Where did your user name come from?

[TheWombatOfDoom]

We all have stories to our usernames. Some we thought of on the spot. Others have some sort of specific meaning attributed to them. Others are from a memory. I'm always interested to find out why or how people come up with their names.

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Mine I picked up from a club I had made as a youngster. We came up with it when we wanted to come up with a new name for the card game: egyptian rat screw. We decided that the form would be ethnicity, animal, lewd act (but we ended up dropping the lewd act part). So, after a few tries from others in the group I ended coming up with Australian Wombat club. We loved the name for it's shear ridiculousness and randomness. From there we had to have Ranks, so one of my friends was Head Wombat, and another Wombat #1, #2, so on. I didn't want to be a number, so I was going to be "The Rogue Wombat"...and then at the last minute when they were scribing out names in the constitution, they asked what my name was and I stated - The Wombat of Doom. They all thought it was hilarious and wanted to make up crazy names like that too, but all their names had already been put in so it was too late.

That was 11 years ago now...Dear God. Anywho the name stuck, and I still am quite fond of it. Anyone else have a story?

[Deathkeeper]

This goes way back to 7th grade. That would make me...13? My friends had just convinced me to make an account for YouTube so I could favorite videos and such. My very condescending friend's exact words were "And don't name your username after a trading card or something." And because I really hated when he said things like that, of course I had to. So I dug up my MTG deck, pulled out one of the rare cards that sounded the coolest: Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper. Unfortunately, Deathkeeper was taken, so I just added Lord as a bit of a prefix. And well, I'm really bad at names, so I have trouble making new ones, so since then I've just been using LDK for everything, since no one but me would ever use that, I know it'll be available.

[about50heavies]

Running joke with friend involving tf2 classes and steam profile names

[Drakeburn]

Well, of all the Runescape accounts I've made to replace the ones which have passwords I have forgotten, there was one account that became my favorite: Drakeburn.

In my head, I've always wanted to write about some young adventurer who would become a treasure hunter and a legendary dragon slayer, so the name that came to me was Drakeburn. So, Drakeburn is my username.

(I'm actually currently trying to come up with a name for a purple wizard)

[Castaras]

Random letters that were put together for a runescape account.

It kinda stuck.

Although one day I want to go to the town which stole my username.

[Morph Bark]

I've always been Morph, in one way, shape or form. Morphman. Morph. Morphy. Morpholomew (after a brief while of being called Mewy). Morpheus. Morphisto.

The Bark only came upon joining the old Gleemax boards, making my name into "M-Bark", which I had on here at first too, in the sense of "embarking on a journey", as I was venturing into a new kind of forum and a new part of the internet, whereas previously I had only really joined boards I already knew people at.

Then here on GitP I later had it changed to Morph Bark.

I've occassionally gone by Murphy's Lawyer (after joking for a while that it was actually MY law, darnit!) and my email still had that as the name associated with it thanks to MSN.

[TaiLiu]

It's a bit morbid, but my username comes from a dead relative.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

Random letters that were put together for a runescape account.

It kinda stuck.

Although one day I want to go to the town which stole my username.

Can I use it as a town in my novel? I love it!

[Castaras]

Can if you want - the real life town is Cástaras

It's more of a village, really.

[factotum]

It's from the uncommon English word meaning, approximately, "jack of all trades" (and no, I knew nothing about the identically named D&D class when I picked it)--just seemed to suit me, at least in my mind. I've been using it as my forum handle for around a decade now.

[Lensman]

I've always worn glasses, since I was about 10.

In my early teens I read the Doc Smith Lensman stories, with brave and heroic characters in possession of the lens, a psionic amplifier. I enjoyed the books (I did say I was in my early teens) and joked to my friends that I was a lensman. (My puns have always been awful). When, thirty years later, I needed a handle for myself, the old joke surfaced again. By then I'd been a D&Der for a long time - I just liked the image of a beholder wearing a lens - a monocle.

[Aurenthal]

Mine came from a book a few years ago (I can't really remember the name, but I do recall that it was in spanish). Anyway, Aurenthal was a sword the main character needed for achieving the plot or something like that. And somehow I started using it as a username for everything

[MoonCat]

I just liked the term MoonCat. I wasn't even thinking about space kitties, I just randomly strung together two nouns for things I loved back in fifth grade, and I realized how much I liked it. If I needed a random wordy thing for a while after that, I chose MoonCat, and then it became my goto username.

[RebelRogue]

It's named after the theme and class of my very first 3.5 character.

[ScrambledBrains]

Mine came from the fact that when I signed up for the forum, I'd just gotten back from an entire day at college, and felt like my brain had been sufficiently scrambled. A Science degree(AN: Environmental Science to be precise) class schedule is nothing to joke about.

[KuReshtin]

Mine is from back when I needed a new user name after figuring out that my old one was too common and loads of people used it.

So, I started thinking about unusual but still pronouncable names that I could use, and came to remember a word from a series of books from Jennifer Roberson, The Cheysuli Chronicles.
"Ku'Reshtin" is basically an expression of surprise, it's an insult, a term of derision, and it kind of worked with my sense of self-derision at that point.

So, that's how the user name KuReshtin came about. The apostrophe was dropped since most forms won't accept special characters in user names, but the capitalisation of the R stayed.

Also, the pronounciation is not to far off my real name, so that helps as well.

[Das Platyvark]

The Platyvark is a crossbreed of a Platypus and an Aardvark, a combination which brought me much hilarity as a 7th grader. Das comes from the German.

