note Aristotle For a long time I didn't post here, because, well, there's not much to say: [Aristotle] is my real first name. Not much of a story, is it? That was my reply to [ybiC]'s idle request in the chatterbox whether everyone present had posted, too. But then it occured to me that it's not exactly a common first name, so the fact might be worth pointing out. And here I am. So now you know. [ Update: you may wonder how that happened to become my first name. First of all, it is not that improbable, being that I am Greek. (I was born and live in Germany, but my parents immigrated here from Greece. I speak both Greek and German fluently, in case you were interested.) In Greek tradition there is a strict system for naming children. The firstborn male gets the father's father's name; the second gets the mother's father's name. Same goes for the females named after the respective grandmothers. (If there are more children, as was often the case in older times, the chain went on to the include the grand uncles and grand aunts.) All that said, I'm the younger of two brothers and the name of my grandfather on mother's side is Aristotle. Note however that with all that said, the name is still uncommon even among Greeks. ] To spice things up a little, I'll mention the name that I used to go by, here and at many other places: [Screamer]. I uniformly dropped that nick for personal reasons a while ago. In order to avoid another similar situation should it ever arise again for whichever reason, I requested to have my account name changed to my real first name here although I assumed another pseudonym elsewhere. My real name is obviously not subject to change. “Screamer” itself is a short form for what I used when I first started my online ventures: “Blue Scream”, indeed a reference to melancholy as may be obvious, and inspired by the nick of the very capable musician of the once superior demo group [http://www.futurecrew.org|Future Crew]: [http://www.modarchive.com/artists/pm/|Purple Motion]. (Sadly, they never produced anything again after their best work ever, but at least they went out with a bang… sigh (Some of the group's guys went on to write the popular [http://gamershq.madonion.com/download/?3dmark2001.shtml|3DMark] benchmark, others are working on [http://www.bitboys.fi/|3D acceleration hardware].)) This was a time when I was mainly into graphics effects written for the PC in assembly language — a fun, if laborous task. How the years change… Meanwhile the [http://www.scene.org|demo scene] is still quite alive, although the mad pace of PC hardware development has changed the face of its coding challenges. Makeshifts last the longest. 110166 110166