So here’s something that has been weighing on my mind. Where did your net identity come from? Some of them, like anukul and jameel are obvious. But most people don’t use their real name as an email address or LJ name, presumedly because most people have pretty ordinary names and Mike and Stephanie (or whatever) are just already taken.
So here’s the question (or questions really): Where did you get your LJ name? Do you use it other places? Email? Other websites? RPGs? IM? Do people call you that in real life? How did you come up with it? Obviously, a bunch of people on my friends list are wrestlers, and use their gimmick name, but if that’s you, where did you come up with that?
For some reason made up names that have no obvious meaning to a person’s personality (say qiika and drfell) or that are based on a persons name (either real name or gimmick name – sui66iy and kingdomjames) seem to ring truer to me than ones that are based on something about a person’s personality or hobbies (like stuntviolist or mistergrumpy – no offense to either of you), do other people feel like that? I don’t think I have any like this on my friends list here, but back when i used to use Epinions a lot, the names that always really bugged me were the ones that were based on an aspect of a loved one, like bobbysmommy or joes_wife or something like that. It just seemed weird that a person chose their identity as an aspect of someone else. Kind of belittling or something?
So the cultural theorist in me is really curious about this sort of thing. Please take a second to leave your name orgins and your thoughts and please point others who I don’t know here to do the same. I want to see what people really think about this.
EDIT: Come on, work with me people. So far I only have one additional person that I don’t know. I actually want to hear from as many people as possible on this one. papertygre had the right idea. Think of it as a meme.
Where did you get your LJ name?
The King of Hearts. He is the only face card with his sword through his head.
Do you use it other places?
Not Really.It’s a stricly LJ name.
Email?
No
Other websites?
Nope
RPGs?
HA HA… NERD!! (What V:tM books?)
IM?
No.
Do people call you that in real life?
How did you come up with it?
When I created my LJ, I wasn’t having alot of luck with the ladies. I thought it would be oh-so-ironic to name myself after the King of Hearts to reflect this.
so, in your case, I actually knew that the suicide king was a reference to the king of hearts. I just didn’t know why you’d picked it. So do you typically pick different names for different websites and stuff? Do they always have some hidden meaning?
The bobbysmommy style ones kind of weird me out, too. What, there’s nothing else about you other than your relationship to another person?
Ones like don’t weird me out, though – I mean, sure, include your mothering aspects or your wifely aspects or whatever, but…eh. I guess I am not good at explaining why one bugs me but the other doesn’t.
And mine’s part of my name. Has been since the day I was born. And it’s very rarely taken anywhere, so it’s convenient.
curiously, having a reference to being a mom in the name, doesn’t really bug me. My mom’s LJ is. It sort of makes sense. Now if she’d chosen “mavsmom”, that would have just been weird.
I needed a name for LiveJournal as the usual was predictably taken. I was being cranky about it, hence the suggestion.
I would assume shadow is taken most places, is it not? Who suggested the grumpy name?
Alycia suggested it. The Swedish phrase for grumpy one or mister grumpy was also suggested; For some reason I didn’t go for it.
shadow is taken a lot of places, but sometimes I get it. Of course, I punted on flickr because it was taken there.
“Papertygre” is a play on the fact that my personal name refers to a tiger character. The term, of course, means something that seems fierce but really isn’t, which helps me feel more comfortable acting/speaking without obsessing too much that my actions will be misinterpreted: it reminds me that appearances are often misleading. I also like the reference to paper – the clean blank surface on which creation is ready to take place. (I wrote this some time ago – whole thing here)
I use it pretty much everywhere (for personal things, not things like credit card accounts though). I don’t know where I got it – in 1998 while I was at work I needed an AIM username and that just popped into my head. ‘papertiger’ and ‘papertyger’ were taken, so ‘papertygre’ it was.
I agreed with you that ‘bobbysmommy’ or something else incidental like that is a really flavorless and disappointing kind of name.
Muhahaha! Now I know your aim name! Weeee!!!
*activates stalker mode*
*pokes own stomach*
*makes squeaky noise*
*passes out*
ruh roh.
I knew the origins of the tygre part, but I always assumed that you were mispelling it for some philosophical reason. ah well.
Dave can’t hear or doesn’t listen and he thought my name was Caroline. Katherine. Marmalade.
Strangely, “marmalade” is always taken. So I vary it as marmaladium or marmal8, neither of which ever seem to be taken.
I don’t like marmalade, the condiment.
ok… I don’t get it. Did he get your name different each time? Or did he think your full name was Caroline Katherine Marmalade?
Not that I have any idea who Dave is.
If you knew Dave, you would know that it is futile to attempt to determine a thought process similar to that which the rest of us go through. How Katherine sounds like Caroline or Marmalade is, and will forever remain, a mystery to me. The fact that this explanation does not make sense is the very meaning of the story.
One day I was in McKeesport, and I noticed a pigeon that was limping. While a sad thing to see, I thought “Hey, ‘Limping Pigeon” could be a band name.” but since I didn’t have a band, I started using it as an ICQ handle. I eventually started using it everywhere because, well, it was never taken. And it’s a highly memorable screen name.
LiveJournal is one of the few places I still use the name. On rare occasions, I still use it on AIM, or Yahoo! Messenger.
For the most part, other places, I’ve switched to using names such as “Benwhoski” (an obvious joke on my last name), and “LostAngles” (the home of the home of my favorite character from the cartoon “Reboot”).
Ooh, the computer animated cartoon, Reboot? That was awesome.
