Where does your username come from? (Following up on last year's thread)

I like vampires, I like gothic things, I like drinking the blood of humans I have a messed up sleep schedule.

The epigraph on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents,

In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix

First
Must
Burn.

Our current political situation makes it seem more political and more aggressive than I originally intended. Haven't quite decided how I feel about that yet.

Eh I have several monikers, this is probably my more general use one. I have about 6 generations of usernames and this is 4th gen and the oldest unabandoned one.

The origin is about as banal as possible: I was naming a character in WoW or something and could not get a name to stick. I had tried unsuccessfully to find a coffee table for my room and so I did not have a coffee table. Originally (and where possible) it is stylized !CoffeeTable.

Edit: OP, I assumed it was an ICQ handle or something

Edit2: my favorite username on the site is @teaearlgraycold since I read it in Picard's voice every time.

One of my favorite bands, not a reference to government.

I was in college browsing the Erowid archives, while also being annoyed that my (very common) real name was a PITA to register on any given website, as it was almost always taken. I then read about baeocystin, a relative to psilocybin, but with potentially milder and therapeutic effect. It also had essentially zero hits in any search engine at the time, so here I am! And it's turned out to be a great choice, in that I've pretty much always been able to grab it wherever I go, which is convenient. :)

(As an amusing aside, I did manage to get my real name as a gmail address, and it has been a real monkey's paw careful what you wish for experience. I get soooo much email intended for eponymous derplgangers around the world who can't be assed to remember their actual email addresses. It is both funny and tragic in equal measure. Divorce papers, birthday wishes, medical results, the whole gamut.)

I was like 13 and sick of my short lived, childhood username which was something like "<initials>ISDABESTEVER<dob>".
I wanted soemthing short, unique and not so dumb.
So I took "coffee" which is a word I like the sound of and changed some letters.

Its worked pretty well through the years, even now with the dense internet. I used to have a fun back and forth with a Nigerian guy who also went by kaffo and it was a bit of a war to see who'd get to services first, but I've not seen him in a few years now.
Sometimes though I'm screwed and I need to go for my backup "kaffse" which is just a pet name version of kaffo my freind used to say. Noone uses that, mainly because noone can pronounce it.

I used to always get a JumpStart educational computer game for my birthday. When my sister and I were little (like ~7), we played one of these (I don't remember which one, but it was detective themed I think?) in which one of the minigames involved a simple platforming session where a little stick figure guy you controlled needed to collect some stuff. This little stick figure guy was called "Sparks" in the instructions they gave at the beginning of the game. When my sister was playing, I would jump around pretending to be the stick figure as she was platforming.

Around the same time, I needed to come up with a username to make a neopets account, and I picked "sparks" because of the above. Obviously that had already been taken, so I added my initials to the end. Hence: sparksbet

I was rehearsing for a school play and the drama teacher kept getting on my case for not keeping my back straight during some of the dance moves. I actually had really severe scoliosis and was scheduled to have surgery at the end of that school year and was not physically capable of keeping my back straight the way she wanted. She called me lazy, some other kids were sticking up for me and trying to tell her about my scoliosis, and I said "I'm not being lazy, I'm genuinely crooked". I needed to make an email account for something later that day, so I used that, and I've been using it ever since. It was a pretty funny moment for me, and it's been a nice memory.

Moon Child, from the neverending story (a beloved book of mine). I more use the German 'Mondenkind' these days, though.

C D B! by William Steig (probably most famous for writing Shrek!) was my favorite children's book growing up.

I think I liked it because each page was a kind of puzzle that requires you to think about letters in a way you normally don't, while the illustration provides clues to ambiguous letter combinations.

For example, the first page has an image of a child pointing at an insect flying above a flower. The text reads:

C D B !
D B S A B-Z B.
O, S N-D !

Interpretation: See the bee! The bee is a busy bee. Oh, yes indeed!

I'm used to it from reading it so many times, but most of the adults I've shown this to get tripped up or even stuck on a lot of them. Some have called it silly or dumb. Maybe it's a bit silly (it's a children's book, after all), but I feel that it's a good lesson in orthogonal thinking.

