System Update

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve chosen a system name. It’s one that has already come up as an idea in the past, but we dismissed it. The circumstances have changed and it’s come back around to looking like a pretty good idea. Hello from the monorail system!

You’ve probably already noticed the spiffy new domain name here. It felt weird to have a blog specifically about the fact that not everyone in this brain is Holly and host it on https://blog.hollymcfarland.com, so there’s already a benefit to having finally picked something.

We’ve felt weird about this name in the past because I’ve been going by “monorail” online for a decade and a half, and it seemed very much like something that belonged to me. In particular, for a while, Amy was struggling to work out what her own identity was, and collectively using a name she associates with me wouldn’t have helped. But as she’s developed a stronger sense of self, that’s been less of a concern. If anything, it’s actually kind of nice that we all get to share in that history. We do all like each other quite a bit, so now that xi isn’t actively trying to figure out how to separate herself from me, she’s happy to share in something that I’ve been using for a while. And I’m more than happy to use the name for us all, too.

There are a few things here and there that are a little bit awkward about the choice. For example, I’ve been going on “monorail” online for a decade and a half. I have a lot of accounts in different places that use it or similar as a username, some of which are explicitly mine rather than shared by the system. For example, our fedi usernames are “monorail”, “Amy” and “decamark”, which seems kind of weird now that one of those is a name that refers to all of us. But I don’t think that’s too big of a problem. For one, I don’t even think it’s super uncommon for that to happen to new systems anyway. Also, for better or worse, I am pretty solidly our host, which kind of makes me the public-facing alter by default. So sharing a name associated with me in particular won’t cause too many problems, I think.

But the reason we bit this bullet and made it official was that in practice, we were basically already using it anyway. “Holly and Amy” is already sort of a mouthful, and when Deca showed up it was clearly not sustainable to have people say all our names when talking in general. We were joining discord calls and hearing “Oh, hey, it’s the monorails!” enough that we’d already kind of internalized it.

It’s something we already answer to, it’s pretty unique, I like the joke (it’s like a transit system haha), and it’s got some history with us. All in all, I think it’s a pretty good choice.