I'm always really fascinated by usernames. They're pseudonyms, they're nicknames, they're names we can pretty much pick for ourselves. Maybe it's just me, having always hated my given name, but that seems pretty cool. Anyways. Tell me where you got your username, as many usernames as you feel comfortable with sharing! And, if you have any internet nicknames, tell where you got those too! I love stories about these sorts of things :'D Spoiler: Really long ramblings about my own usernames whoops For me, I've run through several different usernames, each of which had a lot of significance for me. Originally it was Blazeheart16 (or Blazehart16, and yes I know that "hart" means stag basically but I thought it was cool looking so I stuck with it). This username came from my Warriors phase--Blazeheart was the name of my pseudo-self-insert character, chosen because I like firey things and heart=passion and caring, which pretty important to me. For a long time my internet nicknames were any variation of the word "Blaze". Then somewhere around there I was Raginghearts for a while, though it never stuck--even if I can get pretty grumpy and rage-y for a while, I've never really had the kahonas to DO anything about it most of the time--so ever since then I've kind of used it as a way to distance the Raginghearts accounts from any other accounts I had at the time. At some point in my Warriors days (I roleplayed in a guild on Neopets, lmao) I was given the nickname Jas by one of my friends, who claimed that it was Czech for Blaze, though since then I haven't been able to find any evidence to support that Jas means anything in any language, lol. It still stuck, and around that time I started using the username LordJas (or variations thereof), which strikes me as particularly funny because at that time I hadn't yet realized I was transgender. But it was either Lord Jas or Lady Jas and I knew I did NOT want to be called Lady so I just went with Lord lol. I still go by the nickname Jas (or Jassy, or any variation thereof). Then, a couple years ago I made the final username switch to my current username which I use on pretty much every site I'm on, Heavenbat. This one has an actual story behind it! I was on youtube trying to figure out a username to use, and I decided to try to use Hellbat--as a reference to my favorite animal and my favorite music artist, Meat Loaf, whose most known albums are the Bat Out of Hell trilogy. Unfortunately, that was taken. So I decided to go opposites, and thus Heavenbat was born! The convenient thing about Heavenbat is that it's rarely taken so I can usually have it all to myself, and if not I can just slap a number on the end and BAM it's all mine. Thanks to this username I've gotten a new batch of nicknames, all revolving around some form of Bat :'DD I love nicknames. I like to collect them. I'm pretty okay with people calling me whatever, though! So, yeah. If you ever see a Heavenbat wandering around any website, chances are it's meee. (I've decided I'm finally okay with people knowing what my tumblr is on here, but I'm keeping the Raginghearts thing just so it's marginally harder to find me from the outside lol) So now it's your turn! Share them storiesssss. Even if it's just the username you use for this forum, and even if the story is silly. I still find it fascinating!! *noms on popcorn*
Random name generator! You know, the ones that spit out vaguely-pronounceable fantasy style names. I was poking at it because I was procrastinating on something else so I figured I'd name ALL OF THE IRRELEVANT THINGS for that 'verse because fuck working on the next part. It spat out "Lazarae" in the middle of the Losals and Chazelais and Adavns. It gave me a good cackle, since Lazarus is the Latinized form of the name and some Latin words, when pluralized, end with -ae, so "many Lazarus." If you want to get technical, I don't think Lazarus would be pluralized with an -ae but it's been several years since I took Latin. Anyway I sat on the name for a while since I didn't have anything to use it for at the moment. My current Standard Username was starting to fit wrong and I felt it was time for a rebranding but had no idea what to go with. And then I remembered Lazarae. By then I'd... gone through a lot and was running on spite. I'd also come to the (at the time painful) conclusion that I just would not die and stay dead and took the name partly as a "fuck you" to myself. It ended up a major step forward on my recovery path: a reminder that I've bounced back from everything that's tried to kill me so far. I've cheated death more than once- a plural Lazarus. So "Lazarae." Before that my major usernames were vaguely-name-sounding words I just liked. They were both a little too feminine, and Kayuna ended up getting too cutesy for me to feel like it fit anymore.
http://i.imgur.com/MCyMG.jpg The original little pink beast. I had a habit, back when City of Heroes was a thing, of making four-foot-tall not-quite-human characters with bright pink glam hair, and after about the fourth or fifth of these I changed my global to littlepinkbeast and just kept using it.
my current one was based on homestuck's pesterchum/trollian handles, but hell if i remember how exactly i came up with it. and yes, i'm aware it has a grammar mistake in it ::D i use Eyefish on a few sites, and Eyefish_Soup, both from the dish shown in 07 Ghost. i tend to change my nicknames around every few years. can't attach to one for much longer than that. Kitewinter is coming up next, which would be my IRL Actual Chosen Name if I could change my name where I live! Kite is also the name I go by IRL whenever I can get away with it, because a kite flies and soars, but it's still tethered to the ground, it still has a place to return to, it is not lost. Winter because I love the season, and Kite Winter rolls better off the tongue than Kite Autumn. (and because Helix Kite Winter shortens to HKW.)
