Screen Name Origins

[Chromascope3D]

Back in middle school I had a few OCs that appealed to my preteen cynical nature, named Karson the Arson, Conrad the Comrade, and Parker the Parka (He was the straight man of the group. He wore a parka. The name didn't make any sense then but I rolled with it anyway). Conrad was a proud member of the Soviet Union, which he refused to admit had been dissolved (not unlike the followers of a certain former political entity from my neck of the States). Anyway, Conrad had a kitschy superhero alias named 'Commander Fallout,' which is exactly what it sounds like. I kept that name for a while, and eventually started using it for my new screen names, of which this was one of them. Of course, by that time I had gotten into the Fallout franchise and kinda fell in love with nuclear wasteland type stories, and started tying it into that.

In hindsight, I probably should've stuck with the superhero theme, since abandoning it changed it from 'somewhat amusing' to 'bland and uninspired," which is why I've fallen out of love with it and am now looking to get it changed.

[Morbis Meh]

Morbis: Name of the first necromancer that I played on Diablo 2

Meh: a word I like to say that drives people up the wall due to its inherent laziness

[Killer Angel]

As you should easily guess from my avatar, I took it from the book "The Killer Angels".

[KuReshtin]

My name is a swear word from a series of novels by Jennifer Roberson. It's a very handy 'cover-it-all' swear word that can be used as an exclamation of surprise, it can be used as an insult or just generally as a swear word.
Kind of like 'Sonofabeech' or 'B'stard' in regular English.

No one ever seems to know about the series of novels I've taken it from, though.

Also, the pronunciation of the word kind of sounds almost like my proper real life name. With a bit of imagination, at least.

[Kianlon]

My principal epically made a typo when he typed my name one time. It became a nickname that I really, really hated in grade school... until I found out that it was a great screen name because it was never, ever taken.

[LeSwordfish]

I think I based mine, in some or other way, on the Terry Pratchett "The Password Is Always Swordfish" thing. I have not the slightest clue why I added the "Le" to the front of it - I assure you, it was some time before the "Le Memer" reddit thing. I suspect it was a spur-of-the-moment thing to get around the fact that "Swordfish" was already taken on Steam.

[SirKazum]

I came up with my screenname as a pun - "Sir Kazum" is supposed to sound like "sarcasm". Maybe my grasp of English pronunciation wasn't as good as I'd hoped when I came up with that name And it doubles as a fantasy character name, which is good for a D&D-centric board like this. I imagine "Sir Kazum" as a boisterous, hot-headed, rude fellow who got knighted pretty much just because of family connections or whatever, so Destruction from the Sandman comics popped up in my head as a pretty close approximation, hence the avatar.

In most other places, however, I go by "Lynx Cat" of some variation thereof (like Lynx T. Cat when "Lynx Cat" is taken - I like to think the T stands for Tiberius). It's a name I came up with on the fly, the first time I was ever asked to name a character, in an old NES game (where you're a dude in an Indiana Jones-esque costume adventuring in a Disney theme park). I just like cats, and thought lynxes were cool

[Chromascope3D]

I think I based mine, in some or other way, on the Terry Pratchett "The Password Is Always Swordfish" thing. I have not the slightest clue why I added the "Le" to the front of it - I assure you, it was some time before the "Le Memer" reddit thing. I suspect it was a spur-of-the-moment thing to get around the fact that "Swordfish" was already taken on Steam.

Wasn't that started by a Marx Brothers movie?

[golentan]

Wasn't that started by a Marx Brothers movie?

It was! It was great...

Baravelli: ...you can't come in unless you give the password.
Professor Wagstaff: Well, what is the password?
Baravelli: Aw, no. You gotta tell me. Hey, I tell what I do. I give you three guesses. It's the name of a fish.
Professor Wagstaff: Is it "Mary?"
Baravelli: [laughing] 'At's-a no fish!
Professor Wagstaff: She isn't? Well, she drinks like one! ...Let me see... Is it "Sturgeon"?
Baravelli: Aw, you-a craze. A "sturgeon", he's a doctor cuts you open when-a you sick. Now I give you one more chance.
Wagstaff: I got it! "Haddock".
Baravelli: 'At's a-funny, I got a "haddock" too.
Wagstaff: What do you take for a "haddock"?
Baravelli: Sometimes I take an aspirin, sometimes I take a calomel.
Wagstaff: Y'know, I'd walk a mile for a calomel.
Baravelli: You mean chocolate calomel? I like-a that too, but you no guess it. [Slams door. Wagstaff knocks again. Baravelli opens peephole again.] Hey, what's-a matter, you no understand English? You can't come in here unless you say, "Swordfish." Now I'll give you one more guess.
Professor Wagstaff: ...swordfish, swordfish... I think I got it. Is it "swordfish"?
Baravelli: Hah. That's-a it. You guess it.
Professor Wagstaff: Pretty good, eh?

