Morrocco Mole was my CB handle in the 70’s. The home CB base was Secret Squirrel. Loved that cartoon even as a young adult.
/image secret Squirrel Morrocco Mole
@thismyusername thanks for the ping. I used to love getting developers notifications from Dave or whoever when they made changes to forums and announced new features… Like “now you can use @username to ping people” etc
As a youth I played a lot of Samurai Shodown at the local arcade, and Hanzo Hattori was one of my favorite characters.
Somewhere around the same time, we got access to Prodigy and I needed an online handle… Hanzo it was.
This became my defacto for every bbs, online service and platform for a lot of years. Turns out, Hanzo is a super popular name.
Around the time AIM decoupled from the base AOL system, I snagged the screen name “hanzo”. At some point, AOL employees reclaimed the more choice names, and I lost mine. I needed a new version of my name, was still attached to the Hanzo moniker, and I was a teen boy. Thus Hanzo v(ersion) 69, Hanzo v.69 was born.
For good or ill, I’ve used it for so long and it’s just unique enough that a cursory glance at google suggests that damned near every result is in fact, me.
@thismyusername I love the internet archive. In this scenario, I have something better than MAME… an original SNK/NeoGeo cabinet with MVS board and Samurai Shodown I-IV carts for it. I have a bunch of others as well, a few Metal Slugs, Bubble Bobble, KOF, and a black market multi-rom MVS cart with all the official releases and a bunch of modded versions.
Back in my early days working at an ad agency, one of the accounts I worked on was the I️New York campaign, which I referred to as iHeartNY. Around that time I also acquired a pedigreed Korat cat from Thailand. One of the characteristics of the Korat breed is a heart-shaped face. So naturally I registered him as iHeartNY. However, I called him Heartny because it sounded better as a cat name.
Only 1 person (from high school) called me “muscles” but with a hard “c” hence the “msklz” portion. Yes, it was a sarcastically-given nickname.
Only 1 person (from college) called me “Annie”. I had short curly hair (not red) and when we 1st met I was wearing my tshirt that advertised the musical I’d been an unnamed orphan in. For a couple of years he seriously thought my name was Annie.
I combined them when I created my woot account and continued the name over here.
It’s my name without any vowels. Originally just used DVD, but needed something more unique for public accounts. Apparently it’s not unique enough, because some websites already have a DVDBZN user that is not me.
Mine was based on my first email address. Thinking I needed to preserve my anonymity on the internet (little did I know how impossible that would be then), I opted to use my first initial-middle name-last initial (ACraigL). It’s basically been my username everywhere ever since – it’s almost never taken so there’s that.
Pretty much ditto. When I originally set up an account here, I didn’t think I’d be spending time doing anything but checking for the odd deal, so I used my standard abbreviation.
Unlike Woot, where I spent some time thinking about what I wanted my screen name to be and the appearance of my avatar.
And now, of course, I rarely visit Woot, and drop by Meh every single day!
I’m from TN, I’m a hillbilly, and I’m a gal so… I usually use either hillbillygal or tnhillbillygal for usernames. Except on gaming type stuffs where I use RedPandaNami.
My grade school gym teacher called me “Downtown Brown” and lots of kids called me down town. It was ironic because the real Downtown Freddie Brown was a basketball player and even it first grade it was clear I would not be. Jump to 9th grade French class, where of course we were supposed to call each other by our French names. My name, Don, with a French accent sounds like a bathroom grunt. One of the guys in class said my nickname was Downtown, which in French is Enville, so for a good part of my high school time my nickname was Enville, which is almost always available as a username. This is Freddie, not me.
About 20 years ago the Hubby (Jim) started playing a racing video game. He joined an online community with the username of jimeez… Not long after I joined him as jimeezlady. (jimmy’s lady) 99% of my online exploits have been as jimeezlady.
Have you ever seen the movie Gladiator? The main character’s name is Maximus. The mother of the girl who I was dating at the time has a very think Serbian accent…and for whatever reason she started calling me Adamus (Adam’s my given name), which sounded more like Ada-moose…LOL.
Naturally, my gf at the time also started calling me Adamus…in front of my friends…LOL. My friends rolled with it, dropping my name, thus calling me mus.
The magic was added when I was playing a doubles round of disc golf with my buddy Drew near Asheville, NC. We played so magically that day…I started calling him Drew-magic…he called me musmagic…
And here we are…a unique nickname that is never, ever taken on any site…unless I already signed up and forgot about it!
We were showing American Eskimo dogs, so I chose that as a screen name on AOL, and noticed that I can virtually always get that as an email address, so it stuck.
Mine means nothing. I made an email address with it because I thought I’d get a lot of spam from somewhere, but I didn’t, so I kept using it. Once I start getting too much spam, I’ll make a new one.
My mom gave us a kitten that needed bottle feeding back in the 90s. Since we had a Bart and a Maggie, we named this young one, Lisa.
Her middle name was my mom’s name, since that’s who gave her to us.
Lisa Violet.
