The first week of these journal entries weren’t supposed to be published as blog posts. I’m noticing that now as I edit them. This will be a constant evolution…
—
January 9th, 2011
Since the title of this blog is “Pwning Life” I should probably give you the back story of the name.
The Birth of Pwning Life
Before pwning life, there was just pwning. Before pwning, there was owning. Everyone knows the traditional meaning of own, here’s what it is for us gamers (from Urban Dictionary):
own – 731 up, 148 down
1.To win a round in a game. (usually a video/pc game)
2.To beat someone at a game.(usually a video/pc game)
3. To be better at someone. (usually a video/pc game)
Through a misspelling of own, pwn was born. Once pwn hit critical mass it ran through the internets like a digital wildfire. Here again is the most popular definition from Urban Dictionary. Make note of huge up/down vote difference between own and pwn.
PWN (verb) – 10208 up, 693 down
1. An act of dominating an opponent.
2. Great, ingenious; applied to methods and objects.
Originally dates back to the days of WarCraft, when a map designer mispelled “Own” as “Pwn”. What was originally supose to be “player has been owned.” was “player has been pwned”.
Pwn eventually grew from there and is now used throughout the online world, especially in online games.
I’m a gamer so, like any gamer, pwn become a part of my lexicon on and offline.
“You got pwned!”
“I’ll PWN you in Halo 3!”
“My Geometry Wars score fucking PWS!”
It was only a matter of time before a gamer who was also into personal development mashed the two together. I can’t say that I was the first to do it, but I can say that I never heard or read pwning life before I thought of it. The next day I bought the domain and made a video about my idea (January 19th, 2008, almost 3 years ago).
I had the option of getting pwnlife.com, lifepwned.com, lifepwning.com or any other combination I could think of. The reason I chose pwninglife.com was because it felt more “zen.” From my experience with and understanding of life, it isn’t something that you learn to master and then you’re done with. It’s a never ending process of continual refinement. It’s never in the past tense. You can never say “I pwned life, I don’t need to do that again.” You’re ALWAYS pwning life!
Getting The Clan Back Together
So that’s where the name came from. Either that same day, or shortly after I decided that I wanted to write a book, build a community and do seminars. I had a number of failed attempts at community building (choosing the wrong platform, making it to easy or too hard to become a member, etc.) Even with my failed attempts there were people that stuck through the ups and downs of my learning process. Even after practically disappearing for 9 months during the recovery process of my manic episode, people patiently waited for my return.
On September 25th, 2010 (almost exactly one year after being released from the hospital) I got this email:
Hey Casey its Recessive.
Great to see you working on the Kohl’s project and such. I was wondering what happened to the Miltownklan forums, and if they will be started back up any time soon? Are you still working on MTK projects or have they been put on hold temporarily?
Thanks.
We’ll talk about the MilTownKlan and the Kohl’s project another day. What that email did is get the ball rolling again. Shortly after I got that email, I rebuilt the discussion forums for the MilTownKlan. Since I already started working on pwninglife.com when I moved back to Milwaukee in July, it was easy to start building a Pwning Life community again.
On top of that, I didn’t want to talk about things that might work in theory or have worked for other people without testing them myself first (like