I actually just explained mine (and how to pronounce it!) over in another thread.

I guess to give a little more insight, when I first started Tild-ing a couple of years ago I was working in an open-plan office. The layout of the site is distinctive, my username was pretty easy to see and remember. I don't dislike my coworkers, but I also don't want many of them knowing details of what I'm thinking,

So I just character replaced my username with l's and I's to make it visually as difficult for a shoulder-peeker to see. I did it on reddit and Tildes simultaneously, but that was just before the reddit API stuff, so I only really use it here.

I'm pretty sure I participated last year, but I love my handle, so here goes.

Way back in the proto-internet, when access was not as widespread an a popular online (an American online service at that) service charged hourly for access, I was a user of said service. This service (which we'll call AOL because, well, it was) had various chat rooms, and one set of them were for roleplaying. The character I created for this purpose was a fantasy character with a surname I invented to sound vaguely European, very high fantasy, and quite unusual. Her surname was Smith... kidding, her surname was Thrabalen.

Seeing as how I made the name up, I grew fond of it, and used it for my online identity, and have been doing so for more than two decades. I don't think I'm going to stop anytime soon.

I work as a Department of Energy contractor, doing nuke stuff.

My namesake is Mendanbar from The Enchanted Forest Chronicles

I first read the books years ago and consider them pretty important in shaping my young mind. I especially identified with Mendanbar when he was introduced in the second book (Searching For Dragons), so I just started using the name online and in games. :)

Mine's a reference to an Invader Zim episode of the same name. I've never even had a pet hamster before, although I did keep pet mice for a time!

I want to say I started using the name for Tildes exclusively, but then started using it as my go-to for other stuff.

My username comes from WALL-E! That Eve, not the biblical one. High irony since I was an early user and one of the few chicks to be on the site at the time it started. I also wanted the person who invited me to match and be WALL-E but no such luck. I should've gone with my usual calico variations.

I may or may not be bipedal. I'm not sure.

I like usernames allude to being human as that's what I am. It doesn't feel that way often. I remind myself every day that I am human.

I wanted to exude authenticity with the handle for my account. Though, this is just one of many monikers I have used.

Mine’s actually a first for me here on Tildes, because I finally joined a site early enough to get my pick of the litter. It’s a reference to a song from one of my favorite bands, Between the Buried and Me’s Shevanel Cut a Flip. It’s always been taken every time I join a site, so it was a pleasant surprise to get to use it here!

I shared a live recording of it instead of the original because first, they sound much better performing it in 2008 than they did as a bunch of 19-year-olds in 1999, and second, I was at that Nashville show where they recorded those live videos! One of my favorite live concert experiences.

I wanted a username that I could use across the internet to establish a consistency of presence.

My requirements were essentially

1. No numbers
2. Not directly related to anything that could identify me
3. Not a reference to any media property or person in case I one day change my mind about it/them
4. Short and memorable
5. Ideally something unlikely to be taken by other people so that I can claim the name as broadly as possible

I happened to be eating some kind of potato at the time and the song Let's Call The Whole Thing Off was on my mind due to a funny story one of my college professors told me*. So on a whim I tried this phonetic spelling of that line from the song and it happened to be available everywhere I checked. The only place I don't have puhtahtoe is Minecraft. I wish I had a way to contact the puhtahtoe of Minecraft and offer a trade or deal of some kind.

Amusingly, like 90% of the time I have heard people pronounce "puhtahtoe" after seeing my name (twitch/youtube stream chat) they just pronounce it "potato". But what can you do.

* I went to college for a music degree. My clarinet professor said that one time he was a judge at a singing performance evaluation. Some guy came in and sang Let's Call the Whole Thing Off but he had apparently neglected to actually listen to any recordings of the song first. He sang the whole song not doing different pronunciations of the words like potato, tomato, either, pajama, etc.

Pistachio pudding makes me sick

I've only met one person who knew the reference, in a game of Squad of all places.

I took a longer version of this name from a dude's spam account's display name. It has nothing to do with me or him. I shortened it because short nicks are cooler on IRC.

