mako's name
mako was a chosen name. On the internet, choosing your own name is basically required as part of the traditional practice of psuedonymity, but if you live and work under a psuedonym for a long time, it effectively becomes your real identity. I suppose you could say that the practice exists mainly for the youth, to allow them to dispose of identities that don't work out, which can also support disposing mindsets or self-concepts that don't work out. But the practice has a great side-effect: It often results in people having names that suit them better than the name they were given when they just were an indeterminate blob of potential.
A name doesn't have to be meaningful. Initially, I didn't have much of a reason to choose "mako", it just felt right, while my given name didn't. Since then, though, it has come to suit me eerily well for a couple of reasons.
The japanese name "mako" could be translated very literally to mean "person of honesty". Since long before I knew that, I've adhered very strictly to the practice of never ever lying (even lying through omission or bias) to my friends, or to any information networks I play an important role in. I have this possibly dogmatic belief that if one lies to one's friends then they will always lie back, and then by the principle of logical explosion you'll all go all the way insane together, because you rely on each other to filter and make sense of reality, so I don't generally lie, I see it as being like poisoning your own water supply.
Some communities normalise weaponized lying, they lie strategically, when they think it will achieve desirable effects. I have a lot of difficulty fitting into communities like that. I'm very skeptical that this strategy even works, as, if you lie, you detach yourself from reality, so you lose the ability to know the effects the lying will have. So you no longer know whether telling the lie was a good idea or not, right? And the longer you do this the less strategic it all becomes, until eventually you're just telling random lies for no reason. Well, anyway.
I used to kind of resent the association with mako sharks, which I know is somewhat absurd of me, but bare with me. I've never heard of the maori/polynesian word "mako" ("shark") being used as a name for people in those cultures, so it doesn't totally make sense as an interpretation. However, I do live in aotearoa, so it's understandable that people would consider it.
But, oddly, today, that association also fits for reasons you wouldn't expect. For one, I just kind of look like a mako shark, I'm slender and I usually dress a way that's grey on one side and white on the other. I swear that the reasons I (think) I dress that way had nothing to do with sharks! (it was sort of an allusion to airplanes (enormous machines of global transformation, unsafe by nature, safe in practice as a result of rigorous safety work), and the light grey is an expression of a stance of optimism with nuance)
I suppose the attitude of the shark is also quite earnest. A shark doesn't stalk or misdirect its prey, as most predators do. Instead, it just goes in and gets it done, fast. As a forum designer, my prey would be acrimony. Since I don't often lie, I also have to approach acrimony in a very direct way, and I usually end it quickly.
yass is a historical, though uncommon surname. It seems to have escaped any meaning it might have originally had.
September 2025