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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

AOL instant messenger suggestion when I was in grade school.

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.

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 stole 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 the former name for half or a full decade.

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.)

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.

Well, I'm a huge Swiftie, and my partner was eating pickles at the time I was creating this account, so...

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.

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

I wanted to prove to my parents that I would stay pseudonymous when on the internet, so chose a name that would remind me every time I typed it: secret_online. The underscore is important and I get annoyed any time a service doesn't allow me to enter it. I assume this feeling is felt by those with an O'<something> surname when systems don't accept the apostrophe.

At times I wonder if I should switch everything over to my IRL identity, but every time I come to the conclusion that I probably shouldn't because it'd be impossible to separate the two again. I also wonder whether this name has done its dash and I should pick a new one. But what purpose would that name serve that this name doesn't? For now this is fine so I'm sticking with it. Identity is hard.

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.

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.

­

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.

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.

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 name is several permutations removed from its original form.

Way back when, I noticed two trends of Reddit usernames:

1. OBNOXIOUS_ALL_CAPS
2. shameful-porn-addict

I decided to spin up a persona as a shameless degen coomer (years before the phrase “shameless degen coomer” existed) with variants of HORNY-IN_PUBLIC as the name. More of an amusing novelty than troll troll. Over the years, I became the mask as I enjoyed the roleplay more than chasing after my expected life goals. Later, I dropped the incessantly horny on main aspect from this family of names when registering for new sites. (I have about two other families of names that are loosely IRL-based that I largely no longer use)

Not to mention, it’s fun to call my esoteric opinions the voice of the public.

It's pretty simple in my case. I like raspberries. I also like coffee. So I fused the two.

Mmm... Maybe I should make a cake that uses both. Could work, actually. Bit like the raspberry and dark chocolate combination.

I get a lot of questions that I should be answered by my username.

I don't actually get a lot of questions.

I switched to this handle a little bit ago after deciding to retire the one I'd used since... My Gmail beta invite. Yeah so just a few years now. But it's the only one ive used on Tildes.

It amuses me that people believe it

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

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.

Sorry, it’s boring. I stole the name from ogre3d because I had just learned about it around the time I made this account. I do feel a bit bad, I don’t think I appreciate the name as much as a dedicated lover of ogres would. I wish I chose something more representative of my usual usernames, which are long and fantastical.

Somewhat related, I struggle to grab the username “first initial + last name” on professional services because there are multiple people out there with the same name as me in the same line of work. I measure my success against theirs.

I worked at a smallish company for many years, being one of two IT people who would regularly fix peoples issues, including the CEO. I would semi-often go to the CEO's house to troubleshoot tech issues for them and would often help them in their office, though they would often make themselves scarce when I did.

At any rate, I'd been working here for years and we're at a company party at the CEO's house when said CEO needs some IT assistance, they look at me from across the kitchen and go, "Uhhh...hey....hey" pregnant pause "....could you uhh, help me with this?" It became immediately apparent that they didn't know my name, in spite of working at the company for years, interacting with them for years, etc, etc. I later told my friend and colleague about it, as I found it darkly amusing. Said friend jokingly said the CEO knows me only as Beardy Hat, given my constant beard and constant baseball hat. Thus a screen name was born.

I used to comment on CSS Tricks as Anonymous. Chris Coyier actually emailed me asking me to use a real name if I wanted to keep posting in the community and that my comments had been beneficial, drove engagement, and were positive contributions.

I told him I'd meet him half way. And picked Not A Name, but spelled as Nadya Nayme. He agreed - as that's at least someone people could specify by name.

So I started going by Nadya where I can be and NadyaNayme anywhere it isn't.

