I've had three pretty consistent usernames for stuff over the years. First one, and one I still use a few other places, was shadowfire, and if there was ever a reason for it beyond "sounds kinda pretty" I've long since forgotten it. My old DA account was TurbulentIndigo and that appeared a few other places too, it's a Joni Mitchell album. prismaticvoid and variants came out when I was 15 and getting into Homestuck, I had to come up with a Pesterchum handle and it just sounded kinda nice. Shrug.
Back when I was in college in the early 2000s, I was still Mall Goth As Fuck and, in a desperate effort to distance myself from my weeb identity of yore, looked up some Gothic Names on a now defunct website. Ruevian was on the list and I just really liked it. It's stuck with me ever since, even now when all my gothiness is turned inward, under the crusty corpulent outer shell of a pasty potato housewife. Of course, I later learned Ruevian is in fact an alternate spelling of Reuben. I am the sandwich. It's me.
My first online handle was for my deviantArt account, and I went with EmpressNairec because at the time I hated my middle name (Cerian) and only liked it backwards. And my best friend and I used to play make-believe that I was empress of the fairies, and she was my heir. A couple of years later, we'd gone through our fairy phase (mostly) and were really into the Skulduggery Pleasant books, in which you can be bound magically by your parents-given name unless you came up with one of your own, so naturally we both did. I've always been really big on wolves and dragons (my email is wolfspirit) so I went with "lupa" as the female form of "lupus" the Latin for wolf, and "dracolis", purely because draco (Latin for dragon, wow, surprising) looked too short. I stuck with lupadracolis from fanfiction.net to twitter to tumblr to ao3, and now if I make a purpose-specific sideblog on tumblr it's as lupas-somethingorother, eg lupasmusicblog. Nickname-wise, I have Lupa from the above, and Becca and Beq which are short for my irl name Rebecca. I've also been Rebec, Be-caw, and Egg (from my surname) off-the-internet, and have a passionate distaste for being called Becky, Bekky, etc, I think from knowing too many unpleasant Beckies when I was at school.
I actually don't remember any of the usernames I used pre-2009 or so except for one, and I'm sure I'm blocking them out for good reason, since the one I remember is helenaxxheartbreak (on Neopets, of all places). Hahaha. Oh, and my very first username anywhere was beaniebutt3 on AOL (my friends and I all had matching usernames, beaniebutt 1, 2 and 3). My current username is a sort-of reference to Aranea Serket; when she was first introduced, my friend who was reading Homestuck with me said "which one is she? Mindfang? She looks like a dork. Spinneret Dorkfang."
it started with my cousin introducing me to neopets above anything else, even before i had my own email (i ended up using my uncles... he mustve gotten some weird emails because of me XD). He created an account for me just so he could get free points or whatever and i ended up choosing my name plus a string of random numbers. Then I got aim and my username there was Shysong which was a character i was inspired to create after reading Elfquest (of all things a third grader should probably not be reading XD the aim account came later i was 10 or 11?) with a 1 attached because I was not that creative with names. Then came Hogwarts Live thanks to a friend, a text based mmrpg based on the green dragon text games, where i first had an original character who then got stuck in the words, then i started rping as Yuffie Kisaragi (my fandoms were many as a 12-14 year old, also Ninja in Hogwarts what?!). I managed to find Gaiaonline in 2004 through quizilla of all places, started with the username Shiori_05, changed it a year later when i realized how stupid it was to Shiori Mesna (NOT Mensa) for horrible mary sue kingdom hearts fanfiction purposes that have promptly been left alone because I am horrible with writing characters that arent my own... continuing on, got email account lil_kawaii_fawx, used that as username for gaia when i forgot pw for shiori account, forgot fawx pw, got new email and gaia account Okimi-koi, promptly lost email for the last one because hotmail was dumb..., but i still have all three accounts accessible XD If you catch me on gaia, im usually on Shiori Mesna Deviantart, Fanfiction.net and Fictionpress i had gotten all around the same time, DA = Breezes-fade, fanfiction = Lady-Kitsune-Kawaii, Fictionpress= Breezesfadeaway (2005-2009 I R Angsty and moody... and completely friggin weaboo, dear lord how did i survive?) there were some mmos which usernames i cannot remember right now so I'll skip those for now... now tumblr is interesting because initially when i registered, my name there was theconfessionalpoet because i wanted to be all fancy and shit and my creative writing teacher told me that my poetry was of the confessional poets style. Then confessionalpoet turned into confessionalquail (because of reasons which will be explained) to finally what i have now and that is Kamikazequail. Kamikazequail explanation time! So in my area, we