The Game of the Name

I get a few weird looks from people when they see "crushthemall". I'd say the majority of looks are looks of confusion.

"Is it crush them all, or crush the mall?"

I reply, "Yes."

When I first came up with the name, I was inspired by what is now one of the oldest Firefox extensions I use, DownloadThemAll. I always read it as something that downloads all of something, but I also had it in the back of my mind that it was also something that downloaded the mall, and it always made me smile and think to myself, "Why would someone want to download a mall? Ridiculous, if you ask me."

So, circa fall 2006, a little after the release of the Xbox 360, I decided that I needed a new moniker for my online exploits on their Xbox Live platform. I hadn't played on Xbox Live for a long time, and my last handle for that was "Pep-X", which was short for Peppermint Extract; the highly flammable, highly minty, all-purpose flavoring agent that we used while making minty shakes and malts at TGI Friday's. It was the focus of my attention waaay back in 2002, when Xbox Live first launched. I decided it would be a cool name, until it was found out that:

 A) it looked like POP-X on the tv screen, so people were calling me that all the time
and B) I barely played Xbox Live games, so that fell to the wayside.

Fast forward back to 2006 and my new name choosing scheme. I ran some potential names past my roommate. I'm sure they were ridiculous, like "Capt. Coolguy" or "TheKiller8833". I included "crushthemall" as an option and he said that out of the bunch, that one was the coolest. I agreed, and crushthemall was born.

If someone asked me the definition of the name, I'd have to tell them that it's the two following things: it looks super awesome when I kill someone in a video game, and it says, "crushthemall has beaten you" (unfortunately, that never happens very much), AND, I'm not a super huge fan of shopping malls (especially those outdoor plaza-type malls where you have to walk outside to get to any of the stores you want to go to. What kind of bullshit is that? It's friggin' Minnesota. The busiest shopping season of the year is in the wintertime. I know...let's make everybody walk outside to shop. Asshole mall planners.

Since then, I've registered a website, started a blog, created tens of online accounts with the name crushthemall and it's pretty much the new name of the day for me. I like the ambiguousness of it and what it implies.

Can't wait for the next alter ego.