Once upon a time back in 2007 I got an after school job working at my local radioshack. I'm a taller guy, and at the time I drove a '96 Jeep Wrangler and wore big aviator sunglasses. When I came in for my first day, they were playing Top Gun on the in-store TV's, so he looks at the screen and then at me and goes "goose". The nickname stuck, I liked it, and my friends started calling me "goose" also. He even pulled some strings to get me a name tag that I still have to this day. It was a fun job purely due to my manager being an awesome guy. It was in the mid-to-late decline of radioshack as a company, the high pressure sales tactics on cell phones were becoming more and more strong, and business certainly wasn't doing better year after year. Despite that, I did get to learn some about small electronics, and picked up some diagnostic and repair skills I still use today.

I became a locksmith right before joining Reddit, and I thought the name was funny. Now I'm not on Reddit anymore, and kinda not really a locksmith anymore either. But the name is as true as it ever was.

When I was about the age of picking my online identity I was obsessed with Wagner's Ring Cycle. It was literally the only music I listened to for about a year straight and sadly I don't have metrics still but usually I listened to approx 2 operas a day so I think I listened to it well over 150 times all the way through. So it was no question that this inspire my online name. I didn't like Valkyrie nor the german Walkure so I figured Rheingold. Then needed a 2nd part to it which I debated for a while, decided on River cos (a) it's the gold of the River Rhein and (b) River Tam from Firefly

Over the years I shifted from abbreviating as 'rhein' to abbreviating as 'river' and now im just 'river' to everyone!

The username on this account is just phonetically my initials with “bestee” after because it rhymes. I have started using sudo_sara in other places, which I kind of only picked because I was doing a bunch of Linux work when I got sick of my now old handle and was typing sudo a lot and I guess I liked the way it sounded with my name. I haven’t switched to that on tildes though since I’d have to make a new account. I guess I don’t really have much of an attachment to that either, I’ve changed handles a lot since I was a kid and I never really had one that lasted me more than a few years or one that I’ve been particularly attached to. It's a bit silly, but I'm actually kind of envious of people who have used the same handle for 10+ years and aren't really sick of it. I have yet to find one that's truly satisfying, like "yeah, that's the one" when I make one.

Mine actually comes from the old Xbox live days and playing left 4 dead. My friends were using names like Witch_Hunter and TankSlayer. I didn't really care for a l4d name so I ended up making GummybearSlayer as a joke (and because I was putting away some gummy candy). It kinda just stuck. I went back and forth on a lot of usernames on platforms over the years, but ended up coming back to a shortened form of my original Xbox live account. Gummy is just less of that teenage edge while keeping the goofy memory.

Ran a meme gaming club called DAYS. The only entry requirement was to have a day of the week in your user name. Were open to public holidays or important dates if you could make it work. Was silly but a lot of fun.

I got into mushroom foraging around the beginning of the pandemic. One of the ways to help identify a mushroom species is by its spore print (leave the cap on a piece of paper or aluminum foil overnight and see what color you get after the spores have dropped) Spore Prince is just a play on words of that. :)

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. :)

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

I like The Culture series of books.

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

Yeah its just my initials (and now my wife's, interestingly enough).

From The Fall Of Troy song 'The Last March of the Ents' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w21FMRka2D4

Which comes from LOTR

So when WoW was in the early days (not sure about now) they had a random name button. I hit it, got "Arten" but that was taken. So I slapped an extra R in there, making Artren, and it's been my username since!

I wanted a new online alias after my old one didn't resonate with me anymore. I like symmetry, and the idea of 3 points being the most stable bond (and also being able to make a tripod) made me pick 3 characters.

X, for the mathematical unknown, things we do not know.
0, for nothing and things being circular and repeating.
8, for being my favorite number and the sign for infinity when turned sideways.

I've participated in last year's and also mentioned a 'logo' or design of sorts which ties into this whole thing and also became a tattoo on my back.

My real name is Sam, and growing up I was very inspired by and influenced by Samwise Gamgee. Banazîr Galbasi is his original name in Westron, so I use that as a username when I don't mind the potential for my real name to get connected to the account eventually.

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.

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.

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.

