Othello Cody Verrocchio
2026-09-20
The Cane I Chose
Why Otto Brinkmeier Created Othello Cody Verrocchio
I plucked the rod with which to tan my own backside.
I then spent a painstaking amount of time curing it for maximum pliability and tensile strength, before applying it to myself.
That, in rather absurd terms, is how I came to create Othello Cody Verrocchio.
It sounds ridiculous, but there is a serious idea behind it.
I am one person. My legal name is Otto Wilhelm Friedrich Brinkmeier, but over the years I discovered that one name was not always enough to contain all the things I wanted to write, build, explore, and create.
So I began creating pen names.
Not because I was trying to hide who I was.
Quite the opposite.
I was trying to give the different parts of myself somewhere to live.
Meet the Creator: One Storyteller, Multiple Pen Names
I write and create under several pen names, also known as pseudonyms or personas.
They are all me — one real person — but each name represents a different side of my work, interests, and creative personality.
Othello Cody Verrocchio is my primary pen name for published literary works, including my science-fiction projects and the Divine Origins series.
God’s Journalist, also known as Dei Scriptor, is the name I use for Christian writing and daily devotions.
Otto Wilhelm Friedrich Brinkmeier is my legal name, but it has also become my technical identity. It is the name associated with projects such as the PlebMachine cognitive desktop system, PlebWare, software development, technical documentation, and my more practical experiments with computers.
Then there are the occasional characters and personas: Lazar Cody Mendicant, Dei Interretialis, Captain Gemini, and others that have appeared when a particular project, joke, experiment, or piece of writing demanded its own identity.
These names may look like different people.
They aren’t.
They are different doors into the same workshop.
So Why Do It?
Why would one person need several names?
For me, the answer is surprisingly simple:
Organisation.
Writing science fiction and designing software do not necessarily put my brain in the same place.
The person who wants to build a fictional universe filled with cosmic mysteries, theological questions, strange technologies, and philosophical dilemmas is not quite the same fellow who wants to spend three hours figuring out why a Linux configuration file refuses to behave.
Yet both are me.
Rather than constantly forcing every idea into one enormous identity, I began separating the work into creative spaces.
Think of it as an author writing science fiction under one name and romance under another.
Except my genres are somewhat stranger.
Mine are more like:
cosmic faith-driven stories
and
human-centric computer tools.
And Then There Was Othello
Othello Cody Verrocchio was not created overnight.
The name evolved.
There was a desire to have an identity that belonged specifically to my literary work — something that could stand on the cover of a book, at the top of a story, or beneath a piece of philosophical fiction.
Othello became the storyteller.
Cody remained part of the identity I had already built through other creative work.
And Verrocchio gave the name the particular character I was looking for.
Eventually, Othello stopped being merely a pseudonym.
He became a creative identity.
That distinction matters.
A pseudonym can simply be another name.
A persona can become a framework through which ideas are developed.
Othello became my framework for storytelling.
But Why Keep Otto?
Because Otto isn’t going anywhere.
Otto is the builder.
Otto is the technician, experimenter, tinkerer, documenter, and occasionally the poor fool who decides that creating his own solution will be easier than using somebody else’s.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it is precisely the opposite.
Hence the cane.
There is a certain irony in creating elaborate systems to solve problems that might have been avoided by simply leaving things alone.
But that is also part of the creative process.
You build something.
You break something.
You learn something.
Then you build something else.
One Person, Many Names
The important thing to understand is that these identities are not competing with one another.
They are collaborators.
Otto can build the machine.
Othello can write the story.
God’s Journalist can ask the spiritual questions.
Dei Interretialis can wander into the web.
Lazar can probably find a way to turn the whole thing into a marketing opportunity.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it is the same person, sitting at the keyboard.
Me.
Why This Matters on GitHub
GitHub might seem like an odd place to explain all of this.
But increasingly, my creative and technical worlds overlap.
My repositories are not merely collections of code. Some contain documentation, experiments, writing, philosophy, tools, world-building, and ideas about how humans interact with technology.
So if you encounter Otto Brinkmeier in one repository and Othello Cody Verrocchio in another, you haven’t discovered two developers.
You have discovered two aspects of the same creator.
The names are signposts.
They tell you which part of the workshop you have walked into.
And perhaps that is the real reason I created Othello.
I didn’t create another person.
I created another place for myself to create.
And, having chosen the cane, I suppose I had better keep writing.
— O.C. Verrocchio
The Keyboard Is Mightier Than The Pen —–