have a lot of fowl, theres a peacock farm up the road and turkeys wander the hills and fight with the peococks for food. There is also a lot of quails. Quails that are really stupid during mating season and sometimes afterwards. It happened one spring day a couple years ago, I was driving my sister and her friend back to our place and i was getting close to the turn into my neighborhood when i see a quail dart out in the middle of the road. The bird's survival instincts should kick in and make run faster or turn around back to the shrubs when it sees the car, right? Wrong! I brake hard right in front of it and the bird decides to sit in the middle of effin' road! Right in front of my car, it sits for five minutes and then calmly gets up and walks to the other side as you damn well please. Were it anyone else driving the car, I'm sure it would have made some lovely roadkill -_- Nonetheless, i almost got exploded quail on my car... This one here i chose because well even with all the past usernames i have, i barely talked in the forums or chats, i really am just another shy one...
HellfireLover was originally the name of one of my neopets back when NeoPets was still a tiny UK-based independent site. For some reason I didn't choose to take it as a username, going by Incendiary Device 42 on the H2G2 website and later by a couple of names associated with crows, which I wasn't happy with because they weren't available everywhere. I remembered my old neopet name and searched it and lo and behold not only was it free, it didn't appear to have been used by anyone else, anywhere. People have since started to cotton on to the word combo, which means there are posts out there by Hellfirelovers who aren't me. That feels a bit weird.
Around Christmas time last year I went to a pub quiz hosted by a friend's workplace. One of the rounds was 'anagrams', and each of the provided word-scrambles could be unscrambled to reveal a celebrity's name. One of the anagrams contained the following letters: rnsepgusbrtieenc. My boyfriend and I toiled over this for a solid ten minutes. The best we could come up with was Princess Nertbugs. (We got over-enthusiastic and added an extra 's'). I liked it so much I vowed to make it my username for everything internet-based from then on. Whenever the character limit won't let me be a princess, I settle for just being Nertbugs. Spoiler: The actual answer was... Bruce Springsteen. We got zero points for that round.
Such an interesting thread! Well, when I was butterlad there were no publicly available computers (the transistor was invented the year before I was born) and certainly no fandoms. We had proper comics, you know, paper things. I digress. I joined tumblr because of seebs and the C forums. I didn't know if I'd bother to stay so I wasn't going to use my real name - which I always did for permanent sites so I came up with justanotheroldbloke, which was at least true. Here it became jaob.
As a kid, I was either alanna8 or daine(insert random number ) because I was a tiny Tortall fanthing. This username on the other hand? I was flipping out cause I couldn't think of what to put and so I texted @Missfortunate for advice, and this is what she came up with. Cause it started with Em, like my irl name, and I like mythology.
i have...a variety of different usernames, all with different origin stories; however, "faktory" is not so much a username as it is a pseudonym derived directly from my real last name, and is usually how i refer to myself on the internet in general. i've always sort of been interested in the being of creation; synthesis and communication and manufacturing of instances and existences. there are infinite forms of "making" that we use to define ourselves, and i've always thought that the making was really the only thing we had as a means of definition. so i am a factory; i manufacture my sense of self in relation to what impression i can "make" on the things i touch, the people i meet, the words i read, etc. because i am always on the edge of accepting that i do not, in fact, exist in a vacuum, understanding myself instead as the source and creator of my own reality is the best and only recourse i have. (sidenote: strangely enough, my other last name (i have two; my mother's and my father's) actually ended up becoming the basis of my chosen first name that i now use in my personal life.) i could go on about my actual usernames, but there are more of those and they all have different explanations. but my most prolific is actually "nihilistgum", which was also the first name i used on tumblr. the explanation for that is pretty simple: however, i made the decision to move the blog a couple years back due to personal reasons and, after going through a few other unrelated urls over the course of about a year and a half, finally found myself once again facing down a pack of nihilist chewing gum that i'd unearthed while digging around in my drawer. perhaps out of some desire to go back to my roots confounded with my continual insistence that my online identity progress to match my personhood, i finally settled on the url i have now, which is, less than ironically, "denihilistgum". aaaaaand that's all i've got.