[Eldan]

I'm really bad at character names. Getting a bit better now, maybe with experience, but back when I first started D&D...
My first character was an elven wizard. So I picked up hte Silmarillion and went through the appendix, until I found the word for Wizard. Hence, "Istari", my first character.

For my second character, my DM told me I'd need an actual name. Couldn't think of anything, even after hours, so I started up the random name generator on the wizards site and got "Eldane" for my halfling rogue. It stuck, but the "e" got dropped.

[Amidus Drexel]

Amidus Drexel was the name of an NPC from a campaign I ran about a year ago. I don't know where "Amidus" came from; it doesn't have any special meaning to me. "Drexel" was the name of a street in one of the towns near Cleveland OH (I was there on vacation), and I thought it would made a fitting last name. Apparently it's also a university.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

Amidus Drexel was the name of an NPC from a campaign I ran about a year ago. I don't know where "Amidus" came from; it doesn't have any special meaning to me. "Drexel" was the name of a street in one of the towns near Cleveland OH (I was there on vacation), and I thought it would made a fitting last name. Apparently it's also a university.

It is! It's down the road from me! :)

[Hbgplayer]

HBG is the letters many people use to shorten my hometown, HealdsBurG. Player because, well, I play games.

[Dave Halfbreed]

I'm not very creative, and I didn't have room for "Halfmexican" and "Plasticshield" as the epithet. :)

[Siosilvar]

Ah, another one of these.

The name comes from my very first D&D character, an elven fighter/magic-user. It appears to be a mutation of "Silver Star" from my ten-year-old self. Siosilvar Silareth (now Sio'allyn Silareth Varscera, the Black Eagle - that comes from my fifteen-year-old self and is even cheesier than the original) never saw a lot of playtime but he did get a 3.5 writeup and a few paragraphs of backstory.

[Silverraptor]

My username comes from 3 distinct moments of my life.

1) Back when I was 6 or 7, all the kids in my grade were talking about how much better gold is to silver. I didn't think that was fair because silver was almost as valuable as gold. Therefore I decided to like silver better because it was being mistreated.

Over time as I grew older, I began to find silver prettier than gold, so I legitamately liked it better.

2) I was 12 and was volunteered by my dad to a church goodwill act to clean up a burned down house up in the woods in the mountains. Later after we cleaned it up and spent the night at a log cabin that was rented to all of us, I got bored of all the other teenagers (I was the youngest there) talking about drugs and what not (I distinctly remember hearing marijuana in their conversations) I went off exploring the log cabin.

I came across a tv that was only hooked up to a VHS player and the only tape around was Jurrasic Park. Given that I had never seen the movie before, I decided to give it a shot. Needless to say, I was scared out of my mind (Not having watched too many scary movies before). But despite the T-rex large size or the venom spitters, the one that scared me the most were the veloceraptors because they *OPEN DOORS!* The amount of intellegence from them scared me immensly.

I had such a fear from them that some time later when watching "Teen Titans" and Beast boy morphed into a raptor for a scene, I gasped and found myself pushing away from the tv. However, over time the intellegence of the raptors that scared me so much began to make me appreciate them more and more. I was even beginning to wonder if they weren't wiped out, would they become the dominant intellegent species of the planet?

3) When I was 14, and after much arguing and delaying, my entire family decided I needed an email address. However, they decide to force me to do this when it was my turn to cook dinner. So they had my younger sister do it for me. When she called out "What do you want your username to be?" I thought, What do I like the most?

And thus I became Silverraptor.

(Interesting note, my sister being 11 was a really bad speller, so my email is 'rapter')

[White_Drake]

The Knights of the White Drakes was an order founded by my friend's father's gaming group. My first character was eventually inducted, and when I needed a username, I happened to remember it.

[Kumori]

The first time I used Kumori was playing Halo 2. I wanted my gamertag to be something Japanese that didn't sound awkward when used by English speaking folk, and I wanted it to mean something cool. I chose 'Kumori' because it doesn't immediately jump out as being Japanese and it meant 'shadow'.
At the time, my favourite anime was Naruto, and Itachi was pretty cool, so my gamertag was "KumoriUchiha". I later dropped the end part.

Kumori stuck after I used it for XBox live, even after I later discovered that it doesn't really mean shadow. It's would better be used to describe the weather as 'shadowy' on it's a cloudy day.

[smellie_hippie]

Hippie.

What!?

The "smellie" was just because I wanted something that rhymed. There is no actual association between the surname and my general state of being. PLUS I wanted to find a hippie reference that DIDN'T reference drugs or the sixties in general... *stabs Archie*

[golentan]

It's my favorite part of my full title.

[Aedilred]

I have two preferred forms of userid online. One of them is often taken before I have the chance to get it, and although I sometimes suffix it with a number (almost always "03" regardless of whether I am in fact the second with that name) I prefer to leave it unadulterated if possible.

The one I use here is in the older tradition, which dates back to when I first started using the internet in the mid-90s. All these usernames are some variation of "Æþel-x". Usually it's transliterated as "Athel-x" hence why I sign my name "Ath" when using one of these names regardless of what the actual name looks like. Sometimes I render it as "Adel" or "Aedel" for a bit of variety or to disguise it a bit. Here Aedilred was a character I was using in D&D when I signed up, so rather than thinking up a new variant I just used that.

[Mauve Shirt]

Hit the random button on tvtropes.org.