What is a Kewbish?

I'm Emilie, a student and software developer, especially passionate about the web and tools for thought.

Online, I go by Kewbish . It's a unique nickname and the handle I use across all my work. (Bonus: No one else has used it, so I usually always get the username I want when signing up to a new platform and get fairly good search presence.)

Over the years, people've asked me a few times "what's a kewbish?" and "what does it mean?".

🚨 Spoiler alert: Nothing deep. I was 13, getting onto the internet for the first time, and just threw some letters together.

Regardless, here goes: the history behind the handle!

The YouTube Phase

Like most kids growing up during the rise of YouTube, I played around with posting videos and starting a channel.

I was too shy (and too boring) to post vlogs, didn't have the friends around to make skits, and not quite skilled enough to make tutorials.

But I was into gaming. I'd watch other Let's Players work their way through games and was even tinkering around with a few of my own. I was interested in indie gaming at the time, so I decided to record Let's Plays too.

Even though I was interested in gaming, that didn't mean I was good at it. Far from it - I considered myself a bit of a noob.

The Library Nerd

I was also a massive bookworm. I'd read at the dinner table, when we went out for shopping (shoutout Costco book section), and under my desk at school.

I remember going to the library every weekend and coming home with a heavy bag of books that I could barely lift.

I'd drag it in, plop down on the couch, and make my way through them all over the course of the week.

There was one book I read once, The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex.

It's about aliens and kid-friendly dystopia and weird animals. Oh, and J.Lo.

It wasn't a life-changing book. I liked the story, and it was fun to read. But I read it, and moved on to the next in my weekly to-be-read stack.

Somewhat of a Poet Myself

One day, I was thinking about nothing, when I realized something.

In The True Meaning of Smekday, there's a brief mention of a type of alien animal called a koobish. It looks like this:

Not the most friendly and cute.

But remember what I said about YouTube and gaming and being a noob? What if I was a Noobish Koobish?

But that looked funny - I didn't like the look of all the o's. So I switched them to ews.

And so, Newbish Kewbish was born. Here's the logo that I used to have for my YouTube channel.

I didn't go too far with the gaming thing: I tried out lots of fun indie games on itch.io and called a video a success if it hit 10 views.

I got bored after a while, so kind of let it go. Come high school, my friends were OSINTing me a little too much, so I deleted the channel and all the assets, and filed many Google takedown requests to wipe the internet of the cringe.

I dropped the 'Newbish' part of my handle sometime after, when I started getting into web development. (I also just wanted to make sure my friends didn't dig up my old videos.) Since then, I've just been Kewbish.

Today

That brings us to roughly present-day me.

In short, Kewbish is inspired by the Koobish from The True Meaning of Smekday, with a couple extra dashes of tech and tools for thought.

I think people that ask me what Kewbish means think there's a secret story behind it: a childhood memory, a tale of love and deceit, some play on words they're not getting. In that sense, I think this history's comparatively a little boring. Apologies!