From KVIIIlyn's mom:
my husband suggested we replace the 'ait' with the Roman numeral symbol for eight! Now our daughter is truly unique.It's funny because, reading this, the most baffling thing to me ends up being, "What the hell kind of parents are you? You haven't even bought the kid's domain name yet!?" And when I see the story, even after it's been stewing on reddit for like three days, KVIIIlyn.com is still available. And holy crap, I sit on this post for another day and a half and it's still not taken! I've spent the last day figuring I'll buy the kid's domain name and hold it for her until she, or her parents, really, wake up and get in touch.
And then I think, waitaminnit, they live in Australia, do they even USE .com down there? And anyway, finding her username is taken on any site she registers for for the rest of her life is like the one problem KVIIIlyn will not have. So they can make or lose their own domain name battles fine without me.
KIIILyn also made me think of the artist K8 Hardy, who came up with that spelling for her name her own damn self when she was a teenager. Which is probably the ideal time to insert numbers into your name, if your parents can show a little restraint, obv.
If high school is the early end of the number-name changing game, corrupt adulthood is too late. That's the takeaway from the report that the Russian federal agency that registers the owners of luxury foreign real estate properties used randomly generated letter&number combos to disguise the names of two sons of the country's attorney general. On official records, at least, Artem and Igor Chaika have become "LSDUZ" (ЛСДУ3) and "IFYAU9" (ЙФЯУ9), respectively.
Which is pretty awesome. I mean, why not name you kid with a random string of characters? Or even emoji? It's not like you couldn't come up with a decent pronunciation. LSDUZ could be Ellis, and IFYAU9 could be, uh, Fia? Yaunine? Goldnine? Eventually we'll all be signing things with our encryption keys anyway. Why not get ahead of the curve?
This must be a form of child abuse? [reddit/r/australia via @QueenMobs]
The sons of Russia's attorney general were renamed to random numbers and letters. [meduza.io via twitter somewhere]