That would be the one. I’ve always wanted to be more like Hexidecimal. For some reason I find myself intrigued by characters who are immensely powerful, but also completely batshit insane.
i think i already told you this, but mine’s pretty boring.
eyanyo == eric michael yanyo.
i use this for my personal email address also, but most other places (message boards and the like) i go by “tviyh” — remarkably that was already taken on LJ though — which stands for “the voice inside your head” which is the name i use when recording music. any relation to nine inch nails lyrics is purely coincidental.
it actually sort of surprises me how many people pick user names from song lyrics.
well, I dropped ophelia sometime around 1998, since it was a) too popular and b) I stopped identifying with the character.
fans of moxy fruvous were dubbed fruheads, and fans on the fansite picked nicks that described them uniquely. since I was the only goth chick in the group, I became gothfru. I use it for AIM (though I am usually on my work account, TTTtaraJ), Gmail, and I own gothfru.org though I do nothing with it lately. it’s unique; I haven’t ever run into it elsewhere. few people outside of the fruheads I used to know have ever called me it IRL.
hmmm… I’m pretty sure I saw you explain that somewhere else too.
I think it was a meme/quiz thing recently.
Mine is, in fact, based on my name (Rachel Partain). It is a contraction of a nickname that an old friend gave me (Rackle Poontang). I used it at Neopets first, and got my LJ not too long after. (And with my presence on LJ becoming more and more widespread, people I know IRL – either through LJ or predating it – have started calling me Rackletang as a nickname. Which is a funny sort of full-circle for a 16 year old nickname.)
hmmm… I thought it was just a made up workd. Never occured to me that it had any relationship to your name. Thanx for sending other people to comment, btw.
Rotation
The rotation would perhaps work slightly better as
but I find that unaesthetic for some reason. I discovered this at CMU one evening in some sort of ASCII fugue state, and it sat around in the back of my brain for years until I started using it on AIM. Obviously it has nice uniqueness properties.
Re: Rotation
hahahaha, wow. Nice. Never caught that before. I always assumed it was some random identifier chosen so that it could be consistent across accounts.
Re: Rotation
its so weird. It seems so obvious to me, and yet everyone always seems to be really surprised when they find out. Of course, its only obvious to me because you told me years ago, and I was really surprised when I found out.
I have used three different names (or variations of) throughout the years:
RedFox:
Back when I was more religious, this is what I believed my spirit animal was. I identify with many of the fox qualities (such as the ability to adapt to multiple situations). Add to this my addiction to dyeing my hair red…:) Its been a name thats always stuck with me over the years. I have quite a few dear friends who call me Red regularly, and I love it. Many of them don’t usually call me by my real name. I used it as my first IRC login.
Cyllan:
Took the name from one of the main characters in the Time Master Trilogy, by Louise Cooper. This was one of the first screen names I ever had anywhere. I not only love the way the name looks/sounds, the character seemed much too like myself. This was my first AIM nick, and my BBS nick.
SilPhoenix:
Mostly from my love of 1. silver 2. the phoenix. I always refered to myself as a phoenix due to my ability to be completely destroyed in life emotionally, but to be able to come back, relatively unscathed. This was one of my alternate AIM nicks, and I used to roleplay with it often.
Nothing too creative, I know…but they’re all parts of myself.
what color is your hair really then? Brown? Red seems to be the major hair color of choice for most light brown haired girls I know. Perhaps that’s another survey waiting to happen.
And really, your answers were plenty interesting.
My natural color is extremely ash brown…to the point where it looks grey (sounds cool, but its not a flattering color)
So here’s the question (or questions really): Where did you get your LJ name?
It’s my initials and 2 random letters. It’s similar to my old CMU login (nc2d, I think), but I for some reason find it more aesthetic to use just letters. I can’t remember if I first used it for LJ or something else.
I used to use deimos, which besides being a moon of Mars was the name of a radio show I did, a laptop computer my ex-boyfriend used to use, and the name of my best high school friend’s now elderly cat. I don’t really know why I changed, except deimos is often taken on the internet these days.
Do you use it other places? Email? Other websites? RPGs? IM?
Yes. Not for email (strangely, it was taken on comcast, which is my secondary account), but on other websites I do use it – primarily lovehkfilm.com and hfboards.com. I’m not exactly a heavy poster anywhere, though.
Do people call you that in real life?
Nope. I don’t even know how you would pronounce it. I rarely get nicknamed by people. The only ones I can think of are Telescope (my freshman dorm mates were very impressed by my eyesight) and Neko-chan (which translates to something like cat-girl, but if you don’t know the story behind it, it sounds too cutesy.)
I’m with you on the TrendyKidsName’s_Mom usernames. I don’t mind references to being a mom or whatever, but I find it a little creepy to make your relationship to someone else your name. Like you’re just an appendage of that person, or something. Which is especially weird when that person is a kid.
hmmm… that’s odd… I had always just assumed it was an andrew id. I find it weird enough that so many people go out of their way to use their andrew ids today when there was such a big push to get names that made sense back then. But you’re the only person I know who chose to make a different andrew style id to the one that they were given. (as opposed to who also uses a fake andrew id sometimes, see below, but never had one of that style to start with.)
Well, I guess there’s two different goals — for my andrew id, I wanted something easy to remember and figure out so that people could email or zephyr me. For a net identity, I prefer something less revealing of personal info, particularly gender. It at least used to be, if you googled me the first thing you’d get is an old MAYA page with lots of personal info and a photograph. That may not seem like a big deal to people who haven’t gotten multiple declarations of love from complete strangers, but I prefer people not have that information.
There is actually a place on the web where I use my real name, but I guess that brings me to problem number two: very common names are hard to get as user ids. Unless I’m one of the first people to sign up, it’s just not going to happen. So something based on my andrew id works well, and I like it better than name_2000 or name_address, or something like that.
Where did you get your LJ name?
It’s from the graphic novel series Love and Rockets by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez — it’s one of Hopey’s nicknames. My friend Joe started calling me “Hopita” years ago and I dug it.
