september 29 nyl
As I mentioned yesterday, a friend and I started a little Substack publication called The Rocker Step. It occurred to me shortly after posting about it that some folks might not know what a rocker step is.
The TL;DR is that it's an athletic move that is frequently used in sports including basketball and (American) football. From the Cambridge Dictionary entry:
In sports such as basketball and American football, a step taken by putting one foot in front of the other, putting weight on the back foot, and then springing forward.
The name was my friend Daniel's idea. The original name of the project was Flagrant 3, but we moved off that because it's been used before by other sites and podcasts and a subreddit dedicated to "Discussion about Akaash Singh and his lovely 'wife'" whatever that means. It's actually pretty hard to come up with an original name for a basketball-concerned website. All the good names —— by which I mean the names that refer to basketball words and/or terms, puns on those words and/or terms, and extensions to those words and/or terms —— are taken.
Naming things is hard. Not as hard as making things, but still, hard. You want it to sound right but also feel right, and that's a tricky wicket. Naming things and getting the idea juuuuuust right is so hard, in fact, that way back whenever if I got a passably good idea for a domain name I'd just go buy it that night. Regrettably, this was common praxis for me during that fever dream of a year people were buying .eth domains from the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Unstoppable.
Sometimes I wonder if I think this kind of thing, i.e. the idea that a name has to sound and feel right, is actually a nominative determinism thing? It took forever to come up with Kenny's name in that story I am writing for reasons including but not limited to that my dumb ass haaaaad to decide that all the character names are references to [redacted].
The concept of nominative determinism is never too far from my mind. It's such a weird, compelling idea.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go mourn
🌱 touch the
🌳 grass Lynx
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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