Friday, December 9, 2011

The Story of Slorch

Ok, so many of you are wondering, "Who is skorch82, and where did he come from?"

Well, aside from the usual answer to a question like this, involving the birds and the bees and some combination of some rather not-PG activity, I will attempt to answer that as best I can.
Who am I, and where did I get my start?

Well, for starters, my username. Skorch82. Skorch was the name of a fire-breathing dragon in a Reese's Peanut Butter cup commercial sometime in the 90's. It was of the variety "How ... eats a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup." In this case, Skorch the fire-breathing dragon. I think at the time, I was maybe 15? It was during a time when the internet was in use in my home, and that didn't happen until a few years after it became rather mainstream in schools and whatnot. I remember it caught my eye because of the umlaut that was over the 'o' in the name Skorch. Skörch, the fire breathing dragon. Has a nice ring to it don't ya think?

Anyways, I decided to stick with that as my username, and I tacked on '82' to the end to make it unique to me. 82 is my birth year, so it made sense. I was never the type to like having 50 different usernames for whatever it was I was doing on the internet, as things like BBS sites and forums were just becoming mainstream, not to mention, online play. I just carried it along.

Years pass. It's 2006. I've had my fair share of things on the internet that have caught my interest in some form or another. A friend of mine tells me to sign up for a Youtube account to comment on some video he made, of which I did, and never thought anything of it. I sat on a YT username (during the time when  you could have gotten unlimited time limits when everyone was limited to 11 minutes), of which I didn't make use of until mid 2008. I had stumbled upon numerous gameplay videos that featured people beating games that I could never finish as a kid, in near no time flat. Speedruns they called these things. While cool, many of them were tool assisted, so it just seemed kinda lame to watch. I started looking for people who would play games all the way through, without cheating, and without warping or any of that stuff. It was fascinating to me. I later stumbled upon people doing just that, while narrating as they did it. Not a fan at first, I stuck with it. I found people I liked to listen to that played the games I liked. I remember a few people I watched back then, but the only name that stuck out at me and still does to this day, was wc10k. He was the one who inspired me to play games and talk over them, because he was just so 'chill' about it. His style made me feel like it was something I could do.
I did some research, I asked around, I trial-and-errored, and here we are. Over numerous iterations of mediocrity improving over and over again, skorch82 was 'born' on YT. Yaaay!!

Now, as I may have mentioned in previous posts and tweets about some of the comments I get, having been on the internet long enough to know that not everyone is as smart as you think they should be. Definitely not. It never did get by me though, how some people, even with it displayed RIGHT ON THE PAGE, how people could misspell my name. I've seen a lot of things... and I can understand a slip of the keyboard, or maybe the occasional autocorrect (afterall, it is 'scorch'), but there were some horrendous butcher-ing's of my name. It was somewhat of a pet-peeve of mine to see this, as it just came across as lazy. Pure laziness as to how you can't at the very least, spell my name right.
I've seen skortch, shorch, scortch, skoch, and even some as far as skortche. C'mon... really?? Ok, so sometimes language translation and whatnot occurs... it was just... I couldn't let it go.

Most of this was happening during my time at Gameanyone. As you all know, I've developed quite a friendship with some of the top members of the site we used to contribute for (that's a whole other ball of wax...), and part of our daily routine, was to sit on skype and just bullshit with each other. Game talk, sports talk, movies, TV, stupid retard behavior, and yes, the comments we all got. Of course, this topic came up. All the time. So much so, that the other guys started noticing it. Seeing as how it was kind've a big deal for me, what's a good friendship without some harmless ball-busting? Well, there you go. Those guys started the trend that would be the intentional butchering of my name. Just to intentionally call attention to something so blatantly incorrect, that it's just funny by definition.
Thus, the story of 'slorch' has reached full circle. No, the title is not a typo. My name on my YT page is not a typo. The formspring, facebook, and twitter names are not typos. It's me taking a liking to the intentional misspelling of the name, because it's cool and it further identifies me in a unique way. Even to this day, you may hear me referred to as 'slorch' and even 'blorch', which I can't say now, is really all that bad.

It sticks.

Blorch out!