[HN Gopher] Prince's special custom-font symbol floppy disks (2016)
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Prince's special custom-font symbol floppy disks (2016)
Author : arbesman
Score : 39 points
Date : 2025-06-05 15:54 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nymag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nymag.com)
| MisterTea wrote:
| https://archive.is/6A5rW
| frmersdog wrote:
| Needs a (2016).
|
| Because of my age, Prince was not "Prince" for much of my
| childhood; I was introduced to him as "The Artist Formerly Known
| As Prince" and just assumed that that was all we'd ever call him
| in the future.
|
| Renaming oneself is surely not any new phenomenon, but the
| reasons seem to get more and more interesting. Malcolm Little
| famously erased his "slave name" and replaced it with an X. I
| also just recently learned about FM-2030. And then there's the
| self-naming practices that grew around the hacking and early web
| scenes, and which still features prominently in places like the
| FGC and furry fandom.
|
| So you've got a guy fighting cynical capitalist legalism, a guy
| attempting to erase the detritus of colonialism from his
| identity, another guy trying to erase his ties to tribalism, and
| then a bunch of people trying to mask their identities in
| presumed Dark Forest (concluding in, essentially, the creation of
| alter egos).
| egypturnash wrote:
| To name a thing is to own it.
|
| Own yourself. Own fragments of yourself. Own your public self
| as something separate from your private self. Own a public self
| that does things your normal public self would never (be
| allowed to) do. Own a new identity, maybe it'll replace your
| main one if it really works out.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I also learned of prince while he was the artist formerly known
| as prince and it took me a long time to learn that it wasn't
| some quirky stage name but that he actually was an artist that
| was formerly named prince.
|
| Even to this day, calling him prince feels like an
| abbreviation.
| Animats wrote:
| > Needs a (2016).
|
| Was that an obituary? "The former artist known as Prince" died
| in 2016.
|
| Did that symbol ever make it into Unicode?
| dylan604 wrote:
| "How many people can just say 'Hey, I'm changing my name to this
| symbol so can you use it from now on?' and everyone's like
| 'Alright. Okay. No questions asked. You're Prince! We'll do it!'
| It was kind of funny to me."
|
| Um, "You're Prince!" No, I'm not. That's the point of this
| conversation. I am no longer Prince. Do not call me that.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| "It's A Pimp Named Slickback. It's like A Tribe Called Quest,
| you say the whole thing straight"
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| "I don't have a verbal name, just this graphical symbol"
|
| "Ok. Steve it is then."
|
| As far as I'm concerned, by failing provide something usable
| himself, he waived any right to ownership or interest, and
| everyone was free to apply whatever placeholder label they want
| when they need to refer to him. It's no longer any of his
| business. He opted out of having any say in it.
|
| In other words this is not a Dayta vs Dahta situation.
|
| I'm lucky in that I have no reason to refer to him for any
| reason that doesn't involve his music or performances from the
| time when he was still named Prince, so as far as I'm
| concerned, for all of those references at least, it's still
| valid to refer to that artist by that name, and it doesn't
| matter that some other artist exists at some other time. It's a
| Prince album, a song written by Prince, Prince played pretty
| great guitar in a special one time, etc.
|
| I bet he still collected royalty checks that Prince earned and
| retained ownership of all his posessions and copyrights even
| though he was supposedly not Prince any more. Oh I guess
| Prince, while still Prince, had the right to gift everything to
| the new person same as to a child or anyone else, but then that
| comes with a pretty big tax which I bet he didn't pay at the
| time of this massive transaction.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I assume then you feel the same way about Musk's kid's names?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| They claim not to have any names at all?
|
| They retain claim on any rights of being a Musk family
| member?
|
| If either of those then yes of course. But that's not the
| case is it?
| dylan604 wrote:
| > They claim not to have any names at all?
|
| Talking about little bobby drop tables. name = NULL would
| at least be disaster safe.
|
| > They retain claim on any rights of being a Musk family
| member?
|
| I don't know. It sounds like Musk would love to not claim
| rights as family members to avoid having to provide
| support. He's not as rich of a man as he was last week.
| poor guy
| myself248 wrote:
| In practice I just remember him being referred to as TAFKAP in
| places you couldn't load custom fonts. Simple, unique,
| immediately memorable after first expansion, and doesn't
| require your BBS terminal to support TrueType.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I just kept calling him Prince.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| > "I was talking about chat groups and chatting and meeting
| people online and he seemed confused by it"
|
| Imagine if he made a dating site.
| bombcar wrote:
| A big part of why it worked for him was not only that he was real
| famous, but the whole technology world in the area was new, _and_
| he was the first to do it.
|
| If everyone started doing it, people would quickly begin ignoring
| it, or a standard Unicode mechanism would have been developed.
|
| And now, his name has reverted to Prince.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _The Legend of Prince's Special Custom-Font Symbol Floppy Disks_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600091 - April 2016 (18
| comments)
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