Do you use it other places?
All over the place, yes.
Email?
Check.
Other websites?
Check.
RPGs?
I don’t know what that means.
IM?
Yes.
Do people call you that in real life?
A few.
How did you come up with it? Obviously, a bunch of people on my friends list are wrestlers, and use their gimmick name, but if that’s you, where did you come up with that?
Answered above.
yeah, I probably would have gotten that one if I ever heard of you before. 🙂 Thanx for stopping by to comment.
I believe I ended up here by way of.
“Stuntviolist” has a bit of a story behind it. I was at a social function where most of the other people were musicians. I started introducing myself as “Aly–stuntviolist extraordinaire.” It got a lot of laughs. Some of those people still call me “stuntviolist.”
When I started my LJ I was having trouble finding a screen name and this one was available.
I don’t use it for email. I have “stuntviola” on AIM, but I rarely use it. I sometimes use it as a screen name on random websites because it’s almost always available.
yeah, I didn’t mean that there was anything wrong with your ID, btw. So I hope you don’t feel like I was picking on you. Just that I for some reason find non-interest names to be more… uhh… namish.
Oh, I understand. I wasn’t offended. It takes much more than that. 🙂
I’m a Jim Morrison mark.
He = Lizard King
Me = born 6/25
yeah, that one I was able to guess… but hey, whatever works. How come you didn’t just take jessethemark or something?
When I started using text-based BBSes, I was really into Greek mythology, and the fact that I was the only girl on the boards was always a topic of conversation, so I went by “aphrodite”. Ran a website under that moniker for a long time in high school as well.
By the time I got to college, I found it a little pretentious to just be running around calling myself the Goddess of Love, so I wanted a modifier that made it more “me” – and after my years as Grover, muppetaphrodite just stuck. I also go by muppetathena in some instances (muppetaphrodite is sometimes too many characters for some systems.)
ego much? 😉 and here I thought you just had the magical ability to make muppets fall in love.
Where did you get your LJ name?
In my freshman year at CMU, I was a practicing Catholic. I’d experienced a renewal of faith due to 1) the youth-oriented services at school (“wow, Catholicism without old people telling me how much I suck!”) and 2) a girl. The fact that I went to church every Sunday was unusual among my group of friends. There were also too many people named Matt. So, for the sake of disambiguation, I became “Catholic Matt”, eventually shortened to “Catholic”.
Even when the guitars got old and the girl dumped a bucket of cold water on me, I kept the name. I always felt that being Catholic was more of an ethnicity than a religion. I shortened it to “Xthlc” as an abbreviation.
Do you use it other places? Email? Other websites? RPGs? IM?
Yep, it’s pretty much my UUID. I use it everywhere online, except for my more professional stuff.
Do people call you that in real life?
Some do. Not many. It makes me nostalgic. 🙂
heh, I remember interviewing at maya and Terry telling me they just hired someone else from cmu and she said her name, and I just sort of automatically said, “oh yeah, Catholic Matt.” and then had to explain that it was a nickname. It was vaguely embarassing.
I hate thinking up names, so the vast majority of my account ids are from either (a) the song I’m listening to at the time I need to create the account or (b) whatever’s lying on my desk at the time. This one is from the Current 93 Inmost Light trilogy of albums.
The other naming convention I use is words (often nonexistant) that I think sound pleasing phonetically. I use this more often for passwords, though.
I figured yours was something like that. It’s the same way you used to name your short stories.
If I ever have children, I have a bad feeling they’ll all be named “Gus”.
It’s usually less taken than “shawn”.
I used to crack software. At the same time, I used to play DnD. A rotgrub was a creature that ate its way to the heart of something leaving almost no trace on the surface. It seemed a good name for a hacker. But, sadly I couldn’t spell, so I ended up with two Ts.
I use this name nearly everywhere from aim to LJ to logins to video games, etc. Mainly I’ve stuck with it since it seems to be about as unique as I could have hoped for. Its never taken.
heh… you know, it never even occured to me that you were spelling it wrong.
My LJ name is pretty obvious, but I will write a bit here on other online identities and history.
rmitz was the first internet online identity I used when I joined Chester County InterLink back in the day (esr used to be on there, not that I knew him at the time). I consider this my canonical username. I use it whenever it’s convienient to do so. I am bitter at minimum 6 character username restrictions.
The first BBS identity I used was “The Programmer”. Again, pretty obvious. Descriptive yes, creative, no. Though it was relatively original in the sense I’ve not seen the identity used elsewhere, even though it is generic. For door games, I’d use “Ford Prefect”, the character I guess I identified with most in the Hitchhiker’s series. I credit those books with keeping me from sinking too far into depression back in those days. Nicely whimsical, but sometimes too common.
When I came to CMU, I just missed the “pick your own username” phase and got stuck with the hateful “mitz”. So close, and yet so far from my ideal username. So my username is mitz in ECE, Qatar and Andrew. Fortunately, I have rmitz@cmu.edu, as well as rmitz email aliases in ECE and Qatar. I’m rmitz basically everywhere else.
When there are minimum lengths in effect, I have been either rwmitz (which I hate unreasonably) or romanmitz.
I feel zero need to hide my identity behind an alias, and since my name is pretty unique, I can get away with that.
I’m actually pretty amazed that you were ever able to get “The Programmer” in any geek community with like more than 10 people in it.
Where did you get your LJ name?
It is my given name. I thought about using a descriptor on my name, such as Marine, or Access, or SQL, or any number of things, but came to the conclusion that they effectively only relate to one aspect of my life and may in fact be transitional, whereas, I thought of LiveJournal as spanning over many, many years.
Do you use it other places?
Orkut.com and maybe a couple of other places online.
Email?