My username is a result of a lifelong game of 'telephone' with my actual nickname: When I was born my mother had a moment of dissociation, and called me 'truc', which is French for 'thingy'. Because in my family we like adding extra syllables to our names - I call my mother Mamaya, and my father papaya - truc evolved into 'trucha', which is coincidentally Italian for 'trout'. When I started interacting online (I did a bit of dating on OKCupid) I made a user account called 'Hallibutt', where I poked fun at the fact that my family nickname was a fish name and made a pun about my big butt. Having gone through the internet as Hallibutt for a while I couldn't stop the visual image of a fish with a butt (and of course twerking) so I created this avatar, and decided that I'd now go as fish butt.
Knowing that "with an h" is the answer to the most frequent spelling question about my name (and also that I am 30/f), you can probably guess my IRL name. :)
It's my name :D Simple as that really :P I used to go by Emsz, which I acquired through some highschool classmates and now merely go by Emma, because I sort of outgrew Emsz.
Hmmmmm, usernames... I've gone through so very many of them, man. I don't know if I was ever overly attached to any of them exactly. I can't remember what my very first username was, back when I started out on the TY forums (yes, the Beanie Baby people. I still have a bajillion beanie babies); it may have been something like Midnightblackcat because I love black cats, always have and probably always will, although that may have been my password instead, pft. But I remember that at some point I changed it to RufeBrush (or... something very similar) and used that for ages, because I loved how it sounded (though probably have been and still am pronouncing it wrong) and was exceedingly fond of the Redwall character of the same name. When I moved from TY to Neopets I used something else that I have forgotten, and there was one DragonRiders of Pern one that got banned (not for anything to do with the username, it was a silly mistake on my part), and then I got in the habit of making TONS AND TONS of Neopets accounts so I was using an absurd amount of different usernames. Some examples, found in a document where I kept all their p/ws because I would forget them otherwise (this isn't even all of them): P3nny4theguy Ligyrophobia (did not make this one up myself, I think I took it over from someone who was leaving) Silhouettedhorses Speakswithwolves foxxiefyre brokenhopes cowness (same as Ligyrophobia i think) djinn Pinkingscissors maltwhiskey 0m3ns sulphurheadmatches n1ghtwatch (undoubtedly named after the Discworld book) riingmaster Ducking Notsuchagooddetectiv Sevenpenny (p sure I got this out of a copy of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) Illusionable vorpalpenknife (a Doctor Who Extended Universe reference I liked, despite not actually reading the DW EU. Later became an email address I still use) AsphodelDaffodil Basically 90% of them were just phrases or words I really liked the sound of, and in many cases still do, pft. The ones that aren't are usually references to things or I had decided that I would have a Theme for that account and the user should match. Notsuchagooddetectiv for example was a themed account where all my pets were detectives, and either my persona or one of my pets thought they were a good detective but were actually pretty terrible, and riingmaster was circus-themed. This was also the case with my Subeta account, Soulrider, where I decided that I would be like a creepy Wild Hunt/Headless Horseman like figure who rode about with an entourage of ghostly, tormented pets stealing people's souls. That didn't actually last very long, I gave all my pets drastic makeovers, but I couldn't change the username so I just kept it because it still sounded good. I used to wear a lot of different hats when I was a teenager. Once I left Neopets and went wandering vaguely around other petsites for a while I started using Ragnarok a lot, in reference to the Norse end of the world despite everyone asking if it was a reference to a game or a book or somesuch, or if Ragnarok was already taken I'd use Ratatosk or Ratatoskr, my favourite Norse mythological figure (he's an asshole squirrel who runs gossip and messages up and down the World Tree from the eagle at the top to the dragon at the bottom and probably makes their arguments worse). I don't know why I got so attached to them, but they were pretty consistently my names, and I was often nicknamed Rag as a result, which I quite liked. It may have been me who nicknamed myself that even, idk, not many outside people have ever nicknamed me anything. When I wasn't using Ragnarok or Ratatosk (or occasionally both at once) I would occasionally go by badlyanimatedcat, purely because I liked the idea of my persona being, well, a really badly animated cat. But those accounts were always super short-lived, so I guess it was never particularly a 'right' name. For a while I didn't frequent anywhere that really needed a username, and then I joined Tumblr, and I can't remember whether I used TwoBrokenMirrors before then (I may well have done, probably did in fact) but it does seem to have normalised it and I certainly seem to automatically use it these days (though I used it here because of the tumblr connection), except for places