Origin Stories (of your alias/moniker/pseudonym)

[ible]

i am noticing some of you may have sad, exciting, or even triumphant origin stories for your names. if you like, you can also talk about your avatar (picture) origins.

i'll go first:
Ible is the name of a Grayling -- a species of shapeshifters, which all have similar (e.g. gray-skin and no feet) but unique physiology in their natural, un-shapeshifted state. Ible's unique feature is two jaws. Ible is also unique in that he can't shapeshift, but he may have powerful latent magic/psychic abilities (due to being able to speak two spells with his two mouths ). here's a super old sketch of Ible:

Growing up, of course, Ible was teased for not being able to shapeshift, sarcastically being called "Ible the Able". (And "ible the unable" for the less sarcastically-inclined.)

There's more to that backstory and backdrop, but we'll leave it at that for now.

 

[rygD]

I was looking for a new username 16 years ago that wasn't based on anything. I smacked my hands down on a keyboard a bunch of times. I liked this one because it lacked vowels, and was difficult to say (I say it like "ride" with g, as in go, before the d). It gave me plenty of opportunities to make a big deal out of misspelling it (the r is always lowercase, and I prefer the D to be uppercase) and occasionally to tell people they are saying it wrong. I intended it as a "fuck you" to myself and everyone that sees it and gives it any thought. Since then I have given it a lot of thought. I have confirmed that the human mind will find patterns, and have been entertained by how frequently that includes comfortable ones (people sometimes think of it as "rigid" or "rigged", which are both WRONG!). As evidence of this, I discovered that the name I often go by can be found in rygD by changing perspective. This led me to believe that there is a good chance that everything is meaningless, and it is only the meaning and value we assign that we focus on.

My current avatar is more of the same. It is from a larger image that was built up from pieces that were assigned meaning, sometimes conflicting (what is seen is from one of the main example of that), that I used to force acceptance that perception is malleable, and that meanings can be discarded and changed, even with knowledge of underlying meaning. In a sense it is a personal symbol that represents spirituality, antispirituality (or whatever you wish to call it), and, literally, nothing and meaninglessness, yet a reminder that we will try to give it meaning. When I turned the main image sideways I noticed that part resembled a D with a bit of imagination. Since D is the least important part of the name, it felt like it was appropriate.

I would like to have a new avatar with the same degradation and alteration of conflicting meanings, but I lack the skills to make it look how I want. I also have other names I use in the same way.


TL;DR, they mean nothing except what you think they mean, and what you think they mean is wrong.

 

[iprice]

My name here is my real name, only truncated a bit. My avatar is from a game I wrote 15+ years ago, called Dark. Seemples.

 

[Agricola]

I learned Latin in school and liked it a lot. Agricola is the Latin word for farmer and one of the very few that is declined like most other words ending with an A, but still male. Also, it's the direct translation of my family name "Bauer".
I'm just happy I didn't use my old WoW username, explaining Acanthocephalus is a bit harder

 

[Djoga'Ro]

@rygD Your nick is to be pronounced rhyg-dee, obviously, duh.

To mine there's not much. I name myself son of the moon in some language and in this particular case I didn't like the usual transscripts, so I made my own (which only covers, what I needed for Djoga'Ro). Another reason for that was the intent to make my fellow countrymen more likely to pronounce it right - not yo'garo. Have been called DJ a few times, though. I guess, I should have gone with IPA.
I'm not only a sucker for the moon, but also for cats, and snow leopards are the buitifullests. So, I use the bestest snow leopard picture I could find (flickr I think) as my avatar. In other playces I've liked to use a pic of my long deceased lvl70 gnome arcane mage HijoDeLaLuna.

 

[rygD]

@rygD Your nick is to be pronounced rhyg-dee, obviously, duh.

Nope, no special significance to the D. It is merely a reversal of the common practice of capitalizing the first letter in a proper noun, or at the beginning of a sentence. I prefer not to do those things (and use i instead of I), however I can trick people into taking me more seriously by typing in a way that they accept as "proper".

 

[___]

I had a thrash hardcore band by the name of "take no heroes", because we thought it was cool and sounded kinda like "take no prisoners", when I was 17. We had a logo which showed a bunch of skateboard kids with a superman dude lying in the midst of them, with his head bashed in with a skate board. And we had a song called "no pasaran" about some German asshole band called the "Böhse Onkelz" which btw I still despise ^^. And because I was straight edge at the time (lol... look at me now 13 years later. I smoke like a chimney) and people who identify with that often attach Xs to their names/nicknames as a pre and suffix, that's where the my nickname comes from. I stuck with it on numerous platforms.

