I'm not the only cidoku

Posted 2019-05-31.

What I'll share today is curious mostly only to myself. When I search for "cidoku" in various search engines I'm usually greeted with the following message:

Did you mean: Sudoku?

Perhaps that's not so strange; the name I gave myself does look an awful lot like the number game's, and many people have called me out on it. That's what I get for being young at the time and trying to come up with a Japanese sounding name (oh, to be innocent).

What's really strange is what happened when I looked myself up on my search engine of choice at the time of writing this, Startpage. Aside from the usual links to my Youtube page and social media accounts of random Turkish people, I found close to the bottom of the results page a small, obscure imageboard dedicated to Lain and Cyberpunk (as original as ever). On there I found this thread, in which the OP asks how can we make this imageboard more active?. I quickly noticed that the author of the post was me, and it seemed as if I had gone on a posting spree without realising it when I was asleep. I was confused at first, since as far as I'm concerned I only lurk imageboards but don't post in them —and specially not using a name, since the etiquette is to be anonymous—. I also try not to use computers while asleep to avoid similar episodes of somnambulism.

It wouldn't take a very wise man to realize after a minute or two of lurking that the names are randomly picked from a list, and that's very amusing to me; I ignore whether "cidoku" is a common word in schway circles or if one of the big guys in charge of the imageboard knows me. If the former is true then clearly I was witnessing an astoundingly big coincidence, but if the latter is the case, then this is a bigger mystery than previously thought given that I don't know any one of the people managing the site.

The other names in use are pretty standard Cyber, like Observer, Virtual Ghost, and even AzureDiamond, so who knows why they also chose "sudoku but spelled wrong". It will remain a mystery for the time being and perhaps forever. Let's conclude by quoting another post by cidoku:

I mean, everyone being connected to a worldwide computer network all the time every day makes it seem like we're undergoing a transhumanist revolution, but people just use it to perpetuate their meatspace selves and consume meatspace-oriented entertainment. Everyone has hardware lying around, but it's usually in a shiny sterile shell that keeps them safe from all those nasty electronics. Everyone knows that megacorps are monitoring their interactions, but it doesn't matter as long as they can use facebook. The level of acceptance of megacorps as friends is such that the name of a multinational company whose slogan is "don't be evil" is synonymous with finding information. It's like a jungle that noone sees because they have everything they need in their sleek chrome huts.