This is such a cool thread! Everyone here is so neat, I love all your stories. :D I have gone through a lot of nicknames and usernames over the years, enough that if I started counting them up I'd probably feel kind of ridiculous about it. Most of the time I wasn't trying to leave an old identity behind, as such, I'd just... start to feel like the name I was using was increasingly ill-fitting, and have to find another one. In retrospect, I'm certain I was trying to put a name to what I was, since I didn't start getting that itch until about six to nine months after puberty started hitting me and it didn't stop until I came out as trans. I felt desperate to be someone else when I was going into 5th grade as my body had suddenly done the horribly distressing thing of becoming woman-shaped, so I switched to using my middle name. This was... an ill-fated decision. My first name is pretty unisex, with only a change of spelling between 'male' and 'female' versions, but my middle name is unambiguously feminine, while at the same time being incredibly plain, as well as saddled by family history baggage (since it's the name of a family friend who adopted a ton of kids and I definitely got the impression, growing up, that I was expected to be some sort of super mom like that, for some reason. HAHA WHAT A DISAPPONTMENT I TURNED OUT TO BE). And then in a hilarious twist of fate, my mom started seriously dating a man with the same first name as I had, so I felt like I couldn't change back if I wanted to. As a result, I was stuck using my increasingly hated middle name for four years. I finally went "fuck this noise, I want my name back" as I was going into high school, and started using my first name again at school. A year later, things went south in my mom's relationship and the dude exited my life, so that was that. I was still uncomfortable with my name, though. One of my special interests was names, and I kept lists of them, writing down every interesting one that I came across. I mostly used them for naming video game characters, but in my head I was always secretly trying them out. Once I ran a few past some friends and asked which one was the most me, and when they picked the most feminine one in the pile I was really disappointed. I also didn't start using it. Once I started using the internet back in late 1997, that opened up a whole new world of name-trying-out. My first one, I don't even remember how I came up with it - I suspect my boyfriend at the time kind of came up with it? It was pretty, but pretty wasn't really my... thing. I eventually shed it for a series of names related to dragons, all in different languages. The shortened version of my longest running handle is still used as a nickname for me by my partner, the others are lost to time. Then I went back to my first name for a while - a friend had come up with a shortened version of it that was even more unisex than the full version, and at the same time I looked into the name's origins and found the original, masculine Latin version, so I went by the shortened version as a nickname and the Latin version as a handle. Even that started to itch, but I didn't really know where to go from there. Meanwhile, I was involved in the modding scene for a game, and I wanted my handle there to be disconnected from my real life identity (since my then-current handle was very clearly tied to my real life identity), so I picked the Latin name of one of my favorite flowers. What with it ending in an A, it immediately got me pegged as a girl, and that made me pretty uncomfortable. Finally, Homestuck happened to me. I wanted to interact with the fandom but I wanted it separated from my long-running identity; seeing so many trans people in the fandom, I wanted to try out being out as trans, myself, without the potential baggage of old friends getting weird about it. So I migrated to tumblr and decided to come up with a good Pesterchum-like handle. I'd already had quite a lot of personal symbology with Mercury - I saw the alchemical symbol for it was used as a symbol for genderqueerness/androgyny, some places, and I'm bipolar so I'm 'mercurial' by natural disposition. That needed a good noun to go with it, so since I'm an argumentative, picky grump who has an unfortunate love of alliteration, 'malcontent' was the perfect choice. And I didn't want people to have to write the entire damn thing out all the time, so I figured Mercury was a perfectly good name to go by. And I really, really liked it. Seeing people call me by it felt really comfortable. After a couple years of wearing it online, I went and visited a friend who'd never known me as anything but Mercury, and being called that name for a weekend was amazing. I finally found something that fit, and eventually I can retire my first name into my middle name's slot, and kick my hated middle name out. I also use a few other handles elsewhere, but that's mostly for 'my username won't fit into the field so I have to use something shorter' sake. If you read this entire thing, you deserve a prize. *gives you a gold star*
*cackles* My username is a reference to Euler's Identity. It's a mathematical identity which has been described by various sentimental mathematicians over the years as "filled with cosmic beauty", "uncanny and sublime", and apparently "like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence". It's true that it's a really great formula, but more than that I just find the image of thousands of mathematicians over 250+ years creaming themselves over it hilarious. (Oh, that was a bit crude.) And then bi because bi, also puns. The subtitle came to me in a moment of perfect serendipity, or possibly divine bisexual inspiration. I'm still laughing. (God, this username makes me feel so pleased with myself. Ahahaha.)
