I just discovered there is some band right now in America called “Miniature Tigers“…

Obviously in real-life, we don’t assume our names are completely unique (depending on how common they are, we may share them with literally millions of other people). But in Second Life, with names as outlandish as Tuna Oddfellow and Gazira Babeli (it really feels like a Charles Dickens novel sometimes), it seems more likely that our SL names might be one in a million.

When I first created my avatar, choosing the name seemed such a very important step, especially because the last names Linden allows you to pick from are so limited. But in some ways, that made it a bit easier, as certain last names do set a course for the first. The moment I spotted “Tigerpaw,” I knew I wanted to be a “Miniature Tigerpaw.”

Of course in real life, I just realized, we don’t get to pick our last names either… Linden is just doing what our parents have for us already, narrowing the field of our possible name-based identities.