tambre, a history

Earlier this week there was a quote I came across. It was an overheard on Twitter, and it read: “I don’t even know what my real name is”. I’m sure it didn’t even have to be attributed, and people would have somehow figured out it was something I said. Sometimes, I think when I wear those “hello, my name is” name tags it should say, “insert a name here”.

Most commonly I am known as tambre (yes, lowercase). If you look up tambre on Google this is what you find:

tambre (n.) –pronounced tam-bray

• a comune in the Province of Belluno in the Italian region Veneto.
• a life coaching website
• a hydro electric generating power plant
• a music and audio productions website
• an indie girl, a rocker chick, and a sports player

None of those are attributed to me. The following, though, are:

• an English name meaning “great joy”, and is most often a female name.
• sami, aka: smiles

For those of you that don’t know me, hello. My name is tambre, but I’m also known as seopenguin, smiles, Sami, and finally, Samantha, which is my birth name. You can see why I might’ve said, “I don’t even know what my real name is”. I go by so many, and often been introduced as tambre, not as Sami, or Samantha (not that I mind, if I did I would have rebranded myself years ago).

This post is, like my one categorizing all the movies and TV shows I haven’t seen, long over due. It’s one of the questions that I’m more frequently asked, and I find myself explaining quite often: “where did tambre come from”, or any variation of said inquiry.

Well, this is me.

Or the tambre that originated as a two dimensional MMORPG (massive multi online role play game) character back in late 2002. To make a long back story short, I had started college within a month or two of graduating high school, and in my Japanese class met a kid that played an MMO. He introduced me to the game, and as it was downloading (took nearly 24 hours), I cycled through character descriptions on the website, trying to decide who to become. Once I had chosen a profession (a thief, if you were interested), I had to chose a name.

Names are something of an art to me. People believe in the zodiac, or blood typing, or childhood birth order, to describe the personality of a person, I believe in names. It’s surprising how names, without knowing what the child will become, can have similar attributes to it’s owners behaviours. I spent longer picking a name than I did choosing a profession, or than I had to wait for it to download. If memory serves two days after I had downloaded the game did I finally create a character.

Thus tambre was born, and tambre stuck. Every time I server hopped, I brought not only my guildmates (and friends) with me, but I brought my name. If my name was already in use we moved to another server. The name grew from MMO to MMO: Ragnarok Online to Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, and Dragonica, but also to websites: DeviantArt, myspace, delicious.

Once I was graduated and working, the internet marketing sites and forums I joined I also joined as tambre. In 2007 I created a Twitter account (@tambre, which I still have btw), and I attended the SES conference in New York. Unless I told people that my name online was tambre they didn’t put two-and-two together (I surprised some with the fact that I was a woman, they had thought I was a guy).

I continue to use the name today, and despite my Twitter account being private, more publicly than I used to. I have spent at least a few times each month considering changing, getting rid of tambre and just being me. It may not be my birth name, but tambre IS me. So, I walk around and amuse myself with my introduction,

“Hi, I’m Sam. You probably know me as tambre, though”.

No related posts.