Have you ever thought how many every day things have been designed by people with gorilla arms? I mean seriously… you reach into the back of your dryer to pull out that elusive last sock and think to yourself, “geez, I don’t have gorilla arms!” don’t you? Well, I just did!

Ok, so that was a complete non sequitur, but I’m really glad I got that off my chest.

As I was coming up with a title for my blog post today, I got to thinking about how hard it is to come up with really good, really relevant titles to give to blog posts. Sometimes the titles are clever, sometimes they are on topic and sincere, but a lot of times they end up being a tiny bit crazy, in the red herring, non-sequitur kind of way. I’d say the same concept applies to images chosen to accompany posts.

The same thing tends to apply to naming characters for games. The vast number of pun names, offensive names, silly names, derivative names, etc., just illustrates how many other people suffer from the difficulties of coming up with relevant labels for the things with which they identify. A friend of mine goes for the silly names, so he tends to have characters called HelloNurse (for the healers), or Chopsuey (for the DPSers).  (edit: after I posted this, I saw a similar subject of character names from Ash’s Adventures, On What’s In a Name, check it out.)

When I GM tabletop RPGs, I often come up with a sheet full of male and female names so I can pull one off the top and cross if off when my players run into random people. Otherwise, every random NPC ends up being named Bob or Sue. Since I GM a lot of games set in fantasy worlds, that just gets awkward.

I have to hand it to the people who come up with the random names that can be assigned to characters during character creation. They have saved some people endless tears and hours sitting in front of a screen weeping over their inability to come up with a good name. Otherwise, imagine the number of characters named Gorilla Arms we’d all run into.

And so, I leave you with…. Taco Cat…