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Username Explanations

Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 11:03 pm
by SamWiser
We had this in the old forum, and even on the interim forum, and I liked it. Basically its a place where people can explain their username. Is RocketScientist really a rocket scientist? How do you pronounce Mnementh? Is Liesmith a smithy of lies?

As for mine, I had been lurking for a while on the forums, and finally wanted to join. This thread was actually a large part of that. I wanted to have a cool and/or unique name, so I started thinking. I remembered a moment while hanging out with some friends and we started joking around. I mentioned that if I ever get a dog, I would name it Samwise. They mentioned that people would think I was weird, until one of them came up with a solution. I could call the dog Sam, and nobody would be the wiser. I put the two together, and I got my username. I joined right after that.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 11:38 pm
by Amara
Humn. Well!

Amara (Eye ee'ah kuh) was a name of a character I made up in middle school. I was a pretty lonely child, so I spent a lot of time making up other worlds and doodling. Eventually I had an entire tribe of werewolf people, and they wound up with names that middle school me felt sounded 'tribal'. Don't ask. I don't remember the others, but Amara stayed, and eventually became an avatar character for me. She was...stereotypically enough, a black werewolf with red eyes. Yup. Now-days I represent myself with a purple monster thing online, but the name has stayed for usernames!

Lately a few have started calling me 'Yeeks for short, and that's fine too. :p

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2013 12:30 am
by gamecreator
gamecreator wrote:Username is mostly historical and results from my poor ability of devising new things.
Also it's supposed to indicate my interest in programming.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2013 9:38 am
by Arydra
Amara wrote:Humn. Well!

Amara (Eye ee'ah kuh) was a name of a character I made up in middle school. I was a pretty lonely child, so I spent a lot of time making up other worlds and doodling. Eventually I had an entire tribe of werewolf people, and they wound up with names that middle school me felt sounded 'tribal'. Don't ask. I don't remember the others, but Amara stayed, and eventually became an avatar character for me. She was...stereotypically enough, a black werewolf with red eyes. Yup. Now-days I represent myself with a purple monster thing online, but the name has stayed for usernames!

Lately a few have started calling me 'Yeeks for short, and that's fine too. :p
I find myself in the same boat that you are in. One of my first ever DnD characters (actually my 3rd character in 3.5) was named Aryd. I played the character (yes, she was a female character. I was in middle school at the time) so much that she had unintentionally developed her own personality. So I moved this personality to other games until it became my trademark username Arydra.

Actually, even though it was spelled Aryd originally, I was pronouncing it more like Arydra (arid-dra) so during one of the times I was typing it in a friend told me I should try and spell it similar to how it is pronounced. Oh, and calling my Ary is fine, that is how I was always referred to on LOTRO when we would only say the first 3-4 letters in a person's name.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:21 pm
by TinSoldier
When I first started messing around with dial-up BBSes, I had to come up with a user name. (Yes, I am that old.)

At first I came up with "Loc-Nar" because I had recently become a fan of the movie Heavy Metal. Although I had other choices from that movie, I thought that Loc-Nar was most appropriate.

I don't really know what triggered the change to TinSoldier. Maybe Loc-Nar was already in use on one or more BBSes that I dialed into.

Some reasons for choosing the nick:
- Family tradition states that I am a descendant of Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote the story "The Brave Tin Soldier" or "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", which has always been one of my favorite stories.
- There is also the Tin Soldier nutcracker in The Nutcracker. The March of the Toy Soldiers.
- I've always liked the "One Tin Soldier" song by Coven as played in the movie Billy Jack. We sang this when I was in grade school.
- I was in the Marines at the time I chose the nick (early 1990s) and a veteran, and I thought that it was appropriate.
- I also find it similar to the Tin Woodsman of The Wizard of Oz, and I often use that same imagery.

With all of that, I think that the imagery just fit. I've used the nick for about 20+ years now, although I'll try "TinSoldier6" if "TinSoldier" is unavailable.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:50 pm
by WearsHats
Thanks for bringing this thread back. I kept meaning to do it and then forgetting or something.

