FAQ

Who is "Gleep"?

Gleep is a character from the "Myth" series by the late Robert Lynn Asprin.

In this series, Gleep is a secondary character, a dragon, the pet of the protagonist. The dragon is so young, all he can say is "gleep" - hence the name.

I (Earl Brown) chose the nickname "Gleep" more than a decade ago. When I realized I needed a good long-term nickname for my online presence, I noticed there were really two types of nicknames; plagiarism and imagination. There were people online using the names "Darth Vader", "Luke Skywalker", "Lord Vader" - all the "big" names from movies or real life. And there were those who had imagination to come up with their own names like "sonOfChAos" or "Beeblequix" (although that one might be plagiarist, too...) Anyway, I wasn't one of the second sort, but didn't want to blatantly advertise my lack of imagination, so I chose a lesser-known character as my namesake.

Why "the" gleep?

After a bit of time, I found there were other "gleep"s popping up online. While I was the first (at least I'm pretty sure I was), I was no longer the only.

So I put "the" in front to make it obvious - the others are imposters.

Well...they didn't come first, anyway.

So then, why "theGleep.com"?

After a while, I reasoned that if "gleep" was no longer unique, perhaps "thegleep" would not remain distinct for long, either. To solidify my claim as theGleep, I bought the name. (Rented it. You can't really buy domain names.)

...and the Avatar?

From the canonical smiley list:

:] Gleep...a friendly midget smilie who will gladly be your friend

The logo is just the :] smiley turned on it's side in a special font.

I found the font using the "preview" feature of Microsoft Word 2007; I created a new document with just the smiley, highlighted the text and then cycled through the fonts list until I found "FreshBot" - that was the one I liked the best.

After that, it was easy to use Gimp to create the logo and favorites icon.