Username
The Nulcheck username was created early in the morning on Monday, November 25th 2019 at 4am [ref]. It originally started as a different programming related username back in 2015, and was that until 2019. I changed it because there already was an artist with that name, a Swedish band, and also there were like six others with that name on SoundCloud. I also did it in a cringy leet speak kind of way (D3dc0de). I couldn’t sleep that night, so I spent my time trying to come up with a new username.
I didn’t want to use the username I came up with in the summer before freshman year, in July of 2011 (MCE626). That was some dumb garbage I didn’t think was really brandable, and even when I originally created the 2015 music artist name, I knew this. However, in 2019, I hadn’t really been using the accounts with that name or making mods for Minecraft. In early 2020, I changed all my accounts to the new Nulcheck username. However, when I first created the name, it was not “Nulcheck”, but instead was “\0check”, although it was still pronounced as “null check”. \0 is one of the representations for a null character / byte.
Early that morning, I was looking at lists of programming terms because I still wanted the artist name to be related to that. After hours of trying to come up with something, I stumbled upon Null on a list. I thought, “Oh yeah, I always kinda liked how it sounded and just the general concept of null.” So I went to the Wikipedia page for “Null character”. I read the page, and got to the “representation” section, which read:
“The ability to represent a null character does not always mean the resulting string will be correctly interpreted, as many programs will consider the null to be the end of the string. Thus the ability to type it (in case of unchecked user input) creates a vulnerability known as null byte injection and can lead to security exploits.”
I had an idea after reading this. I wondered how many things I could break by having \0 as a part of the username. That block of text also later became the inspiration for the track named null byte injection from the album music != null. I originally tried to make a Google account with the username as “\0check”. I wasn’t sure if it was going to either mess up their databases and put my name as some garbled stuff or parse the input field in such a way that it actually puts a null character / byte in the name, resulting in nothing showing up. So, in case that happened, I put “Check” into the name as a way to see if anything would show up for the username. I realized that in some cases, social sites use the username as your profile link, and if they parse the input field as a string literal, it would have double slashes in the URL, which you can’t do. I also tried to do %00 instead of \0, which is the URL percent-encoding way of doing a null character / byte. However, it wouldn’t let me do this either. It’s almost like you can’t add weird symbols to your name for a reason.
After doing this, I realized this could be a neat username. I did programming stuff; I used to make Minecraft mods and was currently working on making my own video games with a few high school friends. Null checking was something I did quite often because it usually ends in a crash if you don’t. Hell, the whole ass Unreal Engine 4 editor closes if you try to access a function on an object / actor that hasn’t been initialized (essentially being “null”). So, after realizing the username potential, I worked through a few different styles. The first of which was deciding to go with one L in the name for branding reasons. I knew that if you searched the name with two L's, you would, of course, get programming stuff and not my stuff. Second, I thought the two L's would kind of be too "busy" / might be kind of hard to read if the text was small or you're seeing it from a distance. So I thought one L would improve readability and look more like a neat, tidy username.
After deciding on using one L, it reminded me of seeing a black box with a capital “NUL” inside it if you open an exe or DLL file with Notepad++, as well as sometimes seeing that in SQL database tables. So, one of the first styles of the user name was NUL_Check. A few days later, I didn’t really like how that looked, so I briefly tried Nul_Check, before finally settling on the neat and tidy looking username we have now, Nulcheck. However, I did not take into account quickly glancing at the final username, as it can sometimes be mistaken as “Nutcheck”, although I find this to be hilarious. As a male myself, check yo nuts. And if you don’t have any, I guess check if the food you’re eating has tree nuts in it; if you’re allergic? idk. There are about 10,000 new cases of testicular cancer diagnosed each year. This webpage (originally typed up on a "Behind the Name" Google doc) is brought to you by Manscaped; your balls will thank you.