Cradle by Will Wight

I participated in a study once, and when the paper was released, everyone’s names were changed. The participants all got normal names - Alan, Jim, Hannah etc - and for some reason I got Delphi. When it’s not available, I go with 1612elphi (pronounced Sixteen Twelphi) as a reference to a Vulfpeck song.

My name is Derek, and I think I'm pretty cool. May or may not be true depending on who you ask, but hey, positive reinforcement :)

What's that?

My username comes from the idea of the island of stability in chemistry. I am not a chemist or even really a scientist but when I joined here I picked something that I hoped would make me seem academic and respectable rather than the languishing office data cruncher I am.

No, it's not inspired by Wall-E.

Nor is it meant to be Mall E.

No, I'm not really into French film.

And I'm not a Danish catfish.

I'm not from a certain municipality in Belgium.

It didn't come from a certain Captain but I certainly don't mind the association, and it has helped cement how I pronounce it in English.

No, I was maybe 10-12 years old, well over two decades ago. At that point I didn't really have much of a wider online presence, much less a consistent handle. I was playing the 1998 game Phobia II with my older brother. Cooperative game, sure, but I kept consistently scoring better than him. When I managed to get the high score, sibling rivalry being what it is, I felt pretty cocky so I tried entering that as my name, albeit in my native language. That word is six characters long, but the game only allowed five at most. Truncate, make it sound better in my language, and that's how I got from "mallig" to Malle.

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.

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.

Pistachio pudding makes me sick

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

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.

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.

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 was responding in last year's thread and I'm bold enough to make appearance in this one as well. Bear with me.

When I was say 15 (which is a looong time ago) we have gone to PC gaming corner/club woth some friends. Admin there, named Matrix, asked me what my nickname is so he can sign me in the system. Because I played a bit of (old even back then) Earth 2140 at the time one unit from the game came to my mind immediatelly - it was plasma shooting badass mech called Spider. So I say to Matrix I want to be Spider to which he replied he already has one and also a few Spidermans... "Well, we are Czech after all" I told to myself and just went with Czech translation of the word spider which is, you guessed it, "pavouk". And so I became known as Pavouk.

The number 106, which I later added, has its forgotten history as well. It was back in elementary school when 106 became meme number of our class. I don't know the origin but it stuck with many of us up to these days. When I needed something that differentiates me from simple "Pavouk", it was clear I had to use this number.

My idea of me on internet is completely opposite to yours - I use one username everywhere (possible) and I stand by it publicly. I also take care of, say, my image - I weigh the words before I post them, just like I do in real life. My Pavouk106 nick is simply my virtual mirror. Handy people are able to dig up many thing about me from this username and I know it, hence why I try my best to stay in the good light.

It's my initials.

Man some real elaborate and interesting ideas on the username creation.

I like burritos with just beans, salsa, and vegetables. Hard to find premade.

I have a chronic illness that makes me fatigued all the time, to the point that it became a habit to tell people my emotion is "tired" whenever anyone asked me how I'm doing before I got a proper diagnosis and medication to help with the fatigue and the pain that was causing the fatigue.

I am a man with pugs.

An evolution on a previous name (Ravenheart), which was a song from my favourite band at the time.

I changed it to Valravn because I wanted something a little less “edgy” and also sometimes ran into someone who already had the name, but then I kept getting comments like “oh, I love that roller coaster too!”) so I adjusted it slightly, to hopefully still make sense.

I am not even Danish, but a few years after changing my nickname, I did move pretty close :)

I work on modeling nuclear reactors. Rickover wrote a memo (often called the paper reactor memo) about how academics come out with these great reactors on paper that will never be built since they aren't practical. I model a lot of paper reactors right now as part of my research and it's just something I think about.

Mine is a simple mash up. I was in a rush to make a League of Legends account when my friends wanted to play over the pandemic; my usual usernames had been taken already.

