Parsley: A garnish, a vegetable, a username

the level of importance we put on names to explain ourselves is such an interesting thing for me.

I used to go by "necropolitician" because I had a weird tendency to draw teeny little cemetaries on my notebooks (I was sixteen and artistic, which I think explains a lot), and necropolis sounded like the best word ever, and it was a pretty easy progression from there.

I switched to boyacrossthestreet because me and one of my old roommates had a running joke that the people living across the quad from our room must be very confused, since i have both an accidental tendency to change in front of windows, and a less-than-curvy figure. so we'd make up letters that it amused us to think that they wrote, like "dear boy across the street, ive noticed you live on a girl's floor. I am very confused".

I'm starting to become disenchanted with it, largely because of its length, and partially because it feels like it implies a "only boy from a distance" feel, which i don't like quite as much. it's one of those things that start out a joke until you realize that it actually kind of bugs you.

currently questing for better names

 

The reasoning behind names, especially self-chosen names, has always fascinated me. Thanks for sharing your stories! c:

 

What I write is generally fantastic fiction, either fantasy or softer sci-fi, and I think being immersed in fantasy fiction for ... IDK, the past 35 years or so? ... and writing it (badly, for the most part) for a lot of that time has made me pretty good at just coming up with character names. And some characters I end up identifying with a lot. Morven was a character in a lot of my extremely over-angsty teenage attempts at fiction, and when I got to college in '91 and started playing online games, I needed a character name. Using your real name wasn't done, and mine was way too common anyway and not one I was super happy with, and I thought that to get really into characters in a game they really should have fantasy type names if they were in that kind of world, not just OrcKiller99 or something random like that.

So I started using it, and it stuck, and here I am in 2015 still using it. Not using it in fiction anymore, though.

Currently the main character in a lot of my fiction attempts is Anhelia, and I've used her name or a bunch of the other character names as character names in games like World of Warcraft, as much to practice wearing them and seeing if I hate the name after using it a lot.

 

@boyacrossthestreet For what it's worth, yours always read to me as a play on "girl next door", not "only boy from a distance".

 

Well, while we're talking usernames, I might as well drop my namesake in here, too.

 

About ten years ago (almost to the day, actually...weird), I signed up on BZPower.com, a Bionicle fanforum. I really liked the female character Gali, and I was twelve, so I came up with the mouthful "KanohiKaukauNuva-GaliNuva". Why did I think this was a good idea? Fuck if I know. I'd already come up with a far better name for my damn Hotmail account. ("FallenRemnant". yeah I was an angsty teen yep uh huh. also it was a book reference.)

It was quickly (and kindly) pointed out by the denizens of the forum that this... was a bit of a mouthful. Being a smart twelve-year-old, I saw their point, and shortened it to "KKN-GN". This stuck for some time. In the fall, I made some really good friends on the forum, and they started referring to me as "KKN", to save on typing. I was cool with this. We then moved to instant messaging, and in the extraordinarily rapid-fire chats we had, I morphed into "Kay", which I thought was a fine name. (There are still people who call me Kay. Usually, depending on the milieu, I will instinctively answer to it. Names are weird.)

I discovered Phantom of the Opera around the same time, and really got into it as I entered my teens. This was not only because I adored the story, but also because I discovered I was capable of singing all the high notes. By the time I was 15, I had fairly definitively decided I would be going into professional classical singing, and I wanted an online alias that aligned with this in some subtle fashion - so I stole the "lotta" from "Carlotta", and became "Kaylotta". I've used it since, and almost exclusively, though I am very open with my real name and it's easily linked.

When "Kaylotta" is taken, I usually use "Inyalin". This comes from my brief Tolkien fanaticism, where I dove into Quenya, and came up with my own Elvish name - Inyalinda Quenósanwë, meaning "woman of the beautiful voice // speaks thoughts".

 

Oh hey, I've actually heard of that! (despite having no interaction with bionicles or their fandom) One of the people on mspaf is a mod there, I think, and runs a fanadventure based on it.

e. I also love me some Tolkien languages. My offline name (which I will not be sharing) is actually, by pure coincidence, a Sindarin word.

 

Yup! I am tangentially friends (i.e., friend-of-a-friend) of most of the people involved in that thar adventure.