I use accessderek@hotmail.com and derek@machinerebel.com, so I general, I will use at least my first name.
Other websites?
Like I said, occasionally
RPGs?
When I play online games (Half-Life CounterStrike, BF: 1942, etc.) my online handle is ImpactSmash. I created that name from a lyric in the song Walkin’ on the Sun by Smash Mouth about impact and smash from Smash Mouth. I created ImpactSmash so I could have some anonymity online.
IM?
I use ICQ, which is a number of their choosing, and MSN, which is accessderek@hotmail.com.
Do people call you that in real life?
Everybody I know calls me Derek. I never picked up a nickname that stuck. My Mom will sometimes refer to me as ‘DB’, short for Derek Bruce.
How did you come up with it?
Just my name, dude. Just my name.
hmmm… seems kind of weird that your mom would use a nickname like that. I’m more used to mom’s going out of their way to use given names. After all, they gave it. But hey, what do I know? Thanx for answering.
I used to live in MUDLOCK 2.0, so named for its phone number. When I moved out to my own place, my new phone number was examined and the other MUDLOCKians decided that my new apartment should be called OUCHFESt. I use it for just about everything now. None of us has those phone numbers anymore, but their legacies live on!
My new phone number has a 1 in it. Useless!
knew about mudlock, didn’t know ouchfest had similar origins.
There are a few online identities for me.
tg2k–used at CMU, just like sk4p. Of course you know this. People don’t generally call me this in real life, though you’re free to use the bastardization “tg2kool” (hey, it amuses me, and I have a few accounts with it as my login id as well). I use it in a lot of places because it is not commonly taken, and also if someone from CMU were searching for me in some area, it would probably occur to them to try this. I use it for AIM, although for YM it was derived from my yahoo.com email address (toddgleason). Note that Yahoo! changed the way they do IM and email, and originally my YM ID was actually tg2kool (but you have to use the same account to “link” the email and IM together).
Cool-Man–I’m not sure how this one got started, but it was sometime in high school. And yes, sometimes people do call me this in real life. I put it on my web page at andrew.cmu.edu, and eventually got http://www.cool-man.org to host it. I don’t–at least yet–use it in any IDs or email addresses. Interestingly, you may note that my livejournal ID is but if you go to my journal then it will show it as “Cool-Man’s”. That’s the problem with LJ–even if you have no entries, you can’t change your ID. I didn’t quite understand how my account information would show up when I created it, so I experimented and then couldn’t change it. Had I to do it over again, I would have picked cool-man for my account ID, and shown “Todd C. Gleason” for my name in the journal.
T-Dogg–here’s one most of the CMU folks haven’t heard. My friend in the Santa Cruz area called me this a year or so ago while he was on some kind of Snoop Dogg kick, and I found it amusing enough to hang on to it. I just need some place to make it my ID…or maybe register–oh wait–tdogg.com is taken.
if you really care, you actually can change it. you just have to pay them to do so. its in the FAQ
So here’s the question (or questions really): Where did you get your LJ name? Do you use it other places? Email? Other websites? RPGs? IM? Do people call you that in real life? How did you come up with it? Obviously, a bunch of people on my friends list are wrestlers, and use their gimmick name, but if that’s you, where did you come up with that?
Honestly, I was lazy and since variants of Steph were already taken, and I didn’t want to include any last name info being all paranoid and stuff, so I took your idea. Only other place I use it is for aim (I think that came first and I just transferred that to LJ).
Since I’m pretty shy and modest, I actually feel uncomfortable with this username and often think of changing it to something more subtle. I actually hope people mis-read it as “Be Stephi” stuttered. But it’s nice that at least someone thinks the name is fitting :).
but, you ARE the Best Stephi. 😉
“Kenobi” was given to me as a nickname by a girl I had a crush on as a freshman at CMU. I added the “u” for a few reasons: to make it more distinctive, because the English long “o” is actually a diphthong, and because that made it have nicer properties in my invented language of the time, Fazbabn (since unified with‘s Diltic to form Ralah).
I use it pretty much everywhere online (sadly, it was already taken on AIM by the time I came up with it). I’ve just started using the kenoubi.net domain (but the computer that hosts my website is on an internet connection that’s totally hosed at the moment—it should be back up soon).
Somewhat oddly, since most people probably assume a Star Wars connection, I didn’t see Star Wars at all until my late teens and have no particular attachment to it.
Arguably my personal symbol (used here in tattoo form as my userpic) represents me more, though…
Oops, that was the non-tattoo form. This is the tattoo form.
so do you know for sure that the girl in question didn’t get it from star wars?
On the contrary, I know that she did. I guess my wording was misleading. My point was that for me it doesn’t have any particular attachment to Star Wars.
theadana
When I was still in school, my best friend and I used to write messages to each other on the bathroom walls signed with names we had made up. A year of studying Latin inspired the names, and one of them (can’t remember anymore whether it was mine or hers) was “thea,” referring vaguely to feminine divinity. The other name was an inspiration for early passwords, so I hope it has been long forgotten.
When I needed to create an IM name that wasn’t linked to my family’s AOL account, I used “thea” as the first half. The second half arose from a bit of bibliomancy using the Encylopedia of Faeries. My finger randomly chose the entry on the Tuatha de Dannan, the tribe of folk dedicated to the Goddess Dana. Thus, I became “theadana.”
Theadana became the name I used for all online identities. Even at a young age, I must have understood branding. I use theadana for online RPGs, but not tabletop or live action. Too many people know it as my online identity, and it would be weird.
There are a couple of people who might call me theadana offline, but it’s always pretty strange for me. There is a far greater number of people who call me lmarsh, but that’s a CMU phenomena. Mostly it’s just Laura.
Re: theadana
original. But what I find weird is that you don’t remember for sure which of the names was yours. How long ago was it?
