31754
Oct 15, 2024
TL;DR, "pc" is short for my former name "procrarast," and 31754 is a cipher of the word "caged." I made this name in my edgy cryptic teenager phase.
If you want some bonus lore, read ahead!
Procrarast
When I first started using the Internet as a teenager in 2015, I'd go by a bunch of aliases based upon my initials. My brother would do the same at the time, and I just copied him like I always did because I thought he was so cool. None of those aliases ever stuck though since they I wasn't yet tied to a centralized community or social media service. However, I would soon experience a change when I needed an email for whatever I was doing at the time. I can't even remember what it was, I think it was some I'm-not-a-robot tests or something, but I know I needed to recieve email codes.
I used something called throwawaymail because I didn't yet know how to create an actual email account. Kinda strange, isn't it, that something like this is easier to use than any dedicated personal email service? Anyways, I generated an email on the throwawaymail website, and the random address it gave back to me was called "procrasast@throwam.me." And I used it for absolutely everything. I felt some real power and agency in having an email address I could recieve messages with. I think I used it for around two months before it reset, at which point I'd lost access to my email forever. Whatever I signed up for on the family computer was now gone. I was really upset since I kinda grew attached to using it. It wasn't permanent, but it was the first sense of ownership I had on the Internet.
You might have come to notice that "procrarast" is different from the generated "procrasast." I actually forgot the name at some point(because it's so hard to spell) and did my best to reconstruct it when I finally created my gmail account under the "procrarast" name. However, by the time my browser's autofill reminded me of the "procrasast" that once was, it had already been too late; I'd already somehow established my presence on YouTube under that name, complete with misheard lyric video edits, YTP, comedy edits of some chef guy making food, some pretty offensive edits of children's shows, and, most importantly, edits of some Tetris tournaments I'd enjoyed.
And then puberty happened, and my identity was doomed to be influenced by my raging hormones.
pc31754
Just prepare yourself, 'cause this story's gonna go off the rails a bit.
It was at this time that I'd started feeling low self worth if it weren't for making quality work. My YouTube bio still remains the same from when I made it at this time: "you don't matter, the quality of your posts do." A relatively harmless philosophy as it's so common in capitalist society, but it manifested in being hypercritical of myself and my work, decreasing my production and ironically worsening my work.
I also became really ashamed of everything I'd made before I became hypercritical. I deleted a vast majority of my videos off the platform, including my "Boom Tetris for Jeff" video, and I wanted to distance myself from what the channel once was, prompting a change of face.
I wanted a cryptic name because I wanted my online presence to be as impersonal as possible, so as to allow for the content of my work to be what influences others' perception of me. If it were just numbers and letters, I thought, nobody could make an assumption as to who I was or what I was like.
I went to a Scrabble word-finder website to see what the longest words containing only letters 'a' through 'i'. The thought behind this was that I could use numbers 1 through 9 to each match a letter, where a = 1, b = 2, c = 3, and so on. I hadn't thought to include zero (I hadn't learned Java array indexes yet), but that's fine. I ended up with "caged," 'cause it sounded just edgy enough. c = 3, a = 1, g = 7, e = 5, d = 4. 31754.
I then stuck "pc" at the beginning of it, as I thought to shorten "procrarast."