Mine actually has a long-ish history.

Among my other medical "quirks," I went bald in my tween years. I was pretty sensitive about it, so I never went out in public without some kind of head covering.

One summer, my parents sent me to nerd camp. Technically, they called it a "summer program for the gifted." You go there to take classes during your summer vacation because you actually think learning is fun and you happen to enjoy hanging out with other people who feel the same. Like I said, nerd camp. It was fun. We had massive pillow fights in the hall every night and I learned all sorts of awesome stuff. Even took a beginner's class in magic. And, on one memorable occasion, had an adventure narrated by a tablemate as I was the only person brave (stupid?) enough to take on the nigh-impenetrable crust of the radioactive-green mountain which was purported to contain edible stuffing.

One of the rules of nerd camp was that you had to choose a nickname to put on your door. I'd never really had a nickname. Not unless you count my family sometimes calling me by the latter half of my first name (which is sort of but not really my middle name). So I thought about it. I was cheerfully insane (silly, nerdy, somewhat irreverent, etc.) and, like I said, I never went out in public without a hat (or, in Hebrew School, a large yarmulke). Also, I kind of liked Alice in Wonderland. So I chose for myself the nickname "Mad Hatter."

Soon after, I got my first laptop and was introduced to the nascent Internet. Websites didn't exist back then (I'm old), but we did have something called a BBS (Bulletin Board System). You could dial in to a local number and chat with whoever else happened to be online at the time. (You could also use this thing called "email" to leave a message for a specific person, which they would then pick up the next time they logged in. But I never really saw the point of it. Why not just wait until you were both online at the same time again?) I needed a username. So I stuck with MadHatter.

But I noticed that there were times when the chat room conversation would die off. No one would have anything to say. We'd just be sitting there, bored, staring at our screens. And so I developed a routine to fill in those lulls. I'd become HatMan, a superhero who fought boredom. HatMan would drive up to the "bar" (the chat room I frequented was themed on the TV show Cheers) in his Sombreromobile, have a wacky adventure, get everyone laughing and talking, and then disappear, job well done. (Eventually, he picked up a sidekick, Hairpin, who drove a Capcar.)

Well, over the years, I kept the name MadHatter as my primary username. Unfortunately, a lot of other people used that name, too. And there was a disturbing tendency for them to be real jerks. And a tendency for other people to confuse me with one or another of those jerks. So, eventually, I decided to leave MadHatter behind and become HatMan. It's my username of choice, and I probably would have been HatMan here, except that someone on Ustream had already taken it, and I came into the fandom on Ustream before I ever signed up with the boards. At first, I had a generic name based on my initials, but eventually, as I got more involved with the fandom, I decided that was too boring.

And that's how I ended up with WearsHats, which is the Goblinized version of HatMan.

For the record, I've long since become okay with being bald in public. But I do still have a collection of hats. Including a beanie copter, which was a gift from my sisters. They thought it suited my personality and that if I was going to wear hats all the time, I should have some more interesting ones. It became my personal logo. Sat on top of my dresser in college. And has been part of my userpic on pretty much every service I use.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 8:31 am
by Krulle
Krulle = abbreviation of Krullebol, dutch for someone with curly hairs.

Simple as that. Using it online since 1993 (CompuServe, different BBS-boards in the Netherlands and Germany, 1995 for the InterNet).

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 10:24 am
by Jotunheim
Jotunheim=Norwegian mountainy area, and home of the Stone and Ice Jotun in norse mythology. It has become someone of an embuggerance of late though, with all of the "Hurrdurr, that's like the planet the ice giants live on" retardation.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 5:16 pm
by Andrew
Despite what one may think, Andrew is not my real name. Andrew comes from my Second Life account name "Andrew Montagne", which I chose on a whim at the age of 12. It has stuck with me ever since, following me everywhere on the internets from forums to EVE.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 9:43 pm
by T-RexWithTourettes
Wearshats, WHERE were these nerdcamps during MY childhood? :weep:

