Okay. So... A long, long time ago, when I was 16-ish and freshly into the Kingdom Hearts fandom and had started writing dismal LarxNam fic on a regular basis, there arose an injoke between myself and @increasinglyCoherent where 'electrical socket' became a euphemism for Larxene's...(sighs) ...anyway. So teen me thought it would be hilarious to make my revamped deviantART account have the username Electrical-Socket (I made a lot of LarxNam art back then). And then over time it sort of faded away from its origins and became the regular set of words it is, divorced at last from an Organization member's junk. One of my followers on tumblr asked if they could call me Socket for short, I went 'yeah!' and now it's become both my standard username and...sort of my internal 'real name', which is weird. Extra weird when I remember the origins. :P
when i first made a kintsugi account i didn't want it to be connected to my tumblr name, and i wanted something simple. (i was also on neo as a kid, and i was always impressed by the folks who had a one-word/short username; this influenced my username habits until i read homestuck, and possibly after that as well.) in the end i think i was inspired by this poem by margaret atwood: Spoiler “(there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all I need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.” so, "garden and chaos", shorten to "garden," there you go. my username basically everywhere else, though, is a homestuck-style username (graveexcitement). so, thank you homestuck for making a pretty much permanent impact on my online identity for possibly the rest of my life. ur a real pal homestuck (also a while ago i noticed that my three most significant online "names" (gosh, grave, garden) have all started with the letter g, which is odd because i didn't previously have any real attachment to the letter g and it doesn't show up anywhere in my name, but the pattern is there.) icon is sans, because... sans. i haven't really found a consistent icon to use everywhere; right now i use either this one or a baby picture of me (that one always makes the "imagine your icon" posts very strange.)
I can't stick to names for shit, I'm still amazed I hung to my previous one, whimsicalobservant, for like four years. a short history of usernames: Nici_Robin because I was such a fan of Nico Robin and I was hella confused about the name order, and thought Robin was her last name. Well. That got a -Saphir tacked on later, German for "sapphire" because Pokemon Sapphire was THE BEST VERSION. I loved it to bits. still do. Then came WoW, and I ended up with Miraga_Eztheria, Miraga was the name of my night elf druid, and Eztheria... is a permutation of my mother's name. That was not intentional, but I didn't notice until well after I had stopped using that name. I also went by Sulzala some places, which was the name of my troll mage. Seven-ish years or so ago I switched to Eyefish_Soup, which is a 07 Ghost reference. Eyefish soup is a basic, cheap dish there you can make in large quantities. It's soup made with whole little fish which are like 90% eye. Sometimes also went just by "Eyefish" Homestuck and tumblr came about the same time for me, so I wanted to pick a pesterchum-style username. I'm whimsical, and like the word and capricious was too much Gamzee, and I like looking at things. Yes, whimsicalObservant is grammatically incorrect. whimsicalObserver sounds stupid. Fight me. winterykite came up because I like winter season, and kitewinter has a very nice cadence to it. "Kite" is my chosen IRL name. Avatars change. I started out with a nonstandard Litwick collection, probably went through a few more, and my last one was my SBURB rp char, Ilma, with a slightly uncharacteristic resting bitch face, and wearing shades and bow from two cdcf raves. Current one is a self-portrait done in a doll maker. (discord and skype icon is a portrait of one of my transformers ocs, Tempest Dive) title is from a conversation about st patrick and snakes, and how it was probably actually eels. and how eels are water snakes. and thus, snakes are land eels. (skype title is a joke abt physics and gender. Non-newtonian genderfluid)
(Gosh, I do love handle origin stories :D These are so fun to read.) I've had a lot of handles over the years, but this one has stuck with me well enough I'm making it a part of my legal name. It kind of comes from my tumblr username - I got into Homestuck in 2011 and the best parts of the fandom were on tumblr, so for my url I chose to mimic the pesterchum handle format with mercurialMalcontent. Mercurial because of my mood disorder and gender issues, malcontent because I'm a huge grouch. :D It was kind of natural for people to call me Mercury based on that, and Mercury has a lot of symbolism to me in other ways too, so it stuck and I'm glad it did. mercurialMalcontent sums up my personality so well I'm not inclined to change it ever. It's kind of long though so it doesn't work as a username for a lot of places, and most of the time Mercury is taken. Recently I use QuicksilverScribe shortened to QuickslvrScribe when I have length restrictions - that comes from my K6BDish user title. Icon has changed a few times over the years - first it was a color changed logo of some devilish looking person, then it was a very atmospheric shot of my Glitch character, but lately I've settled on Oscar the Grouch and wondered why I didn't think of him sooner. He was my first favorite character, which I think says a lot about me. >_>
My name comes from an old d&d character built from the Hollow World boxed set, a member of a race of jackalfolk with a very Anubis vibe. The book had guidelines for constructing a culturally appropriate name, and xitaqa is what I went with. The character had perfectly average statistics; I actually rolled 11 on all six stats except for Charisma (10) but the dm bumped it up to 11 for the sake of consistency. It was the easiest character to import to new games bc the totally average stats helped any dm feel confident that I wasn't trying to be a cheaty mccheatyface. I've used the name for so many online handles, it's one of my standard defaults now; and yet if you google it you will most likely find an impenetrable wall of d&d fan pages so I still get to feel pretty anonymous. I have used a few avatars. First was a photo of a solar eclipse that just looked like a hole in the sky. For a while I used Dream of the Endless as drawn by Yoshitaka Amano. Current one is "Elves of Deep Shadow" by Jesper Myrfors, bc it's always been my favorite MtG art. She's all gothic and beautiful and pretty much how I wished I looked.