Then we trapped a cat by tricking him into our garage (he was feral and we’d already had him fixed, but the local coyote population was growing, so we wanted him in). Once in the garage, he ran up into the rafters. He wouldn’t come down. On August 1, 1996, I went online to ask for advice on how to get him down. I chose the name “lisaviolet” since there were so many variations of Dianne, and I didn’t want anyone confusing me (like Jon T did during the Twisted Lisa episode - hey, I’m the nice Lisa!).
Red Rafter finally came down on his own a year later. I’ll tell ya, feeding, watering and litter box cleaning wasn’t real fun from a ladder.
My name. My first name is Laura. When I initially did it, thought I was just putting a user name for shopping here. Didn’t think I’d be participating in this asylum.
In the AIM days, my username for most things was ‘KawaiiDragoness’, because I was that kind of terrible nerdy pre-teen. It’s long and obnoxious, but it is indeed unique. As I started using it as a handle in games and things, folks would shorten it to ‘Kawa’, which I liked so much it just became a personal nickname. Nowadays in non-work contexts friends and sweeties will call me Kawa, and I’ll introduce myself as Kawa in places where my real name/day job isn’t relevant.
There’s other Kawas floating around the Internet though, and some places won’t let you have a four character username, so on more popular forms of social media I’m not able to snag the username. Occasionally I can get Kawa-tan or kawatan, the -tan suffix being a weird cutesy Japanese one. But even that’s taken on the really big places like Twitter, so KawaiiDragoness persists.
Well, you see – Growing up, I was a bit of a cowboy, but my mom wouldn’t let me have real guns. So, I used knives instead. Hence, the name KnifingCowboy
But, I’m not a cowboy, and I don’t shoot capguns. Of course, I’m not a woman and I don’t ride motorcycles. MAYBE I COULD BE @BIKERLADY!
I swear I wrote this out before. My nickname for my cat was Fuzzalina. And I used to use that, but I had to use Fuzzalina1 for Ingress, because I already created an account and they needed to kill it for some reason. Anyway, you actually meet people in real life with Ingress, and this one guy kept calling me Fuzzalini, pronounced like Mussalini, and I liked the sound of that. And here we are.
I was a DJ in college, starting with radio but also live, with two turntables and a microphone, that whole thing. I transitioned into digital with some bars in my hometown after college. In college I was also influential in the slack nonmovement, where a bunch of us would just hang out idly at the tables outside the student center.
Online things started to happen around that time, so the name has stuck. I do miss DJing, and every once in a while I pick up a piece of gear to try to get back into music, but life keeps having other plans. In another few years I’ll probably have a complete but mostly obsolete studio waiting for me in my office.
I don’t really go out to clubs and stuff anymore, but when I did I hated almost every club dj with a laptop because all I could hear was their mistakes, and I couldn’t understand how you can have all that assistance and still ruin music when we used to do great things with just vinyl and our fingers. It makes me feel like I’m yelling “get off my lawn” internally.
My favorite sci-fi books growing up were E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series. He had a penchant for using longer and less common words, which served to provide me with a somewhat more enhanced vocabulary than many of my peers; that was both helpful and occasionally injurious in grade school.
When the time came to select usernames (and emails) on pre-internet information services (GEnie) all my favorite car names were already taken (Barracuda, Cuda, Challenger, GTX, Hemi, etc) so I pulled out the Lensman books.
While reading about Qadgop the Mercotan and its zymolosely polydactile tongue, raspily licking its way through a pure neutronium trans-ship’s hull I realized that his more technical terminology would better suit… duodecaplylatomate! The ultimate quintessence of chemical explosives! Volatilizing anything not protected by the ultimate in energy shielding, with a velocity of propagation just under the speed of light! And it had a handy nick-name: duodec. And it wasn’t taken, anywhere! Woohoo!
Of course someone with an early invite snagged duodec at gmail dot com before I could. Obviously some criminal zwilnik from Boskone…
@DrWorm It is perhaps unfortunate that your exposure to the mind-expanding vocabulary and prose of ‘Doc’ Smith have come too late in life.
Not to mention the truly epic pan-galactic tales of the endless battle between the glorious greatness of the forces of Civilization and Reason against the stultifying and degenerate evil that seeks to bring it all down.
I do not believe that being unfamiliar with the works of the good Doc would inevitably lead to the mentation level of a Zabriskan Fontema, but clearly a perusal of his greatest works at a young age, when the mind is still so plastic and full of potential for growth, with thoughtful contemplation of the characters, their stories, and the eternal themes therein contained has proven a boon to many, and played at least a small part in the creation of some truly great minds.
@DrWorm@duodec Doc Smith’s Lensman series is great. You can see where a lot of “modern” sci-fi stole ideas from. I’d love to see a decent movie made from it.
@blaineg@DrWorm I don’t think Doc would mind that his ideas inspired others. I would also love a series of movies based on either of the two series, but only if they respected the work, the story, and the characters, which I don’t see happening…
To be honest, I didn’t put a ton of thought into it. The “Meh” theme song was the video of the day so I had the band “They Might Be Giants” on my brain. I lazily lifted a name from another one of their songs. On some subconscious level, the fact that some people in real life call me “Doc” might have impacted my thought process.
