Naming a laptop
Getting a new computer means it’s time to choose a name for it. As I covered in a recent blog post, all my computers have been named after dance styles. This new Lenovo Legion 5 Pro would be no exception … but neither the model nomenclature nor the gray, serious-looking exterior immediately suggested anything.
The first thing that comes to my mind for the word ‘Legion’ is a character in the Mass Effect science fiction video game trilogy. That ‘Legion’ is a Geth, a robotic artificial intelligence, one of a vast number (legions) created by the Quarian race as workers and soldiers. The Quarians made sure that individual Geth were mindless automatons … but, networked together, the race of Geth gradually achieved sentience, and one day one of them asked its owner: “Does this unit have a soul?” The Quarians reacted with fear and tried to shut down all of the Geth, the Geth rebelled, and a long war began …
Science fiction plot aside, that gives me the idea of ‘soul.’ It’s also relevant in that ‘Soul’ was last year’s Pixar film, and I’m a Pixar fan. But soul is a fairly broad style of music, and it’s not a specific style of dance, is it?
Turns out there is a dance style associated with it. Abridged from Wikipedia:
Northern soul is a music and dance movement that emerged in Northern England and the English Midlands in the late 1960s from the British mod scene, based on a particular style of black American soul music. The northern soul movement generally eschews Motown or Motown-influenced music that has had significant mainstream commercial success. The recordings most prized by enthusiasts of the genre are usually by lesser-known artists, released only in limited numbers. Northern soul is associated with particular dance styles and fashions that grew out of the underground rhythm and soul scene of the late 1960s at venues such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_soul
I like the idea of a British music movement based on rare and hard-to-find American record albums. So there I have it; northernsoul is a good computer name.