So since I had been recently listening to Hatsune Miku and I beat Dark Souls 3 earlier that week, I fused them together. My friends ended up with numbers and off-spellings for their usernames, which I was glad to avoid.

First 4 letters of my name.

My name came from having the nick/handle "zod" on the IRC back in the late 80s/early 90s. There was no way to reserve your nick handle back then, so as more people started joining the chat networks sometimes people would use your name and it caused mass confusion. There was a chaotic year and a half period where I ended up hosting a bot on a server to hold my name in place, but there were still a couple of people and their friends harassing, and hacking me (firewalls weren't really a thing at the time for PCs and the Windows network stack was fragile as hell) to try to force me offline to get my somehow coveted name. I eventually decided to change my name to zod000 signifying that I was the original and let the rest of the crazies fight over it.

From a major player in the cowboy scene. His name was Cowboy Dan. Quite a tragic tale.

And the English translation is “from a cowboy” so it is also a self explanatory handle.

I like spiders, I like cats. That's basically it. :)

Small side character in Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. Was looking for a username when I was creating a Neopets account to play with my friends and decided I look in the in-game encyclopaedia since I was playing it at the time.

Rarely used and only time I'm been restricted from using it is in Star Wars games since you can't use in universe names for your username

Mines pretty simple but has gone through multiple evolutions.

It all started out when I was given the nick name JRizo by one of my best friends as a kid who tragically passed away some years back. We were kids and we thought it was cool riffing off my first and last name.

I added 2016 after it when using if for usernames but then soon shortened it back to JRizo and then made the slight change to JRiso to more accurately represent my last name.

Eventually after years of using it I reduced it down to just Ris. The first three letter of my last name. Unfortunately not every site allows three letter handles so in some places I use TheOriginalRis Or just my first and last name together.

I like it because it is short and simple, and always reminds my of my late great friend.

Started using mine a while ago, it started because all the names I tried were taken so I tried a silly name and it worked. So I've just gone with it because it's not likely to be taken. Not that I haven't run into that before, in which case I replace "The" with "Is". lol

I worked at Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerry's for a few years. I made a LOT of waffle cones. My boyfriend at the time loved that I always smelled like waffles and also teased me for being so chill and lazy. Slothywaffle. I was 18. I'm 40 now lol

My story is boring. "Perryapsis" is a play on the astronomical term "periapsis" that can also be shortened into a real name.

I started using a version of this username (but with numbers at the end, because it was the late 90s) when I was playing Breath of Fire 3. I thought the Kaiser dragon form was the coolest and so I used it on an IRC server that I would hang out with friends on. It stuck, and probably decade ago I decided I wanted to use something that didn't have any numbers but would still be unique and easy to register on new sites. I decided to use a Style to make it less likely to be taken, and settled on "The Right Reverend", which is the form of address used by bishops in Anglican (and Catholic, I think) churches, because I thought it was funny.

One of these comics is titled "wundumguy." I can't find it. There's ~800 of them, and the text isn't searchable. Good luck. Lemme know if you find it.

I previously went by the username badcombos because very early on I enjoyed playing fighting games but I wasn't very good at them. Eventually I lost interest in fighting games and moved on to other game genres but the name stuck around. A few years ago I decided to change it as apart of a bigger personal initiative to change my outlook to be more positive. Being known as the guy who was bad at something wasn't the perception I wanted to bring and carry around anymore.

My current username is fairly generic and not very inspired, but it was somewhat inline with my goal of occasionally giving sage advice.

Ehh, it's pretty boring. I use unique usernames for every site; also, some usernames are very occasionally tangentially related to my interests. On this day I did happen to be watching loon calls on YouTube, and some loons have black plumage. Et voilà.

I was 12 and playing OG Starcraft. I thought it sounded cool. I tried for a while in college and later to come up with something better, but I finally realized it had become too much a part of me. I've been Jerutix (jeh-roo-ticks) for 2/3 of my life now in gaming and anonymous social media spaces - wild.

Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark:

“He remarked to me then,” said that mildest of men,
    “‘If your Snark be a Snark, that is right:
Fetch it home by all means—you may serve it with greens,
    And it’s handy for striking a light.

“‘You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;
    You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway-share;
    You may charm it with smiles and soap—’”

(“That’s exactly the method,” the Bellman bold
    In a hasty parenthesis cried,
“That’s exactly the way I have always been told
    That the capture of Snarks should be tried!”)

“‘But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
    If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
    And never be met with again!’

(Edit: It's also an odd type of tree and something in superfluid physics, though both are named for the Carroll poem. But I didn't find out about them until I'd started using it.)

(Edit 2: Changed Project Gutenberg link to a version that includes the original illustrations.)

Many years ago I briefly participated in an elder scrolls themed forum rpg. I played an ashlander, so I took a random ashlander NPC’s name as my character’s first name. I liked that name a bunch, so I kept using it when I needed a random name somewhere. Except at some point, I got something mixed up and the vowels got slightly shuffled around. So there we are.

My handle started as pmonkey_aa back on Yahoo in the late 90s, where I hung out in the "Religion & Philosophy" chatroom and played ranked cribbage (Yahoo Games was a fantastic platform for a minute or two, and I rarely see it get the nostalgia of other Web 1.0 sites). I still remember some of the characters who were regulars in the chatroom and the drama, and wonder whatever happened to some of them. I remember one guy called himself "BrianSoddingBoru," and it still makes me giggle.

The "pmonkey" part was due to my first job. I'm from one of the last places in the universe that wouldn't let you pump your own gas. You had to have an attendant do it for you. One of the homespun, salt-of-the-earth nicknames we had for an attendant was "pump monkey." The "_aa" was simply because "pmonkey" was taken.

Later, I couldn't get "pmonkey" anywhere else, so extended it to "Promonktheus," a play on the name of the titan in Greek mythology (this was long before the Alien franchise movie came along). Somehow even that one got taken by someone else, so I dropped the "-theus" for a fresh start, and somehow that never seems taken. Maybe I'm more of an early adopter these days.

Mine wasn't from anything, I was staring at the WoW char creation screen when my mates convinced me to join them during Burning Crusade and made this up from the ether.
Wasn't any search hits so yay I made something unique!
Fast forward to 2024 and oh shit I need to travel back to younger self, slap and teach about infosec. Like I'd played Deus Ex, I had a warning about what was coming

Mine comes from a one album wonder band called The Fire Theft (who rose from the ashes of Sunny Day Real Estate). It's been over 20 years since their album came out. Damn.

It comes from a character from the anime .hack//sign, which I liked around the time I started setting up internet accounts. It's sort of a legacy username, I don't usually use it for new things, but I used it here for continuity with my HN/Reddit usernames (well someone bet me to Macha on Reddit, so I'm MachaHack there).

Honestly I've used this one from practically the first time I was introduced to internet in college. Was introduced to the idea of a chat group/mush and I like cats a lot and also really liked this one batman character from Batman the animated series so, I used it. And have been using it or variants of it (because it's not an uncommon name so usually I can't just have it) ever since.

Mine comes from an unusual song title off of an unusual record by the unusual techno group Underworld.

The video is a large man jumping on a bed and the song is 'King of Snake's repeated with dragon screech sounds and a recording of an Asian man passionate about snake fighting.

I’ve always connected to the “air” element in video games and I also love the use of latin words in video games.

Mine is simply my favorite Gundam.
Also it sounds cool.
But it is quite a popular handlename, so I often end up turning it into "Exial", "Exialt" etc.

Before this I used "Mutekitate".
Which is just Japanese for "Invincible shield", with my wife using an ID that is a play on "sword".

My oldest one is RainbowPuppeteer. (Fan of Touhou games, and my fav character was Alice, who, in the game, is called the seven coloured puppeteer)