If you think about the whole thing with the batteries and the refrigerators, it’s all pretty obvious. Of course, you have to carry the 1 and divide by pi a couple of times, and the logarithmic stuff always gets a bit confusing. But after all that, you end up with my user name. Simple, really.
My screen names over the years have tended toward Celtic. I was Lady Kyna from my SCA days, and I morphed that into Kyandra. I needed a name in a game I played and liked that Cerdwyn was a diminutive of Cerridwen, the Celtic Goddess. When she played another game she became Cerridwyn and that stuck for many years. Still does in some places. In more violent games I have been Morrighan and when I want to be a bit more incognito Arionrhod.
I also had a Scathatch once. She was deadly and a toy alt in a game that I had god like powers (i.e., was staff) and was quite fun.
These stories and explanations are great. Thanks for an enjoyable thread, @morocco_mole and for digging up the old one which I’m off to read now @medz.
We used to have 2 llamas and named them Como and Te. It wasn’t taken and I was attempting for some form of anonymity… much unlike my University-issued email address (initials + last 4 of SSN‽ @ tamu.edu ) hence the username.
Asking around today, I found that the Texas A&M student email address assignment system you mentioned was in operation in at least one other UT system campus, at UTA. And possibly at several other campuses for a time.
It may have been the standard method of assigning student email addresses system-wide within the state public universities for some years.
If so, that’s painful to know.
But if several campuses were doing this, the email addressing system can hardly be blamed on one school’s IT Dept.
@f00l ha! I do love me a good Aggie joke. I barely remember the Aggie chicken farmer who wrote his alma mater for advice because the baby chicks kept dying? Anyway it was something about “it doesn’t seem to matter whether I plant them in the ground feet first or head first…”
It really was a terrible system. Otherwise, why do I still remember all my roommates’ “last-4”? Mark’s 2696 and Nicole’s 1393 and… it was just plain silly. Glad to know it was not just our campus that was dumb!
@2palms@f00l wow I had no idea this forum had other Aggies on it. My wife took me to midnight yell once as my initiation into what made her into the crazy woman she is. Safe to say that should have been enough then and there.
@2palms Wow, that’s a terrible way to generate usernames.
Still, there are other terrible ways. Our work started randomizing new user names (so far the old timers get to keep their FirstLetterLastName names). At first it was some slightly recognizable part of their name, with a bunch of numbers. Now it’s some completely random letters followed by random numbers. I feel sorry for folks stuck with those.
on livejournal with some friends I was moonshinehat, because I kept bringing homemade Kahlua and hazelnut liqueurs to get togethers and I liked wearing this goofy fake fur hat. Then it got shortened to moonhat.
@2palms if I remember correctly, yes. Something like instant coffee, water, sugar, vanilla? I never really thought it was that great. The liqueur making was more fun and tastier IMO.
@moonhat I feel a new thread coming on. Booze recipes!
As a science fair project, my son built a “water desalinator” from an old electric pressure cooker and I’ve used it to make moonshine from cheap wine, fermented fruits and not-tasty batches of home-brewed beer. It will do about a gallon at a time but I have never really been happy with the results.
I think I have a 750-mL bottle of “Everclear” (192-proof ethanol from Mexico, actually) on lemon zest in the back of the cupboard! I was going to try my hand at limoncello but got distracted.
@2palms I made lemoncello once, and it wasn’t too bad! I read that it’s really tricky to make though, because you need to be sure to only get the yellow parts of the peel and none of the white parts and it’s really particular, yadayada. But fun to do! Now you have me so excited to make something. The best stuff I made was when my parents had a yard with a bunch of hazelnut trees in it (that my dad had planted) and for years we didn’t do much with the nuts until I started experimenting with chocolate hazelnuts clusters etc… then tried making a liqueur (like Frangelico) and it often turned out really, really good! Yum.
@2palms also, is Everclear really from mexico? I didn’t know that. I remember growing up, in WA you couldn’t buy it but you could buy it in OR. I was thinking that now you can buy it anywhere, no?
@medz Right‽ You sound like his science teacher She was right. (Especially when he was sweating joints.) I’ve learned and the younger kids are required to wear it!
I’ve bounced around screenames for years from monkey9000, to nights777, to nights, to ReclaimerCube. A buddy of mine and I sat down one night and everyone in our Xbox Live group hated anyone with numbers in their names and the username had to be two iconic words. His was/is HeavenlyAxe. For me we combined Reclaimer (Halo) and Portal (Cube). We worked with ideas for the longest but now you can google ReclaimerCube and literally find out everything about me.
@Asviloka I used to have a password generator that could optionally generate ‘pronounceable’ words with valid English syllables (so easier to remember). It made some interesting passwords, occasionally vulgar or pretty funny.
I… joined in 2014?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m DennisG2010 at Woot.