Re: theadana
This was back in tenth grade or so, IIRC. It’s not that odd because I came up with both names, gave one to her, and ended up using both names again for online stuff after that year. So they were both mine originally, she just rented one for a while.
Well, I believe I picked up my nick in middle school or beginning of high school. I play flute and piano, but mainly saxophone, which is where the “jazzy” part probably came in. Jazzyjess…it fits, I think, no? I use it as a bunch of usernames and have it as a few of my email addresses. But yeah, friends call me that all the time outside of the net.
nice icon btw. And actually, yes, the name does quite suit you.
Thank ya. :p
WUTTD
I was searching for an ID for AIM, and everything even remotely associated with my name was taken. I didn’t have any hobbies or interests passionate enough to be deserving. I had a book open at the time. The first letter of each word in some random sentence spelled WUTTD. “We Underestimate The Total Destruction.”
Re: WUTTD
ah… that makes sense. I had always just assumed you randomly hit keys on the keyboard to come up with it.
hi. you don’t know me. LOL.
I chose the username “means” because I was pressed at the time, and the term “means to an end” has held significance in my thought processes. I find humankind non-perfectible, & tend to admire people in terms of their projected goals (or aspirations), so I think striving to obtain a goal is just as important as the goal itself. People are only as good as their aspirations, I tend to think.
I don’t use ‘means’ for any other online persona’s. The name itself is goofy & odd, so using it online (in leu of my real name) affords me enless entertainment when people quote or refer to me (as means). Since I choose to write ‘serious’ fiction in the form of short stories, I tend to play with my entries (and my personae) as a reaction against more cerebral research and writing.
Plus, this culture is pervasively cynical in its use of humor. As one person wrote, “a cynic is a disappointed idealist.” By affecting a silly/goofy LJ title, I’m inviting the cynics/sarcastic folk to make fun of me. Since sarcasm is the national currency, & since I have a tendency to ‘crack people up’ in real-life unintentionally, I work with whimsy online to better understand its import.
When I got an AOL account I was on a huge Herman Hesse kick and was nearly done with Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game which was one of the books that really resonated with me. I still count it as one of my favorite books snf the themes are still things that I think about a lot. I also like that it translates directly from the Latin as “Master of The Game.”
I use it for any online identity that I don’t use my real name for, including AIM.
yeah, I’ve been pretty impressed with your staying with the same ID for so long. I know it was your zephyr sig even back in ’92.
I wish I had read that book as early as 92.
I think this SN dates to 97 or 98, definitely nit till after I got back from the UK.
really? Odd. I thought for sure that was the name you used back then and immediately as an AOL email address upon leaving.
In CMU times I was ml57. I wouldn’t have known how to make a zeypher sig at the time, as the whole internet thing was brand new to me. I think that what happened was that by the time I got back from Europe and got AOL and then AIM, I was far more saavy, and used the internet far more than I did before as my friends were even more spread all over the world, so LudiMagist became more associated with me. By contrast, at CMU people joked that they were amazed when they got an email from me that was addressed to more than one person.
Sorry about that, that was meant to be to the post, not to your comment.
that’s okay. I like Herman Hesse, though I’ve only read Siddhartha. I still intent on reading Narcissus and Goldmund, but right now I’m stuck on short-story writing which combines imagistic metaphors w/ unfolding symbolism (the literary equivalent of, say, the season’s finale of Carnivale… or episode #4 of “The L Word”… or some of Atom Egoyan’s films, like “Exotica”).
But, yeah, Herman Hesse is interesting.
N&G is possibly his best book. Some sy he should have gooten the Nobel for that instead of Magister Ludi. He really takes what he did in Sid a LOT futher in that one.
do any of us really know anyone. 🙂
Thanx for dropping in to answer.
Where did you get your LJ name?
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not exactly made up. It’s a rather obscure reference, but it’s not my creation. Dr. Fell was the alias under which Hannibal Lecter, M.D. resided in Florence, Italy during his tenure as a museum curator. As a fan of the good doctor, and knowing that not only would any username based on his real name be taken, but that it would also not be sufficiently subtle for my taste, I chose his lesser-known pseudonym.
Do you use it other places?
Only when my typical non-actual-name-based-usernames of choice are already taken, such as OKCupid and one of my IM names.
Email? Nope.
Other websites? OkCupid. Again, nobody gets the reference, which in that context is probably good.
RPGs? I don’t play with rocket propelled grenades in the house. It’s messy.
IM? DocFell03, as stated in my profile.
Do people call you that in real life? If they do, they don’t say it to my face. But since the vast majority of them don’t get the reference, I suspect not.
How did you come up with it? I’ll thank Thomas Harris for that.
you know… even with the user icons, that never even occured to me. And yet it seems so obvious now. Why do you like that movie so much, anyway? (I actually like it too… and its one of‘s favorites.
I’m a big fan of the character, both in the books and the movie. The full description as to why would fill a few pages probably. In part I think it’s because he shows that an outward appearance often tells little about a person, a fact people often forget. I love the dichotomy of it; a very refined, educated and cultured gentleman who, without a particular mental disorder, is also a terrifying hunter of men at the same time. I also like the fearlessness with which he can go through life. “Have more than thou showest; Speak less than thou knowest,” and all that.
I think another part of it has to do with the fact I discovered the books while I was studying neuropsychology and criminal justice, in both of which I had a strong interest.
Fortunately, is at least as much a fan as I, though probably for different reasons. She only encourages me. Thanks to her, I have a beautiful Harpy for my collection. (http://www.spyderco.com/pix/products/med/C08_M.jpg)
cool knife… I love knives…
and why has the lovely sarah not shared the secret of her name with me?
