The story of 'Kewbish'.

Introduction

Apparently, I’ve been told, ‘Kewbish’ is not a conventional internet nickname. It doesn’t seem to incorporate my actual name anywhere, does not consist of or include some part of the actual English language, and has an odd collection of strange groups of letters. Why ‘wb’, for example? Is it pronounced ‘qbish’ or ‘quebish’ or ‘queuebish’?

To all these questions, to be honest, I have no answer. I was twelve(ish), and even I can’t understand what I was thinking two years ago. However, I can attempt to recall the very twisted thought processes (I thought myself clever) that led to my chaos of a username.

The Transition

For context, I’d begun a sort of coalition of sorts at school - it had something to do with being a nerd, which was what everyone called me at the time¹. After I attended some website / media camp thing over the summer, I came back to school armed with a weapon no eleven year old should have, for legal and ethical reasons: a Weebly account.

I created a website, and poured all my misguided childish creativity into a secret world and secret website, with layers of hidden hyperlinks and hover effects². I also recall being very excited at somehow ‘hacking’ (transform translates or display blocks were the peak of technical know-how) the Weebly footer to go away, and hiding as much Weebly branding as I could. We were professional eleven year olds.

Anyhow, I remember not wanting to attach my name to anything I did. Something about those scary internet safety videos we all had to watch and answer a worksheet with stuck, evidently. I didn’t really know why I needed a pseudonym, but I did. I think I went with ‘The Nerd’ (yes, stylized and all) for a while.

Fast forward a year or so - I wanted to start making ‘games’. I quote games because they were not games to any degree³. To make said games, I needed a cool name to publish all my amazing, AAA-rated creations under. This begins the dilemma of identity.

The True Meaning of Smekday

Allow us to detour briefly onto an old author I loved - Adam Rex. His worlds were always very nonsensical (kind of like this story), and I remember looking forward to finding any Adam Rex books at the library⁴.

Anyhow, I was halfway along The True Meaning of Smekday when a peculiarly named creature began to feature in the story. It wasn’t actually featured as a character per se, but instead as sort of a side story. These creatures, as you may guess, were the basis of my nick: the koobish. They look something like:

Rather blobby. The koobish itself has a very interesting backstory that Adam Rex himself wrote about on Muddy Colors, so that may be worth a read.

The koobish were a livestock created that were farmed and repeatedly shot into space by the Boovs, the alien race that takes over the planet. A poor little eighth grader befriends one of these Boovs, and among their many misadventures, she’s told the tale of these mysterious koobish.

Changes

This is the part of history that I, as the only person who actually knows the entirety of, will choose to redact slightly. It doesn’t make a big difference at all - I promise.

That being said, I decided that just going by ‘koobish’ was a little weird. First off, I didn’t like the two O’s next to each other, so I changed that to ’ew’. This also had the side effect of making my nick possible to shorten to ‘qbish’ or one of the many variations that have somehow formed today.

If you go far back into my website’s GitHub history, you may see remnants of a rather odd bunny-looking logo. That was my poorly misguided attempt at ‘personal branding’, and at replicating a koobish. It was very difficult to explain these things to people who just wondered what that was, so I always maintained it was just a rabbit.

If you go far back enough, you will also see mentions of an itch.io, which may or may not be related to the hidden history that I’ve redacted, so do with that information what you will⁵.

The End

And here we are - present day Kewbish. Coming up with my own addition to the fine English language has also had the unintended, but not unwanted, effect of having an absolutely clean slate to build a ‘web presence’ from. Before I decided to steal the search term for myself, I didn’t have anyone to battle over, and I highly doubt any other individual will see ‘koobish’ and attempt to twist it into the same thing I have, so that’s safe for now.

A lot of people (actually not very many, but for the sake of the expression) have asked me ‘what is a kewbish?’ and ‘who is kewbish?’⁶. To those people, I still have no answer.

In writing this rather short blog post, I’ve spent far more time looking up pictures of koobish and misspelling ‘Kewbish’ than I’d really have liked, but sometimes, writing about non-tech related things is fun. Perhaps someday I’ll intersperse the dull Vim posts with some personal essays from class, but that is for another day.

Currently

I just finished up a rather annoying PR adding other authentication methods to diveintoht.ml, so I’m currently praying that it doesn’t break. I’m also adding a linking PR soon, so hopefully that will be fun.

It’s also been very fun to watch the Hacktoberfest drama that has unfolded over the last three days (oh boy, hasn’t the last week felt like a year?). I personally don’t really understand the point of adding a ‘repo must have hacktoberfest label or topic for PRs to count’ if said PRs must already be merged or marked as Hacktoberfest-approved, but DO’s trying out something new, I guess. I also don’t really understand why they’re changing the rules now and not maybe a couple days ago, but again, they’re trying to figure things out, which I can give them some credit for. Hopefully, this’ll end up a wake up call for the organizers that it’s not just a PR stunt and has a lot of side effects.