I have a more inscrutable name I use for gaming and forums where I want to remain less identifiable. It’s a combination of the first syllables of my 1st, middle and last names which everyone pronounces differently (someone once asked if it was a South African name ). My gaming buddies call me “Den”, as do some of my IRL friends and fam, so it works.
I originally came up with it as a name for my first (and probably only) D&D character when I was 13.
BlaineG is probably pretty obvious. I didn’t know there was going to be a looney bin to hang out in.
I’ve used a wide variety of names over the years. I stole Dances With Bikers from “Hot Shots!”, back when Dances with Wolves was still a thing.
And years ago I worked with some Japanese customers frequently. My name inevitably got mangled to Brain-san, which my cow-orkers found hilarious, so it stuck.
I chose Gypsigirl213 because in my dna and in my spirit I’m a born traveler. I’ve lived all over the US and get antsy to move when I’ve been somewhere for a few years. Gonna go full time RV life as soon as I finish my masters degree to scratch the traveling itch that’s plagued me since I can remember.
Changed Gypsy to Gypsi because it was less used and girl, because well, I’m female. I had to add my 2-13 birthday month and day as Gypsigirl was often taken as a user name, and it just stuck.
I use a different name every place I go. I usually chose a completely random name that has absolutely nothing to do with me or my interests.
(I do like soup… But not particularly an onion soup connesseur)
Onionsoup was literally the first thing that popped into my head that had nothing to do with me.
I do this to make it harder to link me to any other account online. Early on I used my childhood nickname and some crazy bitch googled my nickname and stalked me all across the internet.
I learnt my lesson and now never use the same name twice. Heck, I have a dozen email addresses to make it harder for small companies online to share data about me with each other. I randomly chose which email address to use on a website… sometimes I create a new email account especially. Which makes a challenge when trying to do a password reset.
@OnionSoup what? Are you a secret agent or celebrity? That sounds like a lot of work to remember which emails belong to which website. It sounds like it’d be a part time job to keep all that straight. What’s the payoff for all that time and energy?
@blaineg I don’t trust password managers. One stop shop for someone to get all your passwords and a list of every website you’ve been signed up for.
I know at least one of those password managers got hacked last year.
I use a formula for generating my passwords. It’s one that someone wouldn’t be able to figure out even if they got hold of one or two of my passwords… But simple enough that only takes me a few seconds. (Simple for me, because it partially relies on a code me and my high school buddies developed)
Self-explanatory
/image fool
@f00l But tell us why do you think you’re the fool? (in 10,000 words or less please)
@Mehrocco_Mole
some sort of string limit set by meh when configuring the username system.
some other username already took my first choice @username
@thismyusername thanks for the ping. I used to love getting developers notifications from Dave or whoever when they made changes to forums and announced new features… Like “now you can use @username to ping people” etc
Ninjas! Modems! AOL Employees!
As a youth I played a lot of Samurai Shodown at the local arcade, and Hanzo Hattori was one of my favorite characters.
Somewhere around the same time, we got access to Prodigy and I needed an online handle… Hanzo it was.
This became my defacto for every bbs, online service and platform for a lot of years. Turns out, Hanzo is a super popular name.
Around the time AIM decoupled from the base AOL system, I snagged the screen name “hanzo”. At some point, AOL employees reclaimed the more choice names, and I lost mine. I needed a new version of my name, was still attached to the Hanzo moniker, and I was a teen boy. Thus Hanzo v(ersion) 69, Hanzo v.69 was born.
For good or ill, I’ve used it for so long and it’s just unique enough that a cursory glance at google suggests that damned near every result is in fact, me.
@hanzov69
https://archive.org/details/arcade_samsho
https://archive.org/details/arcade_samsho2
@thismyusername
I love the internet archive. In this scenario, I have something better than MAME… an original SNK/NeoGeo cabinet with MVS board and Samurai Shodown I-IV carts for it. I have a bunch of others as well, a few Metal Slugs, Bubble Bobble, KOF, and a black market multi-rom MVS cart with all the official releases and a bunch of modded versions.
@hanzov69 snazzy!
@mfladd and I were fighting about what sprinkles are called (not fucking jimmies dammit) and I found this meme and it makes me happy.
@KittySprinkles Titty Jimmies!
@KittySprinkles @mfladd doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way.
@mfladd listen here, Mister Softee, you’re wrong as the day is long.
https://meh.com/forum/topics/lets-give-jaremelz-a-new-name#5768ac16f4783b5009769b2a
Back in my early days working at an ad agency, one of the accounts I worked on was the I
️New York campaign, which I referred to as iHeartNY. Around that time I also acquired a pedigreed Korat cat from Thailand. One of the characteristics of the Korat breed is a heart-shaped face. So naturally I registered him as iHeartNY. However, I called him Heartny because it sounded better as a cat name.
2 nicknames squished into 1.
Only 1 person (from high school) called me “muscles” but with a hard “c” hence the “msklz” portion. Yes, it was a sarcastically-given nickname.