"Witch" was a fantasy identity I nabbed to express myself one "monster" (which is what I'd used before when composing usernames, i.e. I was monster-bloom on tumblr for a while) started feeling too... more wrapped up in "survival" than in thriving, or growth, or joy. "Bloom" came to me in a dream. I was originally witchbloom on tumblr, and then the genders came and I when I signed up to Kintsugi I thought I'd try out a gender-neutral variant instead. Nowadays I'm wixbloom almost anywhere, and Wix has become an important nickname for me! EDIT: as for avatars, I like my presence to be identified by... well, my face. SOMETIMES drawings of my face, but usually selfies. Any other avatar tends to feel dishonest somehow (which does not mean I find it dishonest when other people have cartoon characters as their avatars, it's just a weird personal hangup).
i was high off my ass on industrial-strength painkillers. (and my avatar is just an Aesthetique edit of monoceros i made because i love unicorns,)
My username is just my name. I love my name :) It went through an evolution though. It started out as waterpologirl_emszie, because I used to actually play waterpolo, and the Emszie part is because two boys in my high school 1st year class gave me that nickname :) Then I dropped the waterpologirl when I stopped playing waterpolo. And the Emszie was shortened to Emsz as I grew up. As I used the nickname mostly on this one forum I was a member of (since defunct) and we got to know eachother pretty well I just used my actual name :) My profile pic if of my parents' two adorable kitties when they were tiny and still slept all curled up. They are much more grown now and don't do that any more.
ironicBonds comes from my old tumblr url and my tendency to use homestuck naming conventions! it's also a pun ;) for the detailed version: my url used to be thisiswhatironylookslike after the one and only Dave Strider, and i started using the homestuck convention after my friends and i in high school made our own sburb session. i came up with ironicBonds because i needed a shorter username than what i usually use for some reason? don't quite remember what for but it's an often-used alt for me now my icon is Samael from SMT/Persona, because i love myself some noodle demons and i've used it before for my email, haha oh! the nickname i like to use on here (Dog) comes from my friends and i calling each other "Big Gay ___", and i'm the big gay dog!
they are super cute fluffs, what an excellent pic PUNS! I love the weird eyes and numerous wings on noodle dragon. and dat wibbly tongue :3
I am happiest with names with at least one v or r sound, preferably one of each. I'm pretty sure I picked this up from my Hebrew name, my legal name, and a steady process of getting rid of hard consonants. My name to my friends is Riva. It makes me happy. For the internet, I prefer to be one more step away from that. Also, Vierran is one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite books (Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones). It's unique without sounding too ridiculous, and it feel right in my mouth/brain. Icon is an actual picture of me, wearing all black, barefoot, in a cherry tree in full bloom, because I love the contrasts there, and *shrug* it feels right.
