Naming things is hard. Categorizing things, which can be thought of as a form of naming things, is also hard. Nonetheless, this is my chosen vocation, so I expect to spend the rest of my life attempting to name and categorize things. A caricatured perspective on this (say, if you were writing it into a tv show where it merely has to seem plausible, but doesn’t actually have to be load-bearing) would typically involve bold, bombastic names for things. And occasionally grandiose choices actually are the best ones. But in practice, most of the time, good names have a slightly mundane quality about them. Once you’ve come up with them, they seem like they were always there.

I’m currently looking at my macbook’s Notes app, which is one of several receptacles that I dump notes into. It has a total of 14 folders, including the default one titled “Notes”, and then it also has “notes2”, “shortnotes”, and several others.

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StarCraft as a name doesn’t make sense by itself. You’re not crafting stars. It only makes sense in relation to its predecessor, WarCraft. StarCraft is really WarCraft in space. A lot of language is like this. And the original sources of things are often forgotten. And not just language. Practically everything comes from a lineage that’s often misunderstood.