Where did your handle come from?

[moonlit]

Erm... Pointless perhaps but there are often interesting or disturbing stories around nicks/handles/screen names etc... Besides, this thread was inspired by Darren ;)

Where did your nick come from? Why did you choose it? What was your previous nick and why did you decide to change?

My current nick came from when I began to use a WAP chat room from the mobile network O2 and since I am a creature of the night, usually on said chat service during the dark hours and only had 7 characters to play with I chose MLOIOTN... This, I found, caused people to constantly comment on how hard it was to read or ask what it meant so I corrected it to MOONLIT.

My previous nick was 'dickerbeen'... while this might sound crude if you're in a certain frame of mind, it was actually formed when I signed up to the online currency site called 'beenz'. This site is long gone now.

[Uncle Toxie]

Okay so this may be one of my ramble stories, sit down and get comfortable.

I went threw several different handles in the eighties during the BBS scene, mostly comic book characters and the like. I unplugged for a few years while in the military but decided to get re-connected (it must be bad pun day) with the scene around 93 I think it was. Yeah it was when the Pentium chip was launched. Anyway, I went through a few more things while using Prodigy back then but then I got into FPS gaming.

So I pondered for awhile for a good nick to use while playing. Somehow I came up with the name ToxicShock. I thought I was being all clever and it sounded cool to me. After I got out of the Army, I met a guy that I would play Duke 3D with until his wife woke up to go to work and yelled at him. She happened to notice my handle one morning and called me a few choice names. It was then explained to me what toxicshock syndrome was. Yeah it's bad, go look it up. So my buddy started to call me Toxie, that kinda stuck and the people that I hung out with on a local BBS picked up on it too.

So that is part one. Now, for the longest time I was the consummate bachelor. I had several friends that were a few years younger than me. Whenever I would want to tell a story or something I would tell them 'gather round and let your uncle Chris tell you a story'.

My buddy who started the whole Toxie thing, and I put the two together and I started going as Uncle Toxie. It's stuck with me since around 96 or 97 I think.

[Sparda]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_shock_syndrome

Why doesn't Wikipedia have any pictures on that one? :D

Sparda... ye, I'm trying to phase that name out. Darren, any chance you can change my name to Boris?

[VaKo]

mines just based on how people said my name, Wladimir Iwaschkin -> vlad-i-mir i-vash-kin -> vashkin -> vaski -> vaki -> VaKo. Been using it as a call sign since I was 10 or so. Ironically several years later, i email the guy at vako@hotmail.com and discover that Vako is a eastern european name, the same as my real name.

[metatron]

I was raised Catholic and Metatron is Heavens Scribe (God's Voice) and I love to code so that's how I came by my handle, I did have another one up to I was 17 but that one got to well known and I got in to a lot of trouble under it.

[mubix]

Wow, this is a hard one to answer.. there are just so many:

Vyper -> Zer0cool (yes, after I watched hackers) -> Richard -> prgmmstr -> nubuzai -> mubix -> jd.mubix

ok so I guess there aren't that many, but those are the only ones that stuck in my head.

Vyper was the first nick that I can remember, it was back in the days of 10 PRINT "Hello World!". I chose it because I thought i was cool.

Zer0Cool, no explination needed here. I only kept this one for a little while (until I was made fun of)

Richard, I was known as Richard for a very long time in Ultima Online. I played close to 16 hours a day back in the beta and early release days.

prgmmstr was my first one to stick outside of a game. I just liked it because no one else had it and it was really easy for me to remember. It is actually still my skype account name, outside of that, I have pretty much dropped it.

After Ultima Online got stupid, I started playing Everquest as a Wood Elf named Nubuzai. No, this wasn't a name that was picked up on the auto name button. It was a acutal brainstorming session. This choice was right about the time when the word n00b started picking up steam. But, as with the Zer0cool days, I was the last one to figure out that my name was far from, 'cool'.

So it was about time for me to find one to stick with and so, after careful thinking of something that didn't sound like n00b, I chose Mubix.

