Why "Gothick"?
A lot of people ask me about my nickname. So, here's why I'm called "Gothick". I wouldn't bother reading the long version unless you're very, very bored or some kind of deranged internet stalker.
The Short Answer
I stole the name "Gothick" from a William Gibson novel to use as a screen name, and it stuck.
The Long Answer
Once, somebody asked this and I actually bothered with a complete history of my nickname, so I'm going to reproduce that here. I normally just say, "well, it's a long story."
Back in 1991, I needed a username for one of the earliest Internet talkers, Cheeseplant's House, run by Daniel Stephens at the University of Warwick.
I needed to invent my first online persona, in other words.
Two major influences in my life back then were gothic music, in particular the Fields of the Nephilim1, and William Gibson. In Gibson's Count Zero, he describes a street culture/gang known as gothicks. The particular quote is:
“At least twenty Gothicks postured in the main room, like a herd of baby dinosaurs, their crests of lacquered hair bobbing and twitching. The majority approached the Gothick ideal: tall, lean, muscular, but touched by a certain gaunt restlessness, young athletics in the early stages of consumption. The graveyard pallor was mandatory, and Gothick hair was by definition black. Bobby knew that the few who couldn't warp their bodies to fit the subcultural template were best avoided; a short Gothick was trouble, a fat Gothick homicidal.”
So, basically, this paragraph was fresh in the mind of a rather overweight cyberpunk fan who was also massively into gothic music at a time when he needed to choose a unique and personalised username for an early online virtual world. And thus a nickname was born.
I then proceeded to "meet" quite a few people in the virtual world before meeting them in real life, which meant that several people I knew at university and from further afield knew me only as "Gothick" until they got to know me quite well. Plus, as there are quite a large number of Matthews in my generation, so plenty of people who knew I was called Matt would still use "Gothick" for the purposes of disambiguation :)
This alias then became my username on the University's computer system, and thus my email address, spreading the name even further across the planet. I still use it as a username in systems, because it's normally pretty much unique, so I don't have to muck about trying to find a name that's not already been taken...
So. That, in a fairly large nutshell, is why people call me Gothick, even though I don't actually dress like a goth, and never used to (although I always have had a fondness for wearing black in general...) And it's William Gibson's fault that it's got a "c" and a "k" on the end!
1Who remain such an influence that I'm still wearing their T-shirts and going to their (very occasional) gigs.