Imaginary places and computer names
My theme for computer names has always been imaginary places.
At some point I'll do a more detailed writeup of my computer-owning history, but way too sleepy tonight. So, just the names (almost all of these have been laptops):
Laputa; Cathay (I know, only quasi-imaginary, but I had just been in an alternate-universe roleplaying game in which Cathay figured prominently); Shadow (from a roleplaying game of my own); Eutopia (I was in a rush when I picked that name); Xanadu; Uqbar. There may've been one or two others I'm forgetting.
Huh—I just noticed they're all five to seven letters long. Not consciously intentional, though I was aiming for shortish.
Anyway, so I just got a new MacBook Pro (13"), and haven't yet decided what to name it.
Some of the current contenders (roughly in order of my preference at the moment) include: paravel; gethen; diaspar; cibola; barsoom; havnor; roke; ansul; tigana; zorna; lorien.
Any other suggestions? It ought to be a place that isn't real; have a relatively short name; have generally positive and/or evocative and/or cool connotations; be semi-obscure (somehow something like narnia seems too prominent); have a name that isn't an English word (though I briefly considered the city-state of Helium, on Barsoom); be a place that I've at least heard of; have a name that sounds euphonious to me; probably other parameters that I'm not consciously aware of.
The nice thing about the name "Laputa" was that it seemed thematically relevant for a laptop in various ways: it moved from place to place; magnetism featured prominently in its operation; it was a site of intellectual discourse. But since then, I haven't come up with others that worked so well thematically. (And given the Spanish phrase, "Laputa" was an unfortunate name in some ways; people made assumptions about what I meant by it.)
It occurs to me that my guest-room iMac is currently named "Guest-Room iMac," so I may as well take this opportunity to name it as well.
