Kami Is No More
TL;DR: If you know me personally but don't want to use my real name, or you're just the average stranger on the Internet, call me Leo. I mean, call me whatever you want, but that is my preferred alias from now on.
Long story short, I've changed my username several times. I'm not really enthusiastic about sharing my past accounts, because I was very young, and like many young people, I was kinda stupid. I mean, I still am, but hopefully less so.
SanguineChameleon is the one I'm currently stuck with. I can't really unstuck myself from it, since most of my identity is irrevocably attached to it (competitive programming, Project Euler, all that jazz). It'd be unrealistic to try to start all over again.
Do I regret it? Nah. It's a pretty good username. I came up with it when I was 14. I could've done much worse.
Since my full username was a bit of a mouthful, I had to come up with a nickname. Chameleon was too boring, so in a stroke of genius, I came up with a brilliant alternative: Kami Leon.
Hmm. Okay. It's a bit cringe. But it's been my nickname for a pretty long time now, and people genuinely do use it.
Although, more accurately, people mostly just call me Kami. My full name is Kami Leon.
…Wait. No it's not. Kami Leon is not my full name. My full name is my real name.
Hold on, what is my real name anyway? I've never mentioned it once on this website.
Well, I guess I can fix that easily.
My real name is Nguyen Ngoc Dang Khoa.
There you go. It's the first (and probably last) time you'll see it here.
So why did I have to come up with a nickname? Maybe when I was younger, privacy concerns were a thing. But now, if you just look up SanguineChameleon, you'll find a bunch of my personal info. It's not really a secret.
Am I okay with this? Meh, yeah, why not. My clumsy ass can't hide anything even if I tried, so it's not that big of a deal.
Besides, I like being known as… whatever I'm currently being known for, I guess. My online and IRL identities are so intertwined at this point that it's too late to do any sort of damage control.
I'd say the main reason I still use a nickname is…. I mean, just look at my real name. Can you honestly tell me you can read it correctly first try if you don't know Vietnamese? Even if you shortened it to just Khoa, you probably still wouldn't be able to pronounce the kh sound (it's a voiceless velar fricative, by the way) without approximating it. It's not worth giving people a headache over this.
That being said, I feel like I've been misusing the nickname for a while now. For example, Kami Leon has been the name on my personal email account since its creation (around the same time I came up with the username). It's also what I default to on most messaging apps.
Now that's fine, until classmates and companies (you know, stuff in the real world) try to contact you, and they genuinely think you've legally changed your name to Kami Leon.
I guess you could argue that I should have a separate account, like a work email. And I do, I do. But I wanna prevent any misunderstandings from happening. Well, any further misunderstandings, since some have already happened. Whoops.
So yeah, I've been gradually updating everything. Sites like Gmail and Telegram let you set a display name, so I just set those directly as my username. Any site that requires a full name, I use my real name. I used to actively avoid putting my real name next to my username, but I don't really mind anymore.
Okay, exposition over. Let me get to the main point.
I will no longer be using Kami Leon as a nickname.
This decision has been building up for a while, and honestly it's long overdue at this point. I finally updated to Windows 11 today (after being incessantly "encouraged" by Microsoft and my uni), so maybe I felt inspired.
Why? I can think of several reasons, but all of them are basically some flavor of "I don't like it anymore":
- Kami has Japanese origins. As far as I can tell (from a quick Google check), it refers to the divine spirits of the Shinto religion. Maybe 14-year-old me would think it'd be cool to be called a god, but it's pretty unlikely someone in Japan would actually name their child Kami. And as someone who is not religious in any way, this just seems like bad taste now.
- How do you pronounce Kami anyway? With an /æ/ (cam-mee) or an /a/ (kah-mee)? I have an "American" accent, so I'd usually go for the first one. I don't think that's ideal. But for some reason, the second one doesn't sound right either.
- Actually, I feel like Kami doesn't even roll off the tongue that well.
- Neither does Leon, to be honest. Lee-awn. Those two syllables feel like they clash. No offense to anyone named Leon, promise.
- That's not even the only pronunciation of Leon, by the way. The whole name is a confusing mess.
- And last but not least, it's just a lame pun.
Now let me introduce you to my new nickname.
It's Leo.
That's it. No last name. Just Leo.
Do you like it? No? Well, too bad, because I do.
I think this is a pretty natural alternative. I mean, the reason I even picked Kami Leon in the first place was that it was based on Chameleon. And, well, Leo is literally contained within Chameleon.
Not Leon, mind you. Leo. It's Leo.
I like it. It sounds nice.
Okay, sooo… I'm Leo, I guess. Now what?
Well, after this post is finalized and published, I'll send it to people I know who don't already call me by my IRL name. If you're one of those people and you're reading this right now, thanks! You're a real one.
Will I make a big, life-changing announcement somewhere? Nah, not really. I don't engage in social media that much anyway. I'll just quietly remove traces of Kami Leon I see floating around online, and politely correct anyone who hasn't gotten the memo.
Let me be clear: I'm not trying to erase the past. There are things that are more or less permanent. Like, kami is a substring of my personal email and a subsequence of my master password (please don't try to brute-force it).
I like SanguineChameleon. I still use the profile picture I made back then. Those things are part of who I am.
…However, the nickname Kami Leon is pretty lame. I think I spent maybe 30 seconds to come up with it. And, okay, Leo might've also taken the same amount of time, but it's something I actually like instead of a half-assed attempt of being clever.
This will most likely be the last time I mention Kami Leon, unless I slip up out of habit. But I'm not exactly killing it off. I don't like thinking about my past selves that way. It's kind of morbid.
Instead, you can think of this as a rebranding.
I can't change the past, but I can definitely change the future.
And, well… now feels like a better time than ever, don't you think?
– Leo