Nubuzai -> Nubu -> Mubuzai -> Mubix.

And because gmail is a pain in the butt and doesn't allow for 5 characters or less in a name I tacked on Johnathan Doe. jd.mubix was born and I have kept that name for a while now.

Mubix actually happens to be the name of a Russian scientist, but now that hak5 came around I am beating him out of goodle searches. ;-)

[jollyrancher82]

TomB... it's my name.

[Duelus]

Duelus was a mispelling of "Duelist" when I first started playing FPS. JDav is an abbreviation of my name.

[kYd]

Mine was just a button bash. I couldn't think of one so just randomly bashed my keyboard and came up with kYd.

[manuel]

I haven't been that inventive with my names, b ut here are a few that I have used and some that I still use.

Dogg_killa, mreus1, manuel (very creative here...), orphantech

Dogg_killa -- somewhere when I was 14/15 my neighborhood started missing dogs, and ither kids started accusing me of killing their dogs. Can't figyure this one out because I love dogs. After about a year of people calling me that, I decided to make it my online handle. (for a short while anyway).

mreus1 -- just a play on my initials and the word mysterious. not very long lived.

Manuel -- I use this because, Guess it is my name. As I said i am not that creative when it comes to handles.

Orphantech -- My latest handle that I do use for a few things. The county I live in is spanish for orphan. SInce I am a computer technician, I embraced the two and have started using it. I may make this into handle into a comany name when I decide to register my business, with a slogan like:

Orphantech. Just because you live in the "oprhan" county, it doesn't mean that your technology has to be.

I am also playing with the idea/handle of 911Manuel -- my aunt always calls and asks for me under this name when she needs computer help.

-Manuel

[MrDave2176]

Back in the 80's and Early 90's when I was mostly doing BBS stuff and AOL I was MrDave. Usually I was 8-10 years older than the other kids on the boards. I had a series of AOL names/handles but MrDave was generally what I used (to designate my 'maturity')

When I began to post on USENET/UUNET I ran into literally dozens of MrDaves so I added a birthdate MrDave21764 (2/17/64) but AOL (at the time) only had 10 letter usernames so it got truncated to MrDave2176 so I use that still (although I have several MrDave21764 emails now)

[gbjazzman]

"Jazz Man" was a nickname I earned in Highschool after I played Alto, Tenor and Barry sax in a jazz band performance. When I went to signup for the name, it was obviously taken, I decided to tack the initials of my hometown, Grand Blanc, instead of add random numbers on the end.

[ShinmaRyuu]

Shinmaryuu is the mashing of 2 Japanes words "Shinma" meaning supernatural and "Ryuu" which means dragon making my name Supernatural Dragon. Shinma is also the name of my favorite Dragon Gate/Toryumon Puroresu wrestler. PRetty much since i have been on the net i have used a version of this name.

[armadaender]

I was Madcat for a while (taken from my all time favorite computer games series, Mechwarrior) and as of about two years ago I changed it to armadaender because ender is the name I school fools under in halo 2 and armada because one day I took on ten people in midship and kicked there asses. Right afterwards in the lobby waiting for the next game to start, someone said, "Damn, he fucking killed our whole armada." Hence, armadaender was created.

[Jigga-Zula]

Jackel: misspelled jackal when I was younger, quickly trying to think of my first email account name made me use jackel.

Gargantuin: misspelled gargantuan when I was younger, was getting sick of using jackel so I stole the name from the Gargantuan Beast in Diablo 2. I thought it fit pretty well cause I was always the tallest kid in my class.

Jigga, Jigga_Zula: One of my friends from highschool was a bit of a wigger that also slurred his words. My name is Jacob and he just slurred my name so bad it started sounding like Jigga. So that name is what most of the guys from my highschool called me then turned into a user account name when a friend set up my profile for halo on a box as Jigga. Then because most of the time Jigga is taken as a username I use Jigga_Zula in honor of aqua teen hungerforce.

