Monday, July 17, 2006
The Origins of ly4444
Many people often wonder how the heck did I come to begin using 'ly4444', especially when my name, Yin Zhen Yao, is unique enough to be incorporated in e-mail addresses. In order to save the effort of having to repeat a long story (or truncate said long story into a summarised mess) hundreds of times, I am going to set the record straight by explaining the origins in this here blog... Both long and short versions included!LONG VERSION (for short one scroll further down):
A long, long time ago, back in 2000, I used the nickname LANSIMAN!!! (this name also deserves a story of its own...) in CounterStrike games at the local cybercafe. Eventually, I decided that LANSIMAN!!! sounded too kiddie and inappropriate for CounterStrike, so I came up with another name: 4444_UNLUCKY. The reason for the four '4's? Because they sounded like 'die' in many oriental languages and dialects, Chinese included. The 'UNLUCKY' there represented my (lack of) skill in the game back then; whenever I lost, I could jokingly blame it on luck.
From CounterStrike, I moved on to web-based online games. In one of them, I was required to produce a 6-lettered codename for the character I was playing. Thus, after the compulsory "4444", I put the letters "ly" that represented my English name (which did not appear in my birth certificate), Louie Yin (my parents chose "Louie" after the 1970s Hong Kong singer and actor Louie Castro aka Ka Si Lok).
Then again, 4444ly didn't look nice, so I changed it to ly4444 instead, and have been using it since 2001.
So there! The real story is actually slightly longer than that, but too much detail will most definitely bore you.
SHORT VERSION:
The four '4's are supposed to mean "diediediedie" in Chinese; I used to play a lot of online games. ly, on the other hand, is because my name is Louie (only my parents, relatives, and certain friends call me this, as it isn't in my birth certificate) Yin.
Now you know!