Anyways, T-RexWithTourettes does not, sadly, have any significant backstory like most of these. Most my friends use their D&D characters, but, seeing as I'm the DM 99% of the time, I never knew what to name stuff. Besides drawing, my secondary thing I like best is writing, and I used to have a lot of fun making up random alliterations (bunch of words that have the same beginning sound, e.g. Bob bought big blue boxes of boring bulbous bananas). After a few tries, debating between PugInAPizzabox and a few others, I chose T-RexWithTourettes. It's fairly original, so whenever I use the username it never asks me to use another, so I use it for just about any and everything; email, Youtube, Deviantart, Xbox, anonymous signatures, you name it.
And, yes, the name has everything to do with my avatar.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 5:27 pm
by Liesmith
My name is ironic, like calling a tall person "shorty", or a bald person "Jim". I'm actually very honest at all times probably.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 5:47 pm
by RocketScientist
So is mine. I love science, but I can't do math. Which is depressing, really.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 7:56 pm
by TinSoldier
Liesmith wrote:My name is ironic, like calling a tall person "shorty", or a bald person "Jim". I'm actually very honest at all times probably.
...

Why is calling a bald person "Jim" ironic?

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 9:18 pm
by Zathyr
Because Jim has hair?

I've explained the origin of my own name enough times that I'm just going to quote myself:
Zathyr's sort of a name I've been going by for a while now in various networked settings. I stole the name from myself. Some stories I was writing featured this person who finds himself in this strange land and meets these creatures that, against all reason, do not speak English. They give him the title "Zathyr" which is basically an extreme form of the word "stranger", like what "strangest" would mean if it also meant someone you don't know ... the most. Well I liked the word as a description of myself. There's all these layers of meaning and happy fun deeper connotations you can put around it and stuff. Well, maybe not stuff. Hmmm...
I'm a strange man.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 9:25 pm
by Liesmith
TinSoldier wrote:
Liesmith wrote:My name is ironic, like calling a tall person "shorty", or a bald person "Jim". I'm actually very honest at all times probably.
...

Why is calling a bald person "Jim" ironic?
Well, you obviously don't know Jim.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 9:58 pm
by T-RexWithTourettes
I was actually wondering the same thing. I don't think I've ever known a Jim in my life...I feel so...empty.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2013 3:02 am
by Krulle
I'm pretty sure, Google image search came up with the wrong Jim....
Image

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 5:37 am
by John
So I always wondered what it would be like to just be John on a forum/mmorpg or the like. You know, be the first person to get the most basic name and beat everyone else to it.

Well I know how it feels now. And wish I had picked a different one :(

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 12:34 pm
by gamecreator
You should ask some admin about changing your username.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 2:02 pm
by John
I might, but I've been John so long, part me is like enh- its your goblin identity now

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:37 pm
by gamecreator
How long exactly? A few years? That's nothing.
Besides, wouldn't you regret it more later, when it integrates with you even more?

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 6:30 pm
by Liesmith
I think it would be hilarious for one of the Goblins to be named John. The Fortuneteller could've gotten so frustrated with Complains of Names that she just names a goblin 'John' out of spite. He'd be a completely normal goblin, but Complains would hate him with a passion and be unable to explain why.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 6:42 pm
by gamecreator
He will complain that John has such unusual name.

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Fri Mar 29, 2013 7:41 am
by John
bahahaha- In contrast I can see the humor. I'll just keep it and use a different name for my game goblins!

Re: Username Explanations

Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2013 4:15 pm
by Jibjib
Jibjib comes from the time I was at a friend's house and he asked if I wanted to create a character on a game called Guild Wars... yeah, I lost about 3000 hours of my life to that game :lol: I think I'd been watching the simpsons and liked the sound of Selma's pet iguana's name, Jubjub, but as the name had to be two words I just stuck Jibjib infront of that to make Jibjib Jubjub. After a while I dropped the latter, and then just started going by Jib in various forms (on Guild Wars 2 I can be found via Xibba, Xhibb, Jib Shieldarm or Jibjib the Knight among others).