i think i mentioned this somewhere else, but mine is a cactus pun! opuntia is a common cactus genus, and i love to make lame puns, so i pun t' ya for the moniker i use on my drama blog, i use a similar pun, except this time the pun is about an insult/slur i get called: i cunt, ya
For a long time, my tumblr URL was elphias-doge, because it was a unique Harry Potter URL that hadn't been taken yet. When I decided to take my real name off my blog I replaced it with Elph, short for Elphias. Then I realised that I have no actual interest in the particular character of Elphias Doge, but I quite liked being Elphias, so I changed my URL to elphias-treason - a reference to Eumenides Treason, one of my favourite witches from the Discworld series. Finally I gave up entirely, and now my URL is an extremely obscure HP fandom reference that is only funny to me and my older brother, who doesn't read my blog (I hope). I still call myself Elph on my blog, but I'm trying to figure out something else for it to be short for. Elphias is great, but I'm forever trying to find an alternative to it that can still be shortened to Elph. Spoiler: unnecessary list of potential elphnames; feel free to tell me if you have a fave Elphas, Elphian, Elphane, Elphric, Elphide, Elphan, Elphwyn(ne), Elphyne, and more. Each one has a particular meaning and significance. None of them feels quite right, though I've tried a few on for size. Sometimes I consider keeping Elphias as a nod to JKR... I think about this way too much. So yeah, I chose Elph for here because it's shorter than my long-ass tumblr URL.
I half agree, but I'm much too attached to this icon for now. (Thanks @siveambrai :D) And a bident doesn't follow the Euler theme. Unless it's an imaginary bident, I guess.
when i was a Wee Baby taking my first steps on the internet i made a deviantart account because i was destined for artistic greatness, or something? but i came up with the username starcre8er and was SO PLEASED at my clever use of a number in there as i got older it got more and more bleh to me, started going by star as a shortened version then, a few years ago, i wanted to distance myself even more from the preteen hellpast, so i reversed it: star backwards is rats. and i quite like rats! so it worked out. from there, if rats is taken (it often is lmao) i'll go with mrattus, which is the family and genus for rats as a general group (muridae rattus), i was also erodentia briefly, i do not remember what the e was for? but i dropped that fairly quickly because i liked mrattus better. ive also gone by rodent in a few places, i think im rodent on ao3? im not sure i havent logged into ao3 in a really long time whoops my tumblr url was briefly mrattus, my friend mispelled it as mrrattus (Mr. Rattus, i say, tips top hat) and i quite liked it so that became my url. . . i used mrrattus for a few places as well which causes no small amount of confusion because ill try to log into something and forget the extra "r". . . and now my tumblr url is a rat pun of a literary work LOL tl;dr "rats" is "star" backwards and rats are really fucking great
fun fact about rats starcre8er mrattus: she made an OC whose name was her (rats') first name backwards, and then decided to introduce an Evil Counterpart to that OC, whose name was... the first OC's name backwards, a.k.a. rats' name. (i mean my OCs in that RP were just as absurd lmao) (I was reminded of this by the rats/star swap.)
I've been: - ezellohar(shark) since random hill in Tolkien's Silmarillion and I think I wanted to register on the movies site where we commented on fotr when it came out, after which it became a club, because why not - deathstalker(numbers) since Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series - ethanyar, since made up fantasy race - hoarmurath, since ezellohar no longer fit as we were separated into themes in the Tolkien club - hoarfrostinfernal, whenever some asshole's taken hoarmurath at a site I want to register on
