This is an excerpt from my homepage that I've decided to make into its own blog post. I'll be updating this occasionally to add to it as things relevant to my online identity develop. Enjoy!
The Name
The name "hugeblank" dates back to 2010 when I was in my local library, signing up for Roblox. I had a few criteria for the name. I didn't want it to have any numbers, and I wanted it to be comprised of real words. That made things difficult enough, but to top it all off Roblox was already really popular back then, despite it being entirely different from what it is now. The only saving grace for me was that below the username box, if you put in a username that already existed, it would provide a few alternatives that weren't already taken. I spent what felt like an eternity typing combinations of words in with no luck whatsoever. It got to the point that I gave up and just slammed the keyboard and got a bunch of gibberish which was, hilariously, taken. But whatever keysmash I threw in opened the username suggestion area's third eye. Up until now it had just been putting numbers onto what I wrote in, but this time, it came close to the answer. hugeblank0. I took that username, put it in the input box, and then removed the 0 and prayed. It worked, I signed up, and the rest is history.
The Bagel
The bagel motif was a later occurence in the hugeblank lore. It happened due to a user in a Minecraft server I was playing on back in 2014. They were messing with anagrams of other online players usernames and eventually got to me. They landed on "bagel hunk" which I thought was funny. At that time I didn't exactly have a profile icon I was set on using, so I went and googled a photo of a bagel, and found this one:
While working on this website I decided to finally see if I could find the source, and with a reverse image search I was able to. I had initially thought that the image was lost media, so was very happy to have been able to track it down. Not only that, but the bagel wasn't a photo at all, it was an illustration, done by a woman named Judy Unger. Judy was a professional illustrator who had done commission work for food companies like Del Monte, Kirkland, Little Debbie, and Meow Mix cat food. I have an appreciation for artists and firmly believe that their work should be properly attributed and compensated if necessary, so I reached out to her about the story of how I ended up with the bagel motif and how her illustration ended up being my profile picture for the last decade. I continued by asking her for a way to obtain a license to use the image, in hopes that she might respond so I could rest easy knowing I'm using it fairly. To my delight she replied with a similar gratitude for me even bothering to ask about licensing, and gave me a perpetual commercial use license at a discount! The image you see above is the highest resolution publicly available rendering of her watercolor illustration of a plain bagel she did for Lender's Manhattan in January of 2003. Please enjoy her blog post found here, where she talks about the process of the commission, making 15 different bagels, and how the director of the project actually prefered her marker technique over the watercolor version for the plain bagel! Her work is incredibly impressive and when I have the free time I occasionally spend it reading through her blog and admiring the illustrations.
