(-Death)rant.net

First: I added 15 links to other blogs in my blogroll. All of those blogs are good and interesting. Of course, I don’t necessarily agree with everything that can be found on those blogs, but they are really thoght-provoking in any case.

Second: Recently I acquired the domain radivis.com and I have used it to create two easy to remember e-mail addresses:

1. radivis@radivis.com: Standard e-mail address, which I usually check once a day.
2. mobile@radivis.com: Priority e-mail address. When I get a mail to that address, I get notified about it on my mobile (except it’s in “sleeping mode” or switched off (very rarely), of course). This is the address of choice if you really need a quick response from me.

Third: So, yeah, I’m in the process of changing my internet nickname from Metafire (Horsley) to (Joyful) RadiVis (omega). Every 4 to 6 years I seem to feel the need to change my internet handle. Partially because I want a visible expression of my subjectively experienced personal progress.

In part, the name Metafire was inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote

Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können.

(“One must have a chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.“)
There are also some more great quotes from Nietzsche’s famous work Also Sprach Zarathustra / Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The idea behind the name Metafire was that it’s some special imaginary kind of fire that uses regular fire as food and burns it down in the process. In fact, the deeper meaning is that “Metafire” is an allegory for rationality using emotions and passion as its source of energy and effectiveness. What’s the connection to the Nietzsche quote? Emotions are the chaos that can give rise to creative (!) rationality!

Although “Metafire” is a really cool nick, I felt that it doesn’t really fit me well. In a brainstorming session (on 2010-12-23, Thursday) in which I tried to create/imagine/visualize an ideal version of myself, I compressed all the aspects I came up with more and more until I had distilled eight core aspects:

• Achiever
• Emotional Balance
• Mentor
• Seeking Alliances
• Unique
• Visionary
• Warrior
• Worldsaver

Remember: Those are attributes of my ideal self, not really a truthful representation of my current real self. Then I went on to combine

• “Emotional Balance”, “Mentor” and “Seeking Alliances” to “Joyful“
• “Achiever”, “Unique” and “Warrior” to “Radical“
• “Visionary” and “Worldsaver” to “Visionary“

Yeah, there’s some loss due to this compression, but I think there’s enough information left. Finally, I made up the nick RadiVis as shorthand for Radical Visionary, because it’s the most expressive abbreviation I could come up with. Important criteria for the nick were that the according .com domain was still free and that it sounded acceptable (I didn’t like the sound of “fire” in “Metafire” too much and I don’t own the domain metafire.com).

At Google Mail I had the problem that the name “radivis” already was taken and I didn’t want to use my prefix Joyful, so I just came up with an interesting suffix. There’s the sci-fi world of Da Vinci Omega, which I have started to construct on Google Wave. I just thought the Omega there is cool, so I could also use it for my own nickname. Omega is an allusion to the Omega Point, as well as to omega, an infinite ordinal number (the Greek letter omega looks similar to the symbol for infinity).

What also may be of interest is my current Twitter profile:

Radically Visionary Singularity Horse, utilitarian, modal realist, animal rights vegan, Singularity related sci-fi writer, math&physics student

Infinite bliss!