BTW, why zedas.fr ?

Today, I want to answer to a question nobody asked : why is this site uses zedas.fr for its URL ? Well, there is a small story behind it. No very special, but I wanted to share it.

A lot of personal blogs are usually using an URL named after their owner, or a pseudonym they use. Me, I didn’t want, mostly for privacy reasons and also because I didn’t want to see my same in my mail address and other stuff using a DNS, mostly because I don’t really like it.

This choice take us back a while ago, when I’ve started to self host various stuff. The first thing to know, is I’ve always been a fan of Japanese Mecha animation. If you check on this tag, you’ll see I’ve mostly written about Mecha stuff. Because of that, I’ve had an habit : naming all my computers with anime robots names. Especially Gundam names since I’ve been a big fan of the saga for years. About Gundam, I’ve maintained a French website that was a reference back at this time, before Wikia and now Fandom took the relay, name Gundam France. The website is still online for archive purpose, I’ve remade it with Hugo and abandoned it to the community with the content on GitHub.

But let’s go back to the topic shall we ? People who have knowledge about the mentioned shows and helped by the illustration image may already have understood the origin of the “zedas”. Let’s continue the “origin story” if I may.

During my first self-hosting activities, I’ve selected a domain name based on one of my favorite Gundam mecha, the MSN-0100 Hyaku-Shiki from Zêta Gundam. But, the more I get used to host my stuff, the more I wanted to use them for real. This make me go back to my first dedicated server rented at OVH under their low-cost Kimsufi brand. Originally, my self-hosted tools were on a Virtualbox machine on my PC and the DNS was updated using a service similar to DynDNS. Yep.

So, it came out that “hyakushiki” was quite a complicated name to spell when a company asks for your email address when you subscribe to some service in an agency. When the Customer support on phone for services on which I’ve put this email address was trying to say it, I was worry about the guy having a stroke at the same moment while I was listening his painful speaking. Not everyone was an Anime nerd listening to Japanese almost everyday back on this time.

Anyway, it was to complicated to spell for somebody else, and for me it was difficult to be understood while I’ve had to spell it or write it on a paper. So I was searching for a new DNS name, still based on my favorite shows, that would be short and simple to say and read for a French speaker. And of course, available. Because short DNS names are very difficult to obtain.

The criteria were difficult to select because there was also a risk of falling into copyrighted material and possibly reserved domains. But fortunately for me, this choice was made following another one.

Let’s make a quick spin-off in this story regarding another personal thing about me : the pseudonym I usually use on the Web. I’ve always been an original guy and I use the diminutive of my first name, Seb, as a pseudonym. But for reasons that elude me, this pseudo is taken almost every time. And I don’t like the pseudo with numbers. So on Fosstodon for example, you may have noticed my profile name is @Wivik. Same on GitHub and so on.

This name and my website URL shares the same origin material actually. I’ve started to use this pseudonym with Final Fantasy XIV.

You know, that horrible moment when you look at the “Character’s Name [_________]” field, your mind is completley blank, and you struggle to find something that you will like. While I was on Skype (an old guy thing, nevermind) with a friend that was also into Gundam (and I would say far more, he was the translator for almost every French official releases until a couple of years ago) he said “Why don’t you use an obscur Gundam character name ?”.

At this moment, I’ve read the spin-off manga of the TV show Mobile Suit Gundam AGE entitled “Memories of Sid”. This manga was pretty nice because it depicted the missing part of the TV series about one of the main characters that got missing between two narrative arcs. The first volume of the manga feature its own character, later replaced by the one I’ve mentioned before. It was a standard shônen style character, dumb, hotheaded, etc, but quite fun. And his name was fun too : Wivik Lambro.

And that’s how I’ve named my character on Final Fantasy XIV and it’s still his name today.

My FF XIV character during a cutscene. I love the dumb faces he can have actually.

During the end credits of the Endwalker expansion.

And it’s the username I mostly use on the Web since then.

Now, both stories connect. When I’ve finally decided to change my server’s URL, in 2016, I was searching for a good short and easy to speak and read name. At this moment, my computer’s hostname was inspired by a mecha unit of Gundam AGE : the xvv-xc Zedas. I liked its named, I liked its design, and by a simple choice, it became my website’s URL. “Zedas” is quite easy to say in French, and to read and write also.

Here we are, the origin story of my domain name. I hope you liked it.

And I don’t think this one will be adapted to cinema though.