where it's taken in which case I seem to use GiddyExcitement a bit, again because I like how it sounds. Though I don't think I'm going to stick with that one. TwoBrokenMirrors does actually have some kind of meaning; I have been eternally fascinated by the idea of using two mirrors opposite each other, infinity mirrors, for the purposes of scrying or other magic, and sometimes I wonder what would happen if you had two broken mirrors for the purpose. Though not apparently enough to do anything with the idea (yet). It's one of those things that sometimes sits in the corner of my head feeling like it has some Really Important Significance that for the life of me I can't get a handle on, like the feeling i get when I see forget-me-nots (that'd be a good new username, hmm). It's actually very frustrating. Next time I need a username I might try out Pinpiggy. Which is a probably insulting term for hedgehogs in the pgymy shrew dialect, from the Redwall book Martin the Warrior. Ahahaha. Again, I just really like how it sounds... EDIT: I also actually do really rather like being called Mirrors, which started ofc when I started using TwoBrokenMirrors. It seems to be a name that's come the closest to feeling Properly Right, unlike my birth name which is either neutrally fine or 'ugh', or anything I've tried to apply to myself, which usually start off feeling good and then get weird. Names are hard. It's a shame one would attract funny looks if Mirrors was used as a legal name. Though honestly if I tried to use it All The Time it would probably start feeling weird.
Elaienar is a name I came up for a character I played on several fantasy RPG forums. I was thirteen or fourteen, and I'd only done Redwall roleplaying before under the name Eowyn Theodwyn, so when I decided to try roleplaying on different boards I needed a new character and a new name. First I decided that I wanted an elf character. And an elvish character needs an elvish name, so I checked the dictionary at the back of The Silmarillion and came up with "elen-ear", which is "star-sea" - obviously the best choice for an elf name since those are the two things elves like most, right? But I didn't really like the way it looked and anyway the character wasn't a Tolkien elf, she came from a different universe altogether. So I fiddled around with adding and removing letters until I got "elaien-ar". Funny thing: I'd forgotten the editing I did after a few years, and found myself very confused when I went back to the dictionary and "aienar" wasn't listed under "sea". Also, I don't know if I thought of this when I was working on the name, but it occurs to me that "starsea" could be a poetic way of referring to the night sky. EDIT: I didn't actually officially roleplay Elaienar a lot, but I wound up sort of ... adopting her personality as my internet personality. While Elaienar used a cheerful, goofy attitude to hide the fact that she was clever and powerful, I used the same attitude because I found it easier to interact with people if I was pretending to be outgoing and happy. So I wound up using the name pretty much everywhere!
So Coriander is my chosen name but not my legal name or a name many people use for me. And I'm very fond of its origin. Among my four given names is Corbin, which is a family name and something my parents mentioned considering for me had I been amab. So when looking for a less feminine name, I wanted to look within family names and Cori seemed like a nice, gender-neutral derivative. I started using Cori publicly last summer while working at a summer camp that's been a big part of my growing up and a really solid community for me. One day a coworker of mine who is at least 5 or 6 years older than me and whom I really respect and I were talking and he asked me, "Do you ever go by Coriander? For long?" and no, I didn't at that point but thereafter I started to bc I love the feel and sound of Coriander and I also really like names given to me by other people, if that makes sense? My birth name is monosyllabic so I never really got any nicknames based on it (other than from my family) growing up and I always desperately wanted one. Still, though, I publicly go by Cori most of the time right now. Partially bc i promised myself I wouldn't do that west coast hippie thing and rename myself after a plant :P
i think i might've said this here somewhere, i have trouble keeping track of stuff like this haha. i got my username waaay back when i used to lurk on newgrounds, and decided to make a "really creative" username. i went to type something pretentious like Dearest Ophelia (not that i even knew who that was) and fucked up the spelling. thus, Deresto. but then recently i found out it's apparently an actual last name? oops. i sometimes use berranolla in the rare instance deresto is taken somewhere. just a bunch of letters i slapped together for a character in an mmo my bro made me play with him for a bit. two irl nicknames are bam bam (as in double pistols and a wink, not the flinstones character) and a tragic misspelling of my name in a b day card one year, danu. it stuck. :o 07 ghost is so good. i've been trying to rewatch the anime when i have time.
littlemissCodeless was what I came up with as a handle when I was flailing at pesterchum because new chat interfaces are hard. Codeless refering to computercode and my inability to can with it.