[Ryotaiku]

While playing Final Fantasy X for my first time I was tasked with giving a name for Tidus, the protagonist. I could've just kept his name Tidus, but I wanted to be different. So going to a random name generator the first three names I got were Ryo, Yota, and Taiku. I decided it was good enough to use as a username.

That, and Ryo is one of my favorite song artists of all time.

[Loreseeker]

Meh, pretty simple for me....

I'm pretty heavily interested in just about everything. From quantum physics to biology, from history to mythology, I've got that dangerous curiosity that gets ambitious wizards killed in fantasy stories.

If I could, I would get myself modified to be purely immortal. That way I could learn EVERYTHING. When I was younger, I foolishly considered becoming a pioneer in bioengineering and cybernetics, so I can give himself a durable and enduring shell with which to continue to exist and accumulate knowledge until the end of time. Hell, I STILL want to do that, and continue to exist all the way through and beyond the death of the universe, so I could find out how it happened and what comes after.

Realizing the futility of such dreams, and falling in love, I have pulled back on that a lot in the past decade. Still doesn't stop me from dabbling my fingers in various subjects, much to my dearest's chagrin....

Seemingly having a major mental block in maths algebra level and higher also nixed that for me. While I can grasp the concepts and understand it intuitively, I can't quite figure out the damn math behind the more mathematical sciences. Which saddens me, I quite enjoy astrophysics.

[Tentreto]

Mine was simply choosing a name for my charmander in pokemon red, which when I decided to start going online I decided to use because it was short enough for my goldfish memory.

[Strigon]

My personal favourite video game, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation.
Strigon Team is the squadron of aces that serve as your nemeses. Normally it's free, but recently I've run into a few websites where it's already taken.

[DigoDragon]

As far back as I can remember, anyone who didn't understand Spanish vowels tended to pronounce my name wrong, so friends came up with nick names that were easier. The most popular one is 'Digo' (Which is amusing as there is no 'G' in my actual name) and it has gained so much notoriety that even my parents call me Digo now.

'Dragon' is because of a well-remembered character I used to RP as years back.

[SirKazum]

As far back as I can remember, anyone who didn't understand Spanish vowels tended to pronounce my name wrong, so friends came up with nick names that were easier. The most popular one is 'Digo' (Which is amusing as there is no 'G' in my actual name) and it has gained so much notoriety that even my parents call me Digo now.

'Dragon' is because of a well-remembered character I used to RP as years back.

How does that work? I can't think of anything without a G that's pronounced like "Digo"...

[Ifni]

In David Brin's Uplift series (science fiction), Ifni is the goddess / personification of chance, destiny, mathematics and infinity - more or less. The concept was apparently left vague on purpose. Starfarers swear by her, and sometimes at her. The books are kind of old now, so the name is usually available

[Traab]

My first MMORPG was Everquest. In that game I had two main characters, a halfling druid named Dobbin. And a human monk named Traab Fellhammer. Since then I have made my screen names one or the other, leaning more heavily towards traab. Its actually been quite useful, as I have run into a few old friends in other MMO games that remember me. I joined a raiding guild in vanilla WoW that was made up primarily of old players from my everquest server. They knew that anyone capable of playing that game could handle a WoW level of raiding time requirements.

[Rater202]

I used to be on Neopets.

The names I tried kept being taken.

So I hit random until I got a name that wasn't taken.

I've used that name for almost everything, ever since.

[wxdruid]

wx = weather, and I'm a weather forecaster
druid - because I enjoy playing D&D and my favorite class is Druid and they have some fabulous weather spells and an animal companion.

[FinnLassie]

Well, I am Finnish, hence the Finn, and I am a rough collie that saves the day! young lady, so lassie it is. Lassie comes from my love to all things Scots and to be fair I did live in Glasgow for a good while. Lady and YoungWoman wouldn't really look cool, either.

[Silhitii]

I used to have hermit crabs as pets, and for several years in elementary school/junior high I had a particularly beautiful and gentle one that I loved building mazes for and watching explore new places. I couldn't figure out a good name for her so I asked a friend what the translation was for a word into her first language. I'm pretty sure that language was Chinese and I used to think that the word I had translated was either 'beautiful' or 'colourful' (both of which described Silhitii perfectly), but try as I might I cannot find a synonym in either Chinese or Korean (in case I have confused which friend I asked) for either of those words that sounds at all like my no-doubt mangled version of what she told me. While I can speak a little bit of Chinese now, pronunciation of non-European languages was NOT something I was skilled at as a child, so most likely the true meaning of my hermit crab's name is lost to history.