[barrytone]

Mine is my name...

Actually, It's not my name at all. It comes from my love of baritone guitars :)

I go by my real name plus a prefix, or sometimes two prefixes elsewhere on the internet...

The Initials for my handle with two prefixes are in my avatar

[Famicoman]

Well, back when the PS2 first came out, I wanted to get a GameShark, but heard it could wipe game saves. I than made an account on the GS forums, back when it was good, and started using the name there. Stuck ever since. I'm a big Classic Gamer, having over 55 consoles, and was trying to get a username, but all of them I tried were taken. So, I made a compund word out of

Famicom and Man. No one else uses it, or any variants of it.

[kainchick]

okay so my first nickname was shadowwalker Im not quite sure why i was like 10, then slowly it became Shadow, then i played FF7 and took the name Final_master (if you ever played diablo 2 and saw that name it was me account Final_master21 or something) then i played blood omen 2 a few years back and my nickname was kaindude cause im weird and all boyish like i didnt want chick at the end of my name, but after people being all werid and confused i changed it about a year later to kainchick, now i get hit on in geek forums, so im now slowly changing it to DykeGirl so yep. long drawn out and not much puncuation...

[melodic]

well...melodic death metal fucking pwnz and i love the word melodic so yeah it stuck...

i do like the alias Lysergic tho

[Darren Kitchen]

Wow I must say this thread is mad cool.

In the early 90's I played a lot of Wolfenstein 3D. At a computer show I bought a map and sprite editor for the game on 3.5" floppy for $3. The last texture in the sprite file was text that said "Call Apogee and say Aardwolf". Apogee being the publisher for id's Wolf3d. I called only to find that it was a contest to see who could crack the texture file first. It wasn't me. But all was not lost for I had a new handle!

I've only had one handle before this which was really bad. I've pretty much used this handle all throughout BBSes in the early 90's until now.

I'm wondering if I showed up as Aardwolf in #hak5 on irc if anyone would even recognize me.

/me waits for Wess's handle story in anticipation

[degoba]

ive been through fallen, legion and then like munkdogg something or another. Im a star wars fan and having my nick be the name of the moon that yoda resides on is just cool. And yes i realize it is spelled wrong.

[Shaun]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_shock_syndrome

Why doesn't Wikipedia have any pictures on that one? :D

Sparda... ye, I'm trying to phase that name out. Darren, any chance you can change my name to Boris?

There's a very unpleasant image of vaginal syphilis on Wikipedia, and I'd be happy if people didn't put stuff like that so prominently on articles, put it behind a link or something at least.

[Rocold]

I've only had two handles. And they are basically the same except for one letter.

First one was Roccold. My girlfriend had just gotten AOL (yes I know but I didn't know of any other way of getting online back then) and she decided I should have my own screenname since I would get all my emails on her name.

Roccold -> came from (don't laugh) a combination of Roc, which is what my uncle called me because I was a loud kid who talked constantly and said a lot of stupid stuff. He said I was dumb as a rock. And Cold because I used to watch WWF and Stone Cold Steve Austin was my favorite wrestler. After we broke up, I had to make my own screename and since she had Roccold I had to drop a c and Rocold was born.

I have tried to use BlueIce before, but it has always been taken. It was a password from a MacGyver episode.

[Snowy©]

I was born with this handle and the misses says it's a good size :D

(yeah I know she's just lying to make me feel better)

Anyway Me and I'm the original © :)

Edit although I have used anagrams of Snowy before and a couple of other names :) Just a noob :)

[W4RP3D]

I had a T-shirt with the word Warped printed on it, in a kinda graffiti still. I wore it 3 or 4 times out with my mates and someone started to call me warped.

I liked it and the name stuck on a few forums and games for a year or two, untill i started to muck around making sigs for them all, warped just didnt look right so i tryed W4rp3d which looked alot better in the font i was using.

And the username W4rp3d was born, seeing both hotmail and gmail had a w4rp3d i use W4rp3d.1 (as in the warped one)