Only 1 person (from college) called me “Annie”. I had short curly hair (not red) and when we 1st met I was wearing my tshirt that advertised the musical I’d been an unnamed orphan in. For a couple of years he seriously thought my name was Annie.
I combined them when I created my woot account and continued the name over here.
@msklzannie That does help explain things as I typically read your name as Miss Kills Annie.
It’s my name without any vowels. Originally just used DVD, but needed something more unique for public accounts. Apparently it’s not unique enough, because some websites already have a DVDBZN user that is not me.
/giphy captain America
@CaptAmehrican not this?
/image schooner
Mine was based on my first email address. Thinking I needed to preserve my anonymity on the internet (little did I know how impossible that would be then), I opted to use my first initial-middle name-last initial (ACraigL). It’s basically been my username everywhere ever since – it’s almost never taken so there’s that.
Pretty much ditto. When I originally set up an account here, I didn’t think I’d be spending time doing anything but checking for the odd deal, so I used my standard abbreviation.
Unlike Woot, where I spent some time thinking about what I wanted my screen name to be and the appearance of my avatar.
And now, of course, I rarely visit Woot, and drop by Meh every single day!
@ACraigL Same here. 1st & middle Initials, consonants from last name.
I’m from TN, I’m a hillbilly, and I’m a gal so… I usually use either hillbillygal or tnhillbillygal for usernames. Except on gaming type stuffs where I use RedPandaNami.
The whole initials thing… wife’s first initial followed by a conjunction (?) then my first initial then our last initial. I think.
For some older explanations: https://meh.com/forum/topics/explain-your-username
@cinoclav thanks for the time saver! my entry there
@snapster And here I thought @snapster came about because “I’m the boss and all I have to do is snap my fingers…” or something like that.
You’re kidding, right?
@cranky1950
Cranky for 69 years?
Hurry up and stay that way.
/giphy cranky
My grade school gym teacher called me “Downtown Brown” and lots of kids called me down town. It was ironic because the real Downtown Freddie Brown was a basketball player and even it first grade it was clear I would not be. Jump to 9th grade French class, where of course we were supposed to call each other by our French names. My name, Don, with a French accent sounds like a bathroom grunt. One of the guys in class said my nickname was Downtown, which in French is Enville, so for a good part of my high school time my nickname was Enville, which is almost always available as a username. This is Freddie, not me.
About 20 years ago the Hubby (Jim) started playing a racing video game. He joined an online community with the username of jimeez… Not long after I joined him as jimeezlady. (jimmy’s lady) 99% of my online exploits have been as jimeezlady.
Have you ever seen the movie Gladiator? The main character’s name is Maximus. The mother of the girl who I was dating at the time has a very think Serbian accent…and for whatever reason she started calling me Adamus (Adam’s my given name), which sounded more like Ada-moose…LOL.
Naturally, my gf at the time also started calling me Adamus…in front of my friends…LOL. My friends rolled with it, dropping my name, thus calling me mus.
The magic was added when I was playing a doubles round of disc golf with my buddy Drew near Asheville, NC. We played so magically that day…I started calling him Drew-magic…he called me musmagic…
And here we are…a unique nickname that is never, ever taken on any site…unless I already signed up and forgot about it!
We were showing American Eskimo dogs, so I chose that as a screen name on AOL, and noticed that I can virtually always get that as an email address, so it stuck.
Mine means nothing. I made an email address with it because I thought I’d get a lot of spam from somewhere, but I didn’t, so I kept using it. Once I start getting too much spam, I’ll make a new one.
My mom gave us a kitten that needed bottle feeding back in the 90s. Since we had a Bart and a Maggie, we named this young one, Lisa.
Her middle name was my mom’s name, since that’s who gave her to us.
Lisa Violet.
Then we trapped a cat by tricking him into our garage (he was feral and we’d already had him fixed, but the local coyote population was growing, so we wanted him in). Once in the garage, he ran up into the rafters. He wouldn’t come down. On August 1, 1996, I went online to ask for advice on how to get him down. I chose the name “lisaviolet” since there were so many variations of Dianne, and I didn’t want anyone confusing me (like Jon T did during the Twisted Lisa episode - hey, I’m the nice Lisa!).
Red Rafter finally came down on his own a year later. I’ll tell ya, feeding, watering and litter box cleaning wasn’t real fun from a ladder.
My name. My first name is Laura. When I initially did it, thought I was just putting a user name for shopping here. Didn’t think I’d be participating in this asylum.
In the AIM days, my username for most things was ‘KawaiiDragoness’, because I was that kind of terrible nerdy pre-teen. It’s long and obnoxious, but it is indeed unique. As I started using it as a handle in games and things, folks would shorten it to ‘Kawa’, which I liked so much it just became a personal nickname. Nowadays in non-work contexts friends and sweeties will call me Kawa, and I’ll introduce myself as Kawa in places where my real name/day job isn’t relevant.
There’s other Kawas floating around the Internet though, and some places won’t let you have a four character username, so on more popular forms of social media I’m not able to snag the username. Occasionally I can get Kawa-tan or kawatan, the -tan suffix being a weird cutesy Japanese one. But even that’s taken on the really big places like Twitter, so KawaiiDragoness persists.
well, there’s the ‘carl’ part, which is obvious. and then the ‘669’ part which is also obvious.