On the other hand, this screen name is never taken

[Thrawn4]

Thrawn is a famous character in the Star Wars EU (justified imho, the novels are better written than most of the official material).
It was also my second screen name after Raynor (Starcraft 1) - another cool sci-fi character.
When I needed an email adress, Thrawn was already taken, so I needed something that was easy to remember. Thrawn2 was taken as well, so I figured 4 would be a safe bet. Also, I figured Thrawn might be interesting four many people. So there you go.

[Sian]

if i recall correctly Sian was in the beginning just a random name i used on 4ch (in ... 2006/07 i think) as i didn't want to use my then regular nickname there ... My then primary nick was Devilen, which came from me being a fan of Techno/Dance D-Devils, which i got 'baptized' after on a summer camp i went at for much of my youth, which i then failed hard at translating properly to English.

[TheEmerged]

This name started when I needed to create a handle to use on the HERO System boards. Before this I had always used the name of whatever character I was playing - I was AuntieShaynta on the old EverQuest boards for example - and I wanted something more permanent. Well, the longest-running HERO campaign I'd ever run was called The Emergence, a superheroic campaign where people with superpowers were called The Emerged and, well, there you go.

[dysprosium]

My favorite element is dysprosium.

It stems from back when I was in grade school. For a science project I wrote a quiz program (in BASIC on an Apple IIe)* and one of the questions was "What is the only element on the periodic chart that starts with the letter D?"

The answer is of course dysprosium but my science teacher who was taking the quiz totally blew the question and thought it was a ridiculous one at that. Mind you this is a 7th grade science project and I was having trouble coming up with questions that I thought were challenging enough for my class but not impossible.

I remember this exchange like it was yesterday:

He asked me what the right answer was and I said "dysprosium." I remember saying the answer in a "doesn't everyone know that" kind of way.

So he asks me what does it do? What is it used for? Why is it important?

The next day I started rattling off all of the facts about dysprosium that I could find.

Every chance I had I would find a way to put dysprosium into everyday conversation. It drove my teacher crazier than he already was.

Later in high school, I made "dysprosium rules" my own personal catch phrase.

Honestly I didn't think I would be able to use it as my screen name here. I figured it would have already be taken. You would be surprised at how many dysprosium or dysprosium66 screen names are in use for screen names across the internet.

On the plus side, it was really easy for me to find an appropriate avatar picture!

* and if that alone doesn't date me, I don't know what would.

[VincentTakeda]

I made it all the way through your entire post and every instance of your screen name I read as Dyzo Prezium... I must be tired.

One of these days I'm gonna be so not lazy that I look that up to see what its all about.

The bad news is that when I search for it, I'll be searching for dyzoprezium... Then I'll remember its the only one on the table with a D!

So thats quite helpful in fact...

But for now... Game threads!

[MrConsideration]

When I was about 14, we had to do a citizenship project where you designed your own country, its political system and its laws, which you then had to present to the rest of the class. This was clearly meant to instill in us an appreciation of civic values and gratitude for living under the Mother of Parliaments, but we were having none of it.

To throw a spanner in the works we designed a dystopian, fascist society dominated by arbitrary and meaningless diktats where even the most minor infraction was published by excessive violence. To present this to our less-than-impressed PCSHE teacher, we devised a group of sock-puppet figures who were present in all the propaganda put forward by our country, all named some variation of 'MrConsideration', 'MrPositivity' etc that were meant to enact the presentation. I started using MrConsideration as an online handle and it just stuck.

[Temotei]

Spoiler: Image

Show

In 2nd grade, a kid's mom came in and tried to translate all of our names into Japanese. Mum's called me Temotei since the day I brought this little bit of paper home.

[Peelee]

When I was about 14, we had to do a citizenship project where you designed your own country, its political system and its laws, which you then had to present to the rest of the class. This was clearly meant to instill in us an appreciation of civic values and gratitude for living under the Mother of Parliaments, but we were having none of it.

To throw a spanner in the works we designed a dystopian, fascist society dominated by arbitrary and meaningless diktats where even the most minor infraction was published by excessive violence. To present this to our less-than-impressed PCSHE teacher, we devised a group of sock-puppet figures who were present in all the propaganda put forward by our country, all named some variation of 'MrConsideration', 'MrPositivity' etc that were meant to enact the presentation. I started using MrConsideration as an online handle and it just stuck.

That's....that's dark, man. I like it. Even if you're from the wrong Birmingham.

[MrConsideration]

Even if you're from the wrong Birmingham.

You know what they say about sequels!