Where the name 'Schlupfloch' came from

I was trying to think of a name for this blog and I was at a dead-end.

I only had one thing I knew I wanted to publish but felt like I probably would publish a lot more random things as they came up.

This made it hard to decide on a name - what do you call something when you don't even know what it is? All the good domains related to my name were gone already too so the options for something generic were limited.

So, I decided to do what any sane person would and fed 50 different article ideas I'd saved into GPT-3 and asked it what for some creative name ideas based on them!

Many of the first ideas were...uninspired:

So I decided to ramp the temperature (randomness) up to 0.99 to get some more unhinged results and it came out with this:

While it probably wasn't 'meant' as a joke, I found the idea of parodying those pretentious 'foreign language' names funny - you know like the ones where they take the name of some Japanese water purification method and have a great story about how they learnt the word from some village elder in Kyoto.

"Zaklinacz umysłów" felt non-committal enough as a name that it would allow the blog to be anything while also having a kinda funny idea behind it that would make me smile a little bit every time I read it.

However, it also felt so alien to the English language that it was basically unpronounceable - it felt like poor execution of a good idea.

So I kept looking.

I ran the GPT-3 query over and over and over again, feeding Zaklinacz umysłów in as an example of the kind of thing I was looking for.  

The results ranged from the banal to the psychotic:

I ran it around 20 more times until eventually, I saw it:

"Schlupfloch!", the German for "Loopole"!

Foreign enough that it felt weird and interesting, but not so offensively foreign that it was completely unpronounceable.

I also liked that, in something for something to name it that would seem meaningful but mean nothing, I was searching for a loophole!

And there it was, Schlupfloch!

And I was even able to bag a highly in-demand domain name for it!