@carl669 You stutter and you really like the 69 position?
@cinoclav like i said, it’s obvious.
@carl669 @cinoclav
And also your fuckwad emotional age is 6!
And also your fuckadelic IQ is 69!
Right?
69. <Heh heh>
/giphy fuckwad
@carl669 Obviously, you are Carl, the across-the-street-neighbor of the Beast.
@rockblossom wouldn’t i have to across the street and one over? so, the kitty-corner neighbor of the beast?
Well, you see – Growing up, I was a bit of a cowboy, but my mom wouldn’t let me have real guns. So, I used knives instead. Hence, the name KnifingCowboy
But, I’m not a cowboy, and I don’t shoot capguns. Of course, I’m not a woman and I don’t ride motorcycles. MAYBE I COULD BE @BIKERLADY!
@capguncowboy I’ve always liked your username.
It’s me.
But my usual handle is my favorite word for “ghost” and my favorite ancient musician.
@ThomasF spectreChrysogonus seems like a really long username.
@ThomasF BansheeJubal?
@ThomasF WraithRichards?
@hanzov69 @ThomasF SpookStewart?
@ThomasF ShadeLiszt?
@ThomasF Ghosty McGhostface
@Ignorant
Rationale? I ain’ got rationale!
I don need no stinkin’ rationale!
I swear I wrote this out before. My nickname for my cat was Fuzzalina. And I used to use that, but I had to use Fuzzalina1 for Ingress, because I already created an account and they needed to kill it for some reason. Anyway, you actually meet people in real life with Ingress, and this one guy kept calling me Fuzzalini, pronounced like Mussalini, and I liked the sound of that. And here we are.
https://meh.com/forum/topics/explain-your-username
I was a DJ in college, starting with radio but also live, with two turntables and a microphone, that whole thing. I transitioned into digital with some bars in my hometown after college. In college I was also influential in the slack nonmovement, where a bunch of us would just hang out idly at the tables outside the student center.
Online things started to happen around that time, so the name has stuck. I do miss DJing, and every once in a while I pick up a piece of gear to try to get back into music, but life keeps having other plans. In another few years I’ll probably have a complete but mostly obsolete studio waiting for me in my office.
I don’t really go out to clubs and stuff anymore, but when I did I hated almost every club dj with a laptop because all I could hear was their mistakes, and I couldn’t understand how you can have all that assistance and still ruin music when we used to do great things with just vinyl and our fingers. It makes me feel like I’m yelling “get off my lawn” internally.
My favorite sci-fi books growing up were E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series. He had a penchant for using longer and less common words, which served to provide me with a somewhat more enhanced vocabulary than many of my peers; that was both helpful and occasionally injurious in grade school.
When the time came to select usernames (and emails) on pre-internet information services (GEnie) all my favorite car names were already taken (Barracuda, Cuda, Challenger, GTX, Hemi, etc) so I pulled out the Lensman books.
While reading about Qadgop the Mercotan and its zymolosely polydactile tongue, raspily licking its way through a pure neutronium trans-ship’s hull I realized that his more technical terminology would better suit… duodecaplylatomate! The ultimate quintessence of chemical explosives! Volatilizing anything not protected by the ultimate in energy shielding, with a velocity of propagation just under the speed of light! And it had a handy nick-name: duodec. And it wasn’t taken, anywhere! Woohoo!
Of course someone with an early invite snagged duodec at gmail dot com before I could. Obviously some criminal zwilnik from Boskone…
@duodec Well I think we all knew that. Nothing could be more obvious.
(I think my feeble brain short-circuited in paragraph 3)
@DrWorm It is perhaps unfortunate that your exposure to the mind-expanding vocabulary and prose of ‘Doc’ Smith have come too late in life.
Not to mention the truly epic pan-galactic tales of the endless battle between the glorious greatness of the forces of Civilization and Reason against the stultifying and degenerate evil that seeks to bring it all down.
I do not believe that being unfamiliar with the works of the good Doc would inevitably lead to the mentation level of a Zabriskan Fontema, but clearly a perusal of his greatest works at a young age, when the mind is still so plastic and full of potential for growth, with thoughtful contemplation of the characters, their stories, and the eternal themes therein contained has proven a boon to many, and played at least a small part in the creation of some truly great minds.
Would that I were one of those…
@DrWorm @duodec Doc Smith’s Lensman series is great. You can see where a lot of “modern” sci-fi stole ideas from. I’d love to see a decent movie made from it.
@blaineg @DrWorm I don’t think Doc would mind that his ideas inspired others. I would also love a series of movies based on either of the two series, but only if they respected the work, the story, and the characters, which I don’t see happening…
To be honest, I didn’t put a ton of thought into it. The “Meh” theme song was the video of the day so I had the band “They Might Be Giants” on my brain. I lazily lifted a name from another one of their songs. On some subconscious level, the fact that some people in real life call me “Doc” might have impacted my thought process.