My LJ name’s pretty simple. My name’s Dean. I’m really tall. About five years ago I got heroically fed up with people picking different names for themself all over the place. Whereas it might be fun, it makes it hard as fuck to sort out who’s who on a large scale.
If I’m talking to you, I want you to know it’s me, and vice versa. I picked a name that’s 100% trivial to remember, if you’ve met me and remember my name.
Bought the domain, as well. Unfortunately, someone with the same name had the same idea; AIM was gone. I use my name in my AIM screenname; same reason. It’s very hard for me to track a few hundred people who all use names that don’t relate to them.
yeah, I try to stay Mav or close as much as possible. And though it shouldn’t because its a pretty obvious cool sounding alias, it always surprises me when its taken. it especially surprises me when I can’t get chrismaverick.
Then what’s really amusing is when people write me at gmail and ask if I don’t mind giving up maverick@gmail.com so that they can have it. Not do I want to sell it mind you, but can I just give it to them. Ummm… no, I wanted it, or I wouldn’t have registered it in the first place.
Well, my name doesn’t really mean anything.
I was in high school, trying to think of a name for something (i think aim?) and was also reading books from the darkover series by marion zimmer bradley. There was some magical tower named the tower of arilinn, and I thought the name was cool and took it. My aim name is arilinn1 becuae i signed up for netscape with arilinn and there was some weird thing that I couldn’t cross my names over.
hmm… but isn’t that meaninging something?
Where did you get your LJ name? Do you use it other places? Email? Other websites? RPGs? IM? Do people call you that in real life? How did you come up with it?
It would be boring if I did this for “dr4b” because the answer is — yes. I got it as my login at CMU, it’s just stuck with me due to zephyr, I use it as my email address most places, and yes, I have dr4b.org, and use some variant for most sites (deannaddr4b, deannadr4b, etc, if dr4b is too short). It’s not my IM name, which is even MORE boring, and is just my actual name.
Though, my alternate LJ account, mostly dormant but used for videogame scores/stories, is “Janthina”, which has been my alternate name for many many years, starting back in the whole modem-BBS days, going on to IRC and MUDs in high school, and several D&D characters, before becoming my Puzzle Pirates main character name. The name itself comes from an Ann M. Martin book called “Ten Kids, no Pets” — Janthina was the tenth kid, and each one was named after a letter of the alphabet. She was the funniest character. I also thought the name sounded elven, so when I needed a D&D character name for my first ever D&D character in 1991 or so, I just picked it out of thin air. Then it became a handle/nick for me tons of other places. I never used it much at CMU though — no need when I had dr4b as a useable nickname.
its so weird that so many people used their andrewID as lj names. And they all seem to have come up with that of their own volition. I have no desire whatsoever to return to being ch4a.
so do you ever manage to get artemis? It seems like the kinda thing that would be frequently taken.
At this point not often. I had artemis@cmu.edu when I was there, and of course I have it at my own domain.
Well, mg4h was my Andrew-assigned userid. I was going to take griffin but someone had it already. My other online handle was a bit long I thought for an lj name, so instead of Alanafiona I just took mg4h.
As to where I got Alanafiona from… well, I was looking for SCA names, and I thought they might work out. I managed to find actual documentation on Alana being used in period, so it was a valid name. Fiona isn’t, it seems. But I’d already had trouble coming up with a unique userid in places, since often griffin was taken, and so was alana – but no one seems to take alanafiona. So, that’s the alternate.
And if people start using that so now I have to come up with a new userid, I’ll keeeeel you ;p
wow… oddly i signed up with that for about a dozen different websites only yesterday. What an odd coincidence.
So sad. And you were going to buy such a nice house.
I keeeeel you now.
This is how I came up with my lj name:
I’m extremely bisexual, I think that rainbows are extremely beautiful and I used to dress in extremely colorful fashion–thus ‘rainbow’ in my name.
My ex-boyfriend used to call me ‘pookie’ as a loving nickname. It stuck so much, that I was considering to adapt it as my middle name. My parents and my little brother still call me this sometimes, even though I’m not in contact with my ex anymore. “Pooky” was the name of Garfield’s teddy bear, whom Garfield loved very much, thus my ex creatively thought to call me this name. I always liked “Pookie” spelling better over the traditional “Pooky” one.
So, my lj name was born: RainbowPookie…and it stuck…
Yep, I use this name in addition to other names on different websites. My AIM name used the most is RainbowPookie, etc. etc.
Yep. People call me Pookie all the time. (see above).
Although, I’ve been called Rainbow in certain circles, too.
I love my name, and it’s going to stick for a while.
cool… and by the way, the Maxim party thing sounds cool. I wish I could have been there.
A fellow geek was around when I was trying to come up with a handle for a online flight sim (Allegiance, not that many people remember it.) and I wanted something that made it clear that I am female, since that’s such a small presence in that particular arena, but that also put off any would-be suitors/harassers. Thusly was born snidegrrl.
I use it for IM too.
People call me that in real life, but usually in a joking tone.
p.s. i adore your background and wish i could borrow the idea.
Thankyou. feel free to make your own. I guess it would be kind of weird to just take mine, since your don’t know the people.
Thank you for taking the time to answer as well.
what did you use to make it? photoshop?
yep… and a lot of time.
Where did you get your LJ name/How did you come up with it?? from my old diaryland diary, i chose “missmeridian” for many reasons: the book by alice walker, the coffeehouse at college, it means “south,” my fascination with southern women, my full embrace of “miss” for unmarried ladies of a certain age.