I've always interpreted it as a couple of Aesthetic Mountains for some reason? So to me you're mountains in shuttershades. Possibly this is the similarity of "Everett" and "Everest" poking at my associations as well. BROFISTS LIKE HELL for old KH names that no one can tell are KH names. "Starcrossedsky" is actually an old Xion RP handle that just sort of became my standard; the expanded meaning is "starcrossed as in lovers - something fated for tragedy" and "sky=Sora," therefore "the aspect of Sora that we all knew was going to be tragic from the fucking getgo." "Nai" meanwhile is just the reduced-to-one-easy-syllable form of the name of my Baby's First OC Which Was Basically A Self-Insert, but I've been using it for... shit, over ten years now in some variation, my Gaia anniversary is in December and I know I used it over a year before that. The idea of being anything else is weird, even though I know I'm one of the few Kintsugi whose preferred name-type handle doesn't match their display name at fucking all. Icon is just something appropriately aesthetic off an LJ icon dump. It's a bunch of these in purple.
update on my namey stuff, since name-type-handles have been mentioned: i collect names and so i'm cool with people calling me Xitaqa or Xi, but i'm going by Rook more now. I love the word 'rook' as a name for a corvid bird (like ravens and crows), and my brother used to have the computer game Battlechess, in which the rooks would morph from little castle shapes into stone golems and stomp across the board, and when they killed enemy pieces the animation would do crazy stuff like eating them. But it all comes dowon to Lord of the Rings and ElfQuest. I read LotR pretty young and was impressed by Grima Wormtongue's name for Gandalf, "Stormcrow." I read up on what that mean, and liked the imagery. So years later, when i got introduced to ElfQuest and the Wolfrider elves who use descriptive names to hide their magical soulnames, I was invited to join a fanclub called Grey Falls that published a fanzine and created fanart and fanfic and an ongoing RP in their own AU that was populated entirely by OCs. So I wanted to make an OC named Stormcrow, partly because I was a babygoth and it seemed like the gothiest name a barbarian elf could hope for, and partly because his arrival in the RP served to herald the later arrival of a major villain. I could go on, I loved that RP, but... it was all on AOL at the time, and the screenname Stormcrow was already taken. I didn't think to make the screenname in advance, so i didn't find out unitl people were already gathering in the chatroom, and to my mind it was simply not apporpriate to RP without a dedicated screenname. So i dind't have time to think of another appropriate and meaningful name, so instead i just thought of a synonym/alternative to the 'crow' part. Stormrook. That got me the nickname 'Rookie' for a number of years. When I left AOL but wanted to stay in touch via the free messenger service, i made the screenname Odrook ('od' being the ecstatic state of consciousness granted as a gift to humanity by Odin in Norse legend) So that part kinda continued with me over the years. Now I shortened it down to just Rook because I guess it calls to mind a dark and mysterious girl, a street-urchin with a witchy style, or something. Which is a self-image i can really enjoy.
i... actually don't really have a clear idea of what prompted me to start using this handle! i vaguely remember being an edgy kid and changing my FFNet username to Carnivore in the Kitchen, or wanting to, and i also thought a moogle would be fun to make into a mascot-type 'sona or something. Carnivorous Moogle, Carnivorous M., and variations thereupon has been my go-to handle since i was... 12? 13? so eight or nine years now, because i remember being really proud of the order of the stick-style picture i'd made of my character carnie for the giantitp forums. boy it's been a while, huh. as for my avatar, doodled a vandagyre from neopets bc they're cute n featherfloofy, i feel that expression deep in my soul most days, and it seemed fitting. and it's not colored in because i'm a lazy asshole lololololol
Anyways, my username is the result of a decade-and-a-half-and-counting long obsession with the Burgess Shale Fauna, especially those weird ones that don't fit nicely into any of the modern animal phyla (arthropods, molluscs, chordates, cnidarians, annelids, etc.) Wiwaxia is one of those weird taxa that both looks spiffy and has a spiffy name, although I couldn't say why I chose it over, say, Amiskwia or Opabinia. My sibling and I did choose it to carve into the concrete sidewalk scoop outside our house when it was wet back when we were little, though. I have had one avatar on any site, ever, that was not some sort of depiction of the genus Wiwaxia, and that was to commemorate Tom Motherfucking Siddell drawing some sick eurypterids. My current avatar as of this posting is a glass bead I made in its form. My user title is a play off of Wiwaxia being considered a "problematic taxon" (along with the other aforementioned Burgess Shale oddities) due to it's uncertain phylogenetic position, weird morphology and unknown origins, by way of tumblr over- and misuse of the word "problematic"
oh shit I see it too now, that's delightful that lil hand gesture & pose is so evocative, I love it. very relatable