@Mehrocco_Mole
I have a Secret Squirrel Funko Pop over my desk. Reading your post compelled me to lookup if they made Morocco Mole
@DrWorm
Cool!
Half of my town & NJ. I had been using part of my last name for Woot and didn’t want to use it here.
If you think about the whole thing with the batteries and the refrigerators, it’s all pretty obvious. Of course, you have to carry the 1 and divide by pi a couple of times, and the logarithmic stuff always gets a bit confusing. But after all that, you end up with my user name. Simple, really.
@shahnm sooooo simple.
@RiotDemon @shahnm Don’t forget to factor in the Golden Ratio. Common rookie mistake.
My screen names over the years have tended toward Celtic. I was Lady Kyna from my SCA days, and I morphed that into Kyandra. I needed a name in a game I played and liked that Cerdwyn was a diminutive of Cerridwen, the Celtic Goddess. When she played another game she became Cerridwyn and that stuck for many years. Still does in some places. In more violent games I have been Morrighan and when I want to be a bit more incognito Arionrhod.
I also had a Scathatch once. She was deadly and a toy alt in a game that I had god like powers (i.e., was staff) and was quite fun.
/youtube Just say narf
These stories and explanations are great. Thanks for an enjoyable thread, @morocco_mole and for digging up the old one which I’m off to read now @medz.
We used to have 2 llamas and named them Como and Te. It wasn’t taken and I was attempting for some form of anonymity… much unlike my University-issued email address (initials + last 4 of SSN‽ @ tamu.edu ) hence the username.
@2palms
Your comment on your college login is an Aggie joke in itself!
Off to share with non-Aggies. Pls forgive.
/giphy Texas longhorns
@2palms
“I grinned at Aggie expense” too quickly.
Asking around today, I found that the Texas A&M student email address assignment system you mentioned was in operation in at least one other UT system campus, at UTA. And possibly at several other campuses for a time.
It may have been the standard method of assigning student email addresses system-wide within the state public universities for some years.
If so, that’s painful to know.
But if several campuses were doing this, the email addressing system can hardly be blamed on one school’s IT Dept.
So I beg your pardon.
/giphy Texas A&M
@f00l ha! I do love me a good Aggie joke. I barely remember the Aggie chicken farmer who wrote his alma mater for advice because the baby chicks kept dying? Anyway it was something about “it doesn’t seem to matter whether I plant them in the ground feet first or head first…”
It really was a terrible system. Otherwise, why do I still remember all my roommates’ “last-4”? Mark’s 2696 and Nicole’s 1393 and… it was just plain silly. Glad to know it was not just our campus that was dumb!
@2palms
Love a good school rivalry.
Sometimes I drive past this, in Reagan, Tx.
The years painted on the barn are class years for current family, friend, and other local enrollees.
The “Aggie Barn” was first painted by an alumnus from the 1920’s.
http://aggiebarn.com/
On “Battle of the Brazos” game weekends, locals have to be ready to do emergency repairs on case some Baylor U colors appear on the barn.
@2palms @f00l wow I had no idea this forum had other Aggies on it. My wife took me to midnight yell once as my initiation into what made her into the crazy woman she is. Safe to say that should have been enough then and there.
@2palms Wow, that’s a terrible way to generate usernames.
Still, there are other terrible ways. Our work started randomizing new user names (so far the old timers get to keep their FirstLetterLastName names). At first it was some slightly recognizable part of their name, with a bunch of numbers. Now it’s some completely random letters followed by random numbers. I feel sorry for folks stuck with those.
on livejournal with some friends I was moonshinehat, because I kept bringing homemade Kahlua and hazelnut liqueurs to get togethers and I liked wearing this goofy fake fur hat. Then it got shortened to moonhat.
@moonhat is homemade Kahlua vodka plus coffee or something more involved?
@2palms if I remember correctly, yes. Something like instant coffee, water, sugar, vanilla? I never really thought it was that great. The liqueur making was more fun and tastier IMO.
@moonhat I feel a new thread coming on. Booze recipes!
As a science fair project, my son built a “water desalinator” from an old electric pressure cooker and I’ve used it to make moonshine from cheap wine, fermented fruits and not-tasty batches of home-brewed beer. It will do about a gallon at a time but I have never really been happy with the results.
I think I have a 750-mL bottle of “Everclear” (192-proof ethanol from Mexico, actually) on lemon zest in the back of the cupboard! I was going to try my hand at limoncello but got distracted.![](https://dj5zo597wtsux.cloudfront.net/emojione/assets/3.1/png/64/1f615.png ":\")
@2palms I made lemoncello once, and it wasn’t too bad! I read that it’s really tricky to make though, because you need to be sure to only get the yellow parts of the peel and none of the white parts and it’s really particular, yadayada. But fun to do! Now you have me so excited to make something. The best stuff I made was when my parents had a yard with a bunch of hazelnut trees in it (that my dad had planted) and for years we didn’t do much with the nuts until I started experimenting with chocolate hazelnuts clusters etc… then tried making a liqueur (like Frangelico) and it often turned out really, really good! Yum.