Do you use it other places? no
Email? yes
Other websites? RPGs? IM? no/no/no
Do people call you that in real life? no
fully embracing the concept of miss. that sounds interesting. can you explain further? Thanx for taking the time to answer someone you don’t know, btw.
you’re welcome.
according to my upbringing, in the south, old ladies are called “miss” whether they are married or not, somewhat because you might not know if they’re married or widowed or spinstered or d-v-rc-d, but mostly out of some weird tradition of respect, so you just call them all “miss.” this is for women you are casually familiar with (neighbors, in-laws), or complete strangers – women with whom you have a formal relationship (co-workers, bank managers) are called by their full title, which is easy because you were introduced to them as such.
as a future-spinster of america, i’m doing a sort of take-back-the-night thing by applying the ambiguous “miss” to myself and my sistren despite us being in our 20s/30s. because when you hear a 20-something chick refer to hersef as “miss” you think, wait is she really a “miss”, like she’s 12, or is she a “ms.” in which case is she married or not?
who the hell cares if i’m married or not? my hypothetical husband ain’t taking my name, and i’m not taking his. it’s missmeridian now and forever.
Where did you get your LJ name?
I wish there was some great story behind it. People who see me on the street are often afraid of me (I have no idea why), so in order to compensate for this, some of those who know me refer to me as a big teddy bear (hence, “cuddly”). The “doom” part is because I was an Amber GM at the time, and I didn’t want people to think I was _too_ cuddly. Sort of a Jungian, “duality of man” concept, really. Yeah, that’s it…
Oh, and the zeroes for o’s is due to the fact that I once was an 3133+3 (how many of you remember _that_ “spelling”?) p1r4t3, in my younger days. I actually used to type like that. I make fun of myself, so that no one else can laugh at me.
Luckily, people started putting out stuffed diseases and elder gods, so now I have some excellent user pictures.
Do you use it other places? Email? Other websites? RPGs? IM?
It is indeed my AIM name, as can be seen in my profile. Nowhere else is it used.
Do people call you that in real life?
No. I have no nicknames at all. (Not counting shortening Jonathan to Jon.)
4ND U G4V3 UP 5P3LL1NG L1K3 7H47!?!?! Y?!?!?!
I think puberty had something to do with it. I+’5 h4rd +0 g3+ +h3 14di35′ in+3r35+ wh3n u +yp3 1ik3 +hi5.
L0W3RC453 L3773R5? P053R!!!!!!!1!
n0+ ‘^’h3r3 ! c4m3 fr0^^. ‘^’3 d!dn’+ u53 upperc453 l3++3r5 4+ 411. Actually, a lot of the guys I knew then used to alternate uppercase and lowercase randomly. My friend WeEzeLdUb got so good at it he had trouble writing normally. His pinky would just keep hitting the damn shift key.
LaceChenault – well everywhere I go on the web it’s either LacyChenault or LaceChenault, because of my art mostly – I want my name to be known!
On RPG’s I always use Lacina if it’s a girl or Lark if it’s a boy.
yeah, after all these years, I was actually pretty amazed to learn that your last name wasn’t actually Chenault. Anyway, it totally works for you.
blk was my CMU username. I felt that it became an identity on its own, and liked it enough that I kept it even after I got married. (before college, my most commonly used BBS handle was “stranger,” but that’s far too common for most places.) I managed to get on the LJ craze early enough that blk wasn’t taken, so I took it.
I envied the older cmuers who had the old-skool usernames, which were basically 4 random alphanumerics, so after I ran out of unique short identifiers for places, I decided to create my own fake old-skool userid, bk7j. I’ve actually had a couple people identify me by it, because they assume that I went to CMU several years ago, and had initials of B-K.
like I told I find it fascinating that you would make up your own old school andrewID. I hated mine. A lot of people did. When they offered to let us change them, there was a huge scramble to get that done. To each their own, I guess.
Back in ’97 I needed a name for chatting on AOL. I whipped out the dictionary and settled on the first thing that sounded cool and had a wicked definition. Annexation: to take without asking. I liked it, and have since used that name for everything in the online ether.
Of course, I didn’t realize it then, but there are tremendous benifits to using this moniker:
A) It’s wickit cool.
B) It’s never been already taken.
C) It’s an “A” word, meaning anything that arranges people in alphabetical order places me near the top.
D) It gets remembered and rarely misspelled.
hmm…. so did you start at the beginning of the dictionary and go word by word or did you like just randomly open it and point?
Shiima – fromlust2dust
– Where did you get your LJ name?
fromlust2dust is the name of my finishing move in wrestling, I think I once had a Shiima Xion account on here, but for some reason, I felt more comfortable with this one.
– Do you use it other places?
Yes, it’s the name of my finisher.
– Do people call you that in real life?
That would be weird if someone did.
– How did you come up with it?
I didn’t come up with it. It’s a lyric in the HIM song “Heartache Every Moment”
Re: Shiima – fromlust2dust
eh… I think you should have used midnight panda seizure, but hey…
woah… you read the Simarillion over and over again? wow. Anyway. That was interesting. Thanx for taking the time to answer someone you don’t know.
wow… and you spell girl correctly. How retro. Its a cool sounding name. Very 50s superheroish. Thanx for dropping by.
Since I’m a slacker and have just now finally got around to answering.
Where did you get your LJ name?
Oddly enough, this came from a class that I took freshman year of college.
Do you use it other places? Email? Other websites? RPGs? IM?
I use it for anything in which an alias is called for. That’s my IM name. That’s one of the domains that I own. It’s what I use on various forums online.
Do people call you that in real life?
Only in groups where I’ve met those individuals online before I met them in person. And usually it’s just the shortened Bogo.
How did you come up with it?
At some point freshman year of college, I had finally submitted to using AIM(I had been an ICQ user and didn’t really want to switch). I was having difficulty picking a clever name as my requirements were somewhat strict in that I didn’t want some variation of my name, nor did I want a number in it. After trying dozens of things(all of which were taken), I finally randomly decided to just throw in random terms from class that day, and the first one that happened to work is BogoSort.