I really want to be able to fly. The thought of being able to fly makes me happy enough to twirl in circles. This wasn't even my first such username. Itty bitty 11 or so year old Swirl had a different, me-in-flight related handle.
I wanted something pretentious and not-quite-sensical for my music production moniker so I went with jamming together two bits of Greek. I suppose the "hedron" bit might have been math inspired, maybe. "Exo" just sounded cool.
Mine here is a boring story. Was too chicken to post under my usual username so I was like "ok I am a void" and idk. Picked it cuz I liked the connotations.
Aaaaah so many fun usernames! It was probably a bad idea to create this thread and then promptly go to bed, lol. I want to comment on each and every one of these but at this point that might be a little over-ambitious lmao. I might go back and do that later tonight tho It makes total sense to me! I'm pretty much the same way, lol. That's why I've accumulated so many online nicknames, and why I've been clinging to the nickname Jas for... probably around six years? Nicknames are so much fun lmao.
Here, lemme crosspost the thing I wrote in another thread about Wiwaxia. Also, pic: Anyways, it's been one of my favorite fossils for a long time, and I've been using it as an online name for like 4 years now.
Well, Morven was the name of a character in some horrible and derivative teenage attempts-at-fiction of mine. Back in 1991, when I first gained access to the Internet, I started playing online games and accessing online BBSes, and it was customary to use a handle. My real name's really common and just not cool enough for such, so I scrambled around for another one and picked 'morven' and it stuck. I've been using it ever since. More and more, though, it's been already taken at sites; there are a few people out there in the world that have it as a given name. Perhaps 5 of them at most. I also get all the email for them for some reason. I guess people just guess at their email addresses? So sometimes I use some of my character names. 'Anhelia' is the name of the undead soldier protagonist in my fiction, and 'Mindala' is Princess Yvgenia's bodyguard and companion and complicated; I've used both of those a bunch as usernames.
cinnamoniffer6 was my first online handle. I apparently was a precious cinnamon roll at 13. I cycled through some other ones in high school, I think anotheragenda might have been one of them, I really don't remember. Got introduced to fandom and started going by agent_florida because there was a throwaway line in the series that there were only 49 people for an agent unit named after 50 states and "Not after what happened to Florida. Poor Florida." Name was already taken on their official forums so I was flaarda there, and for a long time. Lowercase f. I don't know why lowercase is so important to me with these things. I cycled through some pretty great handles on Tumblr. I was... hm, I don't remember some of the early non-RP ones, but I think sw33tch3rryfr1ck was one of them (thanks Terezi) and it was intended to be a solely Homestuck-reading blog or something, didn't pan out. My last personal had the best usernames. I started out with deltacardinality (because Delta is a favorite character of mine and represents change, and also I was a redhead with a fauxhawk so I was literally a cardinal IRL). Moved to exeuntpursuedbyabear for a few days, then somewhere in there I ended up with complexcarbohydrates, in response to people being "trans-fat" on tumblr (if you recall drama over that). I was buttholewhisperer for a while and that's what a lot of people remember me as (the "WHISPER INTO ASS" photoset). Then I was gogurtcumshots, and when I deleted I think I was still using that name (screenshotted tweet "I'm so lonely I just microwaved a Gogurt and let it explode on my chest"). 2x2verse is the Homestuck AU I'm writing where everyone is poly and nothing hurts. Well, not much, and not for long. And pixels here because I started a habit of naming my sideblogs [interest]pixels. I am just a collection of pixels on the Internet to anyone else. I'd change my main to 2x2pixels but I have a feeling it's already taken and I don't want to mess up people's readmores because apparently people like my porn or something. this is long and dumb bluh
SO I've been identifying with supernatural beings forever. One of my first tumblr usernames was "monster nest", like a safe space where I could be a monster and still be left alone and sheltered... and shelter other monsters, too. Then when I concluded therapy, I felt like the handle didn't make sense anymore. Why should I be the monster just because monstrous things have happened to me? "Witch/Wix" was a natural progression - the idea of being a magical being who is in control of magic and has power over it, rather than being a victim or byproduct of it like monsters are. And "bloom" has to do with thriving instead of just surviving. It came to me in a dream: I listened to church bells that rang like "bloom, bloom, bloom" and then my skin started blossoming with red roses (I have a red rose tattoo which back then I already wanted, and it's a reward for the end of therapy too). So wixbloom: magical, in control of their life and of the wonders that surround them, beautiful and thriving :D