@2palms also, is Everclear really from mexico? I didn’t know that. I remember growing up, in WA you couldn’t buy it but you could buy it in OR. I was thinking that now you can buy it anywhere, no?
@2palms eye protection, bruh
@medz Right‽ You sound like his science teacher
She was right. (Especially when he was sweating joints.) I’ve learned and the younger kids are required to wear it!
Honest.
I’ve bounced around screenames for years from monkey9000, to nights777, to nights, to ReclaimerCube. A buddy of mine and I sat down one night and everyone in our Xbox Live group hated anyone with numbers in their names and the username had to be two iconic words. His was/is HeavenlyAxe. For me we combined Reclaimer (Halo) and Portal (Cube). We worked with ideas for the longest but now you can google ReclaimerCube and literally find out everything about me.
I’m flammable but conflicted about it
@uninflammable I’m vincible, I’m vincible!
There is no story. I typed random syllables that sounded decent together until one wasn’t taken.
It didn’t take very long.
@Asviloka I used to have a password generator that could optionally generate ‘pronounceable’ words with valid English syllables (so easier to remember). It made some interesting passwords, occasionally vulgar or pretty funny.
I never thought to use it for usernames…
I… joined in 2014?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m DennisG2010 at Woot.
I have a more inscrutable name I use for gaming and forums where I want to remain less identifiable. It’s a combination of the first syllables of my 1st, middle and last names which everyone pronounces differently (someone once asked if it was a South African name
). My gaming buddies call me “Den”, as do some of my IRL friends and fam, so it works.
I originally came up with it as a name for my first (and probably only) D&D character when I was 13.
My username is my real-life name.
Maybe I’m doing this wrong.
@zachdecker absolutely.
@RiotDemon @zachdecker Riot Demon, is that your real life name too?
@OnionSoup yes, indeed.
BlaineG is probably pretty obvious. I didn’t know there was going to be a looney bin to hang out in.
I’ve used a wide variety of names over the years. I stole Dances With Bikers from “Hot Shots!”, back when Dances with Wolves was still a thing.
And years ago I worked with some Japanese customers frequently. My name inevitably got mangled to Brain-san, which my cow-orkers found hilarious, so it stuck.
I chose Gypsigirl213 because in my dna and in my spirit I’m a born traveler. I’ve lived all over the US and get antsy to move when I’ve been somewhere for a few years. Gonna go full time RV life as soon as I finish my masters degree to scratch the traveling itch that’s plagued me since I can remember.
Changed Gypsy to Gypsi because it was less used and girl, because well, I’m female. I had to add my 2-13 birthday month and day as Gypsigirl was often taken as a user name, and it just stuck.
@Gypsigirl213 I keep watching the RV shows on cable with some longing. I doubt I’ll get my wife to want to do it but the road, it does call at times.
@duodec Maybe rent an RV and do a road trip every now and again—there’s a chance she’ll too catch the travel bug
I use a different name every place I go. I usually chose a completely random name that has absolutely nothing to do with me or my interests.
(I do like soup… But not particularly an onion soup connesseur)
Onionsoup was literally the first thing that popped into my head that had nothing to do with me.
I do this to make it harder to link me to any other account online. Early on I used my childhood nickname and some crazy bitch googled my nickname and stalked me all across the internet.
I learnt my lesson and now never use the same name twice. Heck, I have a dozen email addresses to make it harder for small companies online to share data about me with each other. I randomly chose which email address to use on a website… sometimes I create a new email account especially. Which makes a challenge when trying to do a password reset.
@OnionSoup what? Are you a secret agent or celebrity? That sounds like a lot of work to remember which emails belong to which website. It sounds like it’d be a part time job to keep all that straight. What’s the payoff for all that time and energy?
@Gypsigirl213 it’s only work for websites I don’t visit often. For ones I do visit often it’s not really hard to remember.
All my secondary emails forward to one account anyway so it’s not like I have to check in a lot of places for emails.
Not a celebrity but I have been stalked online before so it’s made me more cautious now.
@OnionSoup A couple of suggestions:
Use a password manager to keep track of your accounts. I recommend KeePass for geeks, and LastPass for non-geeks.
anything@mailinator.com is a valid email address, useful for forced signups to sites you know you’ll never visit again.
@blaineg I don’t trust password managers. One stop shop for someone to get all your passwords and a list of every website you’ve been signed up for.
I know at least one of those password managers got hacked last year.
I use a formula for generating my passwords. It’s one that someone wouldn’t be able to figure out even if they got hold of one or two of my passwords… But simple enough that only takes me a few seconds. (Simple for me, because it partially relies on a code me and my high school buddies developed)
@OnionSoup Fair enough. But KeePass isn’t online, it’s a local database in your control. It’s only online if you choose to put it there somehow.
I work on a merry go round.
medz
MeDZ
Me DZ
Me Dizzy
(this isn’t true)