I go by “Drunken UFO Pilot” on some social media

I use my normal full name here in Medium, Linkedin and some other places where it’s best to keep serious, but in many other places, I go by “drunkenufopilot”

In the years before the 2008 financial crash, I followed a few blogs on the housing bubble. It wasn’t the bubble itself that made me curious, but the idea of “McMansions” from the 1990s that I was curious about their success of failure in the real world.

I knew a builder in the early 1990s who built McMansions. I saw a few freshly built ones in my neighborhood. Houses that are too big, pretending to be fancy and high class, difficult to maintain, expensive, and attracted buyers, at least they did back then. I’m no real estate person or house owner or anything, but it was an interesting topic to watch from a safe distance.

Later, in 2004 or so, I had a job that involved setting up software to grind on piles of images. A typical job ran for 20 minutes to half an hour, sometimes much longer. GPUs weren’t like they are today, so the computer wasn’t much good for anything else heavy on math.

But the web browser ran fine. Web pages were simpler back then. That gave me time to browse the web, researching scientific topics when the boss walked through the room and gawking at absurd news articles otherwise.

So one of those days I wondered what happened to those McMansions from a decade ago? I quickly found out that their owners were getting into financial trouble, walking away, underwater, trying to sell even at a loss. I found a few blogs on the topic, and on housing economics in general. One was by a guy named Keith, an American ex-pat living in the UK. It was good source of information on economics in general, focused on housing, and especially on the disaster of McMansions, other types of pricey houses, and option ARMs. Fun stuff!

One day, Keith noticed we, the subscribers and comment writers, were mostly using our ordinary names. A few used quirky nicknames, but mostly we had uncreative plain names. He encouraged us to think up more interesting names, something crazy, creative, to make reading the comments more fun.

I came up with “Drunken UFO Pilot” based on nothing in particular. Maybe I was drinking a mug of beer at the time. Maybe it was a few days after I saw Pixar’s “Lifted” on YouTube.

It’s a hilarious concept to imagine, a 1950’s sci fi movie style of flying saucer dashing back and forth in the air, wobbly, dangerous. Or maybe it’s crashed in someone’s yard, or some odd little moon.

It’s not just an AI generated image; it’s also an AI generated image.

My rather basic cartooning skills have atrophied to uselessness, so I asked Gemini and Midjourney for some quick sketchy toons. The best image from Gemini is shown here, but I will rework it by hand, making a few changes, and maybe use versions and variations of that for a logo, avatar, etc. and maybe print it on a t-shirt.