Frequently Asked Questions
What is this site anyway?
This site is a web log (blog) that contains my thoughts, ramblings, rants, raves, complaints, gripes, groans, compliments, cheers, and jeers, about whatever happens to strike my fancy. My fancy, at least with regard to things that get my inspired enough (either negatively or positively) to write about them is pretty narrow — mostly, gaming, photography, science, philosophy, and computer/web stuff. It’s basically an online journal of my thoughts, where I can expound in ways that would be too long, or otherwise not permitted, on other sites.
What is a “blog?”
A “blog” is a shorthand term for a “Web Log”, sometimes written all as one word (“weblog”). It’s basically like an online journal, and can otherwise take whatever form the author wants. There are thousands of examples of weblogs here at WordPress… just hike on over to the WordPress home page and start clicking links and you’ll see tons of them. Other sites that hoste web logs are Live Journal and Blogger.
Where does the user name “Chessack” come from?
The name Chessack is one that I commonly use as a login on web forums or as an account name for online games and websites. It isn’t an English word, or obviously derived from any English word, or Latin word, or any other language anyone would recognize, so I get a lot of questions about it. Here is the story of “Chessack” for those who are curious.
Many years ago, a group of friends and I played table-top roleplaying games together. We started out with Dungeons and Dragons, and then moved on to other games. In about 8th grade (now I’m dating myself) we stumbled quite by accident on a boxed roleplaying game called Champions, a game about superheroes and supervillains. My friends and I made up supers and had great battles and wonderful stories. Among our best and most active GameMasters (GMs) was a very good friend of mine named Rob. As a GM, Rob was known for his unusual and powerful villains, and for very tough battles (the villains of most other GMs were pushovers by comparison). Rob had a great sense for the dramatic, and liked to make up villain leaders (“master villains”) who appeared over and over but whom we were not powerful enough to beat until the very end. Rob was good at everything… but had very unusual taste in villain names. His names were often either obvious (three different characters were called “Ninja,” “The Ninja,” and “Ninja Master”) or they were nonsense words (“Atlacore” and “Groundare” come to mind). Among the villains, the most powerful, and to us as players annoying, was one with just such a nonsense word for a name: Chessack. What was special about Chessack, besides him being one of the most powerful master villains we ever faced and one of the smartest, was that another friend of ours, named Larry, had drawn a super nifty picture of him. He had a black suit, with a red helmet and red cape, and across his chest was a white “Jolly Roger” type skull (no crossbones though — just the skull). The picture and character of Chessack were probably Rob’s most memorable, along with the mind-bending campaign he ran that involved time travel, dimensional warping, and affecting the outcome of history across different universes.
Chessack, of course, only existed in this incarnation for a short while. We all graduated high school and went on to colleges all across the country, and Chessack was put away in Rob’s Champions box. Then a few years later, when I ran another table top campaign and needed a dimension-crossing, time-travelling master villain, I asked Rob’s permission, and I re-created Chessack for another game group. The master villain lived again, more powerful and brutal than ever before, and marched across many universes in another reign of terror — this time as the assistant of the evil god Darkseid, from DC comics. But this campaign eventually ended too, and Chessack, as a supervillain at any rate, was shelved again, this time for good.
Or so it seemed.
Then in graduate school, I learned about the internet, and started using e-mail. This necessitated having a login name. In those early days, login names could only be lower-case letters of the alphabet (or undersores) — no capitals, punctuation marks, spaces, or numerals were allowed. Also, login names were limited to 8 characters. Of course I could’ve been entirely boring and used my last name, or some combination of my last and first name, as was often done in those days, such as “bjones” or “bobby_z,” but that didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to use the name of a character — and one that my friends would recognize. But most cool or obvious words — such as that of my own master villain from high school, Overlord — were too obvious and already taken, even in those early days. So I needed the name of a villain with 8 characters, that was also a name no one in the world would’ve thought up… a combination of symbols only I would think to use, but one that all my old friends would recognize. After some thought the answer came to me.
chessack
It meets all the requirements. It’s exactly 8 characters, is only letters, and is not a combination of letters anyone in his right mind would assemble, because the word is a nonsense word. And so for the first time in 1994 or so, I used the login name “chessack.” I will note that I only did this after contacting Rob, who is the rightful owner and creater of this word, and asking his permission, and he kindly said (as Rob tends to say about such things), “Sure.”
Nowadays, of course, we can use spaces, numbers, and even punctutation marks in login names. I could be “When-Harry-met-Sally@yahoo.com” if I wanted to be. I could use my first and last name, capitalized, and in most cases even with a space between the two names. But I don’t. I still use “Chessack.” I use it because it’s a sure bet. It’s almost an ironclad guarantee that nobody in the world will have that as a login name, and therefore, I can use it on any website. And I also know that even on the most primitive site with really old software, I can still use “chessack” as a login name, because it was acceptable even in the days of bitnet and mainframes. “Chessack” has thus become my online RPG identity, and I so I continue to use it.
Well, that’s the story of Chessack. I’m guessing it’s more than you wanted to know, but there you have it. It’s the name of a supervillain who crosses time and space to battle heroes, and who has a cool-looking black and red costume with a skull on his chest. 
Where does the “Chessack picture” come from?
The picture I use here (when it shows up, which unfortunately seems to happen inconsistently) is a screen capture of the head and shoulders of a Supervillain I played in City of Villains. The villain was a Ninja-based Mastermind who called himself “Shogun Suzerain.” I thought it was a cool picture so I used it for “Chessack” here (and elsewhere).
Can I post comments to this site?
Yes. Anyone who wants to post comments about any of the articles I have written is not only allowed, but encouraged, to do so. If I didn’t want people to read and comment on my stuff I would just write it in a personal journal and store it on my hard drive. I value free and open discussions. Indeed one of the reasons I “blog” is because too often my opinions are not “welcomed” on other sites. Here they always will be — as are yours. I do, however, require that you adhere to the rules of the site — no profanity, no personal attacks or insults, etc. This does not mean you can’t disagree with me — by all means feel free to challenge my statements on logical or factual (or opinionated) grounds. Just do so politely and we’re all set.
Can I post articles to this site?
No. I am the only person who can write actual articles or web pages on this site. Other users can only post comments. The simple reason for this is that it is my personal weblog, or journal. If you would like to post your own articles, you can do so easily enough by getting your own wordpress blog. Visit the WordPress home page for more details. Like this site, you can, for free, have your own “your-domain”.wordpress.com address, and an unlimited amount (for text) of blogging space, plus 50 MB of graphic image space. If you want there are ways for us to cross-link to each other’s blogs, and we can discuss that via e-mail if you wish.