In retrospect, it’s rather appropiate for me, so it’s kinda stuck. BogoSort, for those not familiar with Computer Science, refers to a sorting process. For example, if you were trying to sort a deck of cards to the factory fresh ordering(all suits together in order), the process that you would follow is as such:
1) Shuffle the deck
2) Check to see if you’re done. If not, then go back to step 1.
It has a very small chance to work, but could potentially be way faster than doing it in any other way. Just the stereotpically random twisted way of doing things, which fits me rather well.
ah… from 15-211, i assume. So there was no real link between you and the bogosort algorithm prior to selecting the name? I had just figured you thought it was clever or something.
Yeah, I think 15-211 that was about the right time. I had known about it, and deemed it silly. In my mind, it’s almost like a real name, I didn’t have that much conscious decision about what to name myself, but that I’ve also grown into it.
“sunderi” came from Dan. We were watching a show on tv (MANY years ago now) where they had named a tiger “sundari”, which is evidently Hindi for “pretty girl”. Dan started calling me “sunderi” which was our best guess for the spelling of the word (since it was on tv and we only got to hear it).
Luckily, since I use a misspelling, it’s almost always available, so I use it all over the place. 🙂
that’s actually a good one. Original. I like it. Did you read LJ just to answer this post? Awwww… how sweet.
My LJ name is the first initial/last name username I’ve had since my first contact with the Internet, 14 years ago. My name is rare outside of Spanish speaking countries, which means that ‘dcalle’ is usually available.
I use it all over the place. Occasionally, when it’s taken, I use DanCalle, because that’s incredibly rare since ‘Dan’ is not a Spanish nickname.
Fortunately no one calls me dcalle in real life.
Occasionally, if I want to be a bit more anonymous, I’ll use “Dan C” or “yippee” which was my old fraternity nickname.
A friend of mine uses her first name followed by her birthday for the following reason:
that begs an interesting question. What makes you want to be anonymous vs. not. I mean, why do you choose to be sometimes and sometimes not?
also, you don’t use LJ much. Do you lurk still or did you also log in just to answer this? I assume the former, since I don’t recall telling you or about this post ahead of time.
Well, I would not normally care about anonymity on the net, but, as a professional dance instructor, I now have a large group of people (my students) who know my name and might be interested in my personal life, who have no business knowing about it. Neither “Dan C” nor “yippee” would be fruitful Google searches. Whereas “Dan Calle” turns up mostly stuff related to me.
I jump on LJ occasionally, like I did today, and happened to see this entry. But I do read more often than post, so “lurk” is probably the appropriate term. 🙂
Have you considered using the filters? I’ve found those pretty useful.
I’m now in the same situation as a university instructor (last semester and next year), so I am really careful about what gets put online in anything resembling a public post.
That’s a good point. I hadn’t been putting anything really private on LJ for that reason, but I hadn’t really latched on to the whole filters idea. The posts I’d want to keep more private are elsewhere in other communities.
answered out of order
Where did you get your LJ name? How did you come up with it?
Valancy’s a literary character from my favorite book. I was led to LJ by folks on on which I am “Valancy” but that was already taken on LJ. Rather than attach her last name to it, I stuck on my favorite # – 17.
Do you use it other places? Email? Other websites? RPGs? IM?
I did have an email account with this name a while back, but nothing I use now. I use its origin (Valancy) when I can.
Do people call you that in real life? Some mudders have, but since they found it difficult to figure out the pronunciation (which I thought was obvious*), they generally stick with my real name when they know it. Plus, I don’t hang on the mud much these days.
*I pronounce it VAL-un-see, as in valance, “a piece of drapery attached lengthways to a canopy, altar-cloth, or the like, so as to hang in a vertical position.” (quoth the OED) Some people not only pronounce it wrong, they spell it wrong – “valency”, which has something to do with chemistry. Of chemistry, I know not.
Re: answered out of order
oh, and I forgot – it is at least one chat username (AIM?) to which I can no longer remember the password so an account I don’t/can’t log into. Ditto for a Juno email account I think has that username – they made it hard for me to get my password because they’d moved to the pay service and wanted me to ante up, so I just gave it up.
Re: answered out of order
hmmm… you never said what the book was.
Re: answered out of order
Ah, yes, I tend not to, becuase most people have never heard of it. The book is “The Blue Castle” by L(ucy) M(aud) Montgomery, author of “Anne of Green Gables” and many others.
I like making up names, and my real name is a made up name, so I make up more for different venues.
A few years ago I was trying to think of the shortest new, catchy name I could, and came up with “Uo”. A few months later I signed up for LJ and tried using it but it was taken. I remembered that “Uomo” means “Man” in Italian… a nice combo of generic and exotic, and so brief, brevity is the soul of wit. Man, brief… Men’s briefs are witty, of course they are, holding in our brains all day. But I digress- must keep the writing tidy and not write of tighty whities.
weird… so its made up, but then not.
Started as a LARP character…
The name Vixen Darkfairy started at S.O.L.A.R, an off-shoot of N.E.R.O. I played a Dark Fae whose insanity was that she believed she was a succubus. She would (try to) kill anyone who ended up all alone with her, then Life Drain them, thinking it gave her her magickal powers as a spellcaster. As a succubus, she chose the name Vixen, and since my character worked the brothel in-play, I thought it a wicked twist of humor to add Darkfairy as my surname, making my initials “VD”. Very few people ever caught it…
Now, since I sometimes do alternative modeling, I kept the sick name. I was even “Vixen” at Hot Topic, because having 2 Asst. Managers named Kristin was just confusing.
I’m pretty much a vamp all the time, so really, my LJ identity is “just me.”
–“Kris” to my RL friends