One of my all-time favorite musical numbers: https://youtu.be/N7yAe2MBIpE

Back in 2009 I got to participate in a beta test for Mount and Blade: Warband, an online medieval combat game like counter strike.

I went by (and still do sometimes) Snook, and fell in with a loose group of people with a hobo theme (dressed in rags, fought with peasant weapons) and took up the moniker "snook the hobofarmer". That eventually got shortened to hobofarmer once I figured out no one ever uses hobofarmer for a username, but Snook was relatively common.

So... Hobofarmer stuck. Plus it rolls off the tongue nicely, and people love to ask about it.

I like The Culture series of books.

I've been using this username on the internet for more than 25 years. When I came up with it I was a young teenager and I think it was just a random, easy english word. Later it has been found suitable in various ways, for example with regard to my desire for online privacy. I have a novelty e-mail address for it that reads like a sentence.

Since I'm a programmer, sometimes I say it's a programming language keyword. I get an alert and am automatically subscribed to the discussion every time someone writes @protected on any github text field, which happens regularly!

In the end, I'm a firm believer in the "you make your own meaning for your own names" school of thought. I have various other usernames that are the same - they were selected to be short and memorable, or long and unlikely to collide with anyone else's, and had no other inspiration behind them.

AOL instant messenger suggestion when I was in grade school.

Mine is a shortened form of what I used to use on BBSes and IRC back in the early 90s, mostly due to it being a common word that is unavailable on most platforms now.

I don't actually remember... the first thing I used it for was a username on Neopets over 20 years ago, though these days it's one of half a dozen or so that I cycle between so I don't feel like I can be followed from site to site.

There was a time, in my teenage years, where I played a lot of Diablo 2. I don't know if it was just my group of friend, but characters with short, english names were revered as Gods. Since only one person could have one username, word names, especially short ones were seen as being superior. There was also the fact that the shorter the name, the shorter the hp bar.

We spent hours with my friend just trying out different dictionnary words to see if some were not taken.

I didn't find any good ones, really, but that attitude stuck with me in other games as well. I've been Spell, Stand, Far and Randomise. The latter one came because there was a "Randomise" (or Randomize?) button somewhere and I liked the idea that my name was a randomizer.

My cousins and I (there are quite a lot of us) used to do puppet shows for eachother using our various soft toys. When the parents were starting to get firm about "go to bed" it became tradition for the story teller to have this super shitty across-stitched red bear come in and kill all the characters in funny ways over a few scenes to tie things off.

So when I started gaming and was wondering what name would strike fear into my enemies...

Oh, and my name is Sam.

This is one of several usernames I have across the web. I felt the other one I used was getting a bit long in the tooth so switched to this one about 6 or 7 years ago. I think the first time I used it was in the migration from NeoGAF to ResetERA after it turned out the owner of GAF was a creep. Felt fitting for a new username.

I just use it because I find the idea of Bruce Willis as a spruce tree to be quite funny.

Mines a reference(not exact) to a bit from Firefly.

It's my Final Fantasy XIV character's name, and that character has essentially become an extension of myself. FFXIV was literally a life changing game for me, so Nono Adomo will be my name forever, with a plus that nobody will ever take it!

I felt on frogetting my username/password to poptropica, so I would just make a new account. Eventually I ran out of ideas for a username and complained about it to my brother. Been ttyybb online ever since.

Blatantly stole it from my favorite singer 10+ years ago and I've just kind of defaulted to it since then when I couldn't come up with a username.

It's Dutch and the smoon was her nickname for Simone, and the tjes means little. Little Simone. I didn't know that when I picked it though - my name is not Simone, I am not dutch, nor am I little. But it sounded neat and I was a massive fan so yeah lol

I do have a new username now though, sofiery (my name is Sofie and I can be fiery. So very fiery ^^) , but I don't really want to change it on any of these kinds of places where I've been known by that name for half or a full decade.

Mine is Tom Bombadil's elvish name from Lord of the Rings. I think its only mentioned twice(?) during the council of Elrond and he was completly cut from the movie so I dont think anybody recognizes it.

I traded someone from Reddit some skateboard parts and they thought my real name was Irwin.