Weird coincedneces & mixing people up, a random ramble

[Doomkid]

Does anyone else have a bad case of mixing up things or people based on tangential relationships?

 

Let me explain: For example, many of you by now will be familiar with Decino, a YouTuber who makes great videos on how Doom's engine works, quirks in design, and speedrunning stuff. Pretty straightforward, but, this other guy named Marcel Vos showed up not long before him - his channel is basically the exact same idea, but applied to Rollercoater Tycoon 2 rather than Doom. Seems weird to conflate them, but they both have Eurpoean accents that sound really similar, at least to my filthy American pig ears, and just to push the mixup potential to it's maximum they even have similar subscriber counts and similar views-per-video. Christ.

 

Due to this, I had a weird exchange with a friend recently. I was asking them if they ever heard of Marcel Vos, a YouTube who makes really interesting Doom videos and they had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. A few hours go by, I check YouTube and realize I was being a moron and remembering the wrong channel, by a different person, for a different game. The thing is though, Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 is one of the few games I love almost as much as Doom. I don't watch either religiously, but I've seen a few videos here and there from each that left an impression on me.

 

My point is, I feel like I make these associations based on super tangential things and I'm just trying to make sure I'm not the only goofball going around doing this.

 

I'll mention a few others that might be more familiar to community members. When I didn't use DW nearly as often as I do these days, I would always mix up Gez and Grazza. I think it's because they both had decent punctuation, little room for nonsense, and both their names start with G. That's literally all it took.

 

This one might make more sense, but for multiple years, I thought DevastatioN, DeathevokatioN, DevilutioN and Evolution were the same person. Similar-ish names and they post on Doomworld? Same person! There are multiple more examples of me mixing up people in the community based on SFA (sweet fuckall).

 

Has this shit happened to anyone else or am I just particularly addicted to mixing people up?

 

Edited November 13, 2019 by Doomkid

[SOSU]

Happens to me all the time too but that's because i have shit memory :)

[Doom_Dude]

This reminds me. I was in the grocery store about a month ago. This guy I knew briefly as a kid, somehow recognized me and even after he told me who he was, I got him mixed up with this other kid.... and I only got it straightened out in my head hours later. I wouldn't of recognized him in a million years. The last time I saw him was... I'm talking fucking decades here and we were just kids and I probably only saw him a dozen times or something. Weird when that happens.

 

Getting people mixed up on forums is fairly easy sometimes. Similar names doesn't help. People change their names and avatars (profile pics or whatever the fuck we call them now) or use the common ones that various people use. It can be a bit of a cluster. I can't think of any particular users I've gotten mixed up. lol

 

Then you have Discord and people change their names on there all the time, it seems. Confusing. There was one fella who changed his name and there for awhile I was wondering where the hell he went to. hah.

[Murdoch]

You want to talk weird coincidences? I knew this English girl years ago when I lived in one city. We lost touch and sometime later I moved back to my hometown. I was talking to an old friend outside a pub and somehow the topic changed to this annoying TV show. I thought of this English girl because she was obsessed with the same show, going so far as to take the phone off the hook. I told him about her and we had a chuckle. I walk inside the pub and my jaw dropped. There she was. Literally the first and only time she's been to this town, and it was the first weekend I went out after moving back, and she went to the same pub to boot.

[Grazza]

Coincidences are inevitable, so we shouldn't be too surprised when they happen, even if each one in itself is unlikely. But two from my own experience stick in my mind as pretty extraordinary, both (sort of) banking related.

 

During a ski trip in British Columbia I signed up for a day's guiding. One of the other people in the group (of about 8) turned out to work at the branch of the bank where I had my accounts back in the UK (in fact, as one of two people who could potentially have been the main contact for my business account there). OK, it was a predominantly British group of skiers, but no reason to expect any geographical bias beyond that.

 

The 8-digit confirmation code for a recent bank transfer matched exactly a sequence of 8 digits from my cellphone number. (Sequence of 8 digits = 100 million possibilities.)*

 

* Sure, I know. Assuming that, say, there are about 1000 sequences of 8 digits that have some significance to me, there is about a 5% chance of two of them coinciding. So not that astonishing. But most of those sequences aren't ones that I'd instantly recognize.

Edited November 15, 2019 by Grazza