EDIT: Just tried to find our horrible demo tape somewhere on myspace or wherever. turns out the band name wasn't that original ^^ what a surprise. well sadly (or luckily for all of humanity) the demo tape seems to have disappeared from the internet.

 

[TrashyMG]

Origins of my name came from Steven King's: The Stand. LAN handle was Trashcanman, which people hated to say the whole thing and it became Trashy. The MG isn't Machine Gun like everyone thinks, but MultiplayerGamers which was the name of my LAN and online gaming group in the early 2000s, which for a time hosted a page to organize other LAN parties in my area.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Mine was a fairly throw away name- I needed a name, openpandora.org was the first forum I ever joined; I chose wrath of Khan from the star trek movie.
Thats it really, I like that movie. My avatar is ricardo montalban

 

[rygD]

@TrashyMG, what about your avatar?

 

[Neelix]

In the mid 90s I was a member of a few local dial-in BBS systems (oh the joys of a 2400 baud modem and half hour download times for an 800k off-line mail packet downloaded with Z-Modem) At first I used my real name, but several of my friends were using aliases and given that one of the boards I frequented was Star Trek themed I wanted a Trek based alias that wasn't likely to be already taken on any of the local boards. I read in a trek magazine about the (then) upcoming series Voyager which had a review of some of the characters, and picked a name that I liked. Since the series had yet to air in Australia, I figured it'd be a pretty good bet that no-one else would be using it yet on any of the local boards.
I've been using it ever since.

As anyone with a Wii or 3DS has probably recognised my avatar is my Mii, created shortly after I got my 3DS. It's reasonably similar to how I looked at the time.

-Neelix

 

[TrashyMG]

@TrashyMG, what about your avatar?

Really?

Crow T. Robot from Mystery Science Theater 3000...

I like the cut of his jib.

 

[comradekingu]

I thought it was MG as in the car brand.

Used to play joint operations, with some britons, in a team called cccp, with the nickname kingu, which is a indonesian demon, or i think also a mesopothamian fish. In any event, turns out its not as obscure as i'd want it to be, for reasons other people have registered it on occation.
Some real russians played us for the cccp title, and won.
So i took comradekingu as certainly that is the worst, or highest entropy choice, if you will. I don't like it, but it works well enough. I have one that i thought i might change to, but i feel its too good, such that it will get used by others, like everything else. There are even comrade-somethings on IRC now.

The avatar is a picture i took where i live, it was originally bigger from the old forum settings, and has a character from a game i made the logo to, since the author of that game changed my logo, i think it befitting that what was originally an easter-gag is now descoped a bit.

 

[rygD]

Really?

No, not really, but since some of us were explaining them I figured I would request it since not everyone is familiar with the series. Now I need to go see what is happening with bringing it back.

 

[SNESFAN]

SNES has always been my favorite game console / game era. Got mine when I was about 10. Fond memories of playing final fantasy and chrono trigger and eating cheese balls.

I made my avatar when there was suggestions for the pyra logo. Guess it didn't get much popularity.

 

[PowerGod]

Before 1996 I lost a lot of time on IRC (really too much), and started to follow the magic way of the script kiddie... after some months I was able to finish 6 different scripts for attack BOTs using MIRC... one day I started 20 of them on a channel, all of them with random names like "deathskull, bloodlion,darkdeath... and powergod", after 10 minutes them were able to take down all the people on the channel and the 5 bots that were defending it... I also was taken down anyway, but when I reconnected there was only an operator, one of my bots that I had put on another server, it was "powergod".
I was so proud of that thing that I took that nick, anyway after that time I almost stopped going to irc, now I never remember even the basic commands But it was a magic time of my life.

 

[ible]

@rygD nice Gödel-esque meta-statements (this statement belongs to the set of statements which don't mean anything).

Now I need to go see what is happening with bringing it back.

they're bringing back MST3K?!

I made my avatar when there was suggestions for the pyra logo. Guess it didn't get much popularity.

same here . wonder if i made my own custom logo plate, if the LEDs could be timed to make it look like eyes going back and forth... oh darn, too much effort.

 

[rygD]

they're bringing back MST3K?!

 

[TrashyMG]

they're bringing back MST3K?!

Yeah I dropped a bit of money on that campaign, it raised over 6 Million dollars...

However I'm a bit skeptical, everything I've got from kickstarter has been garbage.

 

[rygD]

If it makes you feel any better, your avatar looks like a pile of garbage that was spray painted.