarrassed of this one because it’s a reference to this guy, whose name is Feldspar and who is the single greatest and most unexpected Christmas gift I ever received from my parents, nearly twenty years ago now. That’s actually really strange; I’ve known this ceramic panther long than I’ve known my wife or any of my longtime friends, and several times longer than the new generation of grandboys who have shaped our lives have been ALIVE. Funny old thing, to be a human on Earth.)

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AND WITH THIS, we conclude the opening ceremonies of Blaugust 2023.
WHO will survive and be named CÆSAR BLAUGUSTUS?
WHAT scandals will erupt when some participants are caught using ILLEGAL BLAUGMENTATIONS?
There’s only one way to find out, so stay tuned!

Be good to yourselves and each other or face my wrath,

–The Bageler

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I don’t know how you do it
You really put me through it
It must be the devil’s work you do