I recently set up a new desktop and named it rotanev. Let's see why...
Skies of Arcadia shows up in this journal a couple times already in artifacts and music in games. This entry makes three.
If you go to my steam profile, you'll see a picture of Fina's proposed flag (a flying dolphin) for the Delphinus (an airship) in Skies of Arcadia (a videogame). It is usually the one that I pick when replaying the game.
Vyse's skull and sword is a close second. I don't think I've ever picked Aika's cat flag.
In how, I mentioned that the laptop I
got last january is named acen. This is short for alpha centauri, based on
the great game of the same name (and part of the origin story of my zkhr handle
and the source of the roze character
I used for my civ bot).
Continuing with the space theme, I decided to name my new setup after the Delphinus constellation.
I was originally going to just go with its abbreviation del, but then I fell down an interesting rabbit hole.
The brightest star in the constellation, β Delphini A, has an interesting back story.
In 1814, Giuseppe Piazzi published the Praecipuarum Stellarum Inerrantium Positiones Mediae, a catalogue of star positions, with the help of Niccolò Cacciatore. On page 147 (in Hora XX) on rows 227 and 254, you can find (for the first time) stars named ROTANEV and SVALOCIN.
It wasn't until 1859 when Thomas William Webb published the Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes that the origin of these names was uncovered. Starting on page 193:
The leaders of this little, compact, fish-like constellation, α and β, are distinguished by names which, even among the multifarious disfigurements of Oriental words so abundant in the heavens, are pre-eminently strange, Svalocin and Rotanev. The former Smyth has justly characterized as "cacophonous and barbaric," and says that "no poring into the black letter versions of the Almagest, El Báttaní, Ibn Yúnis, and other authorities, enables one to form any rational conjecture as to the mis-reading, mis-writing, or mis-application, in which so strange a metamorphosis could have originated." And of Rotanev he observes, "the which putteth derivation and etymology at defiance." Where so eminent and accomplished a scholar and antiquarian has not succeeded, it would seem presumptuous to offer a solution, but that accident is sometimes more fortunate than study; and if the following is not after all the right key, it certainly is a marvel that is should open the lock so readily. The letters of these strange words, reversed, form Nicolaus Venator, in which it is easy to recognize a Latin version of the name of Niccolo Cacciatore, assistant at the Palermo Observatory, in the Catalogue emanating from which these stars are so denominated.
For so, so many reasons.
First, Cacciatore decided to translate his last name (meaning hunter in Italian) to Latin, getting Venator. Then flipped it backwards to get Rotanev, secretly naming the celestial body after himself.
Next, nobody knew why it had this name for 45 years (!), until Webb comes along and figured it out. This dude would have absolutely loved puzzle hunts and his write up was both savage and brilliant.
Finally, I've done the same! In FFXIV, my chocobo's name is Rahkaz.