Where Did You Get Your Screen Name From?

[jadewik]

I read a similar post at FK's forum, started by Apo, and the answers were so interesting, I thought I'd see what everyone here at Titan had to say.

So... where did you get your forum name from? How did you think of it? Did someone give it to you? Have you had other online names?

****

"Jadewik" is actually the 4th online name I've had... I rotate names once they lose their luster.

The first online name (not posted here, sorry) I had was a mile long and used for my first email address when I was twelve. It took me about 4 hours to think of it because I kept trying different names, but they were already taken-- names like DragonSlayer etc. Actually, once I obtained a unique name, I emailed dragonslayer to tell him what a cool email name he had. A Peter in California emailed me back and we got started playing a "word of the day" game after he totally cut me down to size for being so wreckless and brazen.

I kept that username 'till 1999, when I went to college and decided to make my own website. I went for something shorter than my old name... though I've since decided "carnelianfire" is too long. However, "carn" did start the whole gem+fire naming scheme.

The gems originated from the Sierra game "Conquests of the Longbow". In the game, there's a puzzle where you have to associate gems with characteristics described in poetry. So... I started out by choosing a gemstone that had a meaning/qualities that I felt portrayed myself and combined that with my favourite element-- fire.

"Keye" (carn's first name) developed in 1999 when I started a Gemstone III account. It was suggested that I come up with a shorter first name and use "carnelianfire" as the surname. I thought and thought and thought... and eventually settled on "Keye" because my roommate had a sign on our door that read "keys" because she'd forgotten her keys a couple times that semester and had to wait for me to get back from class to let her in. "Key" didn't look fantasy enough, so I added the "e" at the end to make it "Keye". My young character developed into an innocent, naive waif...

After I ran out of money to fund my Gemstone III addiction I looked for other (FREE) locations where I could "mud/RP". On January 17, 2000, one of my Gemstone buddies directed me to Dragon Court. Like most first-time players, I used up all my quests and immediately had to start another character. An hour later I had "Ebon-Ashe" whose name comes from Obsidian (gemstone) and Ash (fire-related-element).

Days later, I found Titan and started to role-play Ebon. I decided to make her the opposite of "carn" in every way possible. She was strong, brazen, and much more fun to role-play.

"Jadewik", my latest username, also follows the gem(Jade)-fire(wick) theme and is much shorter than "carnelianfire". I actually created the name around late 2002-early 2003, when I was leader of Titan, so that I could escape from all the AIM messages I would get (sometimes I'd have up to 20 AIM windows up at a time). I wanted to be able to stay available to those who needed to reach me, but be able to get some homework done too.

After dropping clan leadership, I decided to lose the "carn" name and adopt some anonymity, so that future Titan leadership could progress without living in my shadow and the clan would grown in a new direction. This arrangement worked briefly, but I took a lot of crap for it after someone leaked the change.

Now, I would switch back, but I've grown rather fond of "Jade".... though, I still post on other forums as "carnelianfire" (so that I don't have to deal with the multiple-name stigma that some people have issues with).

In the RP world, Jadewik was supposed to be the mediator between carn and Ebon-Ashe... though I did start, but haven't fully developed her character biography... and I keep debating between RPing Jade and keeping this just a forum name to avoid conflicts others have had with associating RP characters with my personality.

Anyway.... that was probably more than anyone cared to know about my online names. =P

So tell me about yours!

[Ominous]

Wow! This is a cool thread. Thanks for the story, Jade, I found it pretty interesting.

So, my names. My first username for most things was flare89; flares catch attention (though not so much the word, I found) and 89 was my birth year. After a while of this, I decided to get rid of all numbers in my usernames as I found them tacky. Thus, FlyingKitsune, my second username was born, based off of Tails, the flying fox from the Sonic series. However, I soon realized I hated the Sonic series and wanted nothing more to do with it. So, I decided to pick my name here; Ominous. It was a good name, since it wasn't a name. It's also a bit ironic that someone named Ominous isn't a very ominous person; proving how I just have to make everything funny. When the username Ominous had already been taken (luckily a rare occurence) I added the word Neutral onto the end (OminousNeutral) since the name had a ring to it.

More recently, I've been using either my real name or the words Usually and Think in my usernames. My YouTube account, for example, is UsuallyThinks.

So, there ya go.

[James]

Mine's kind of short. I've loved fantasy my whole life and my parents and sister used to refer to me as the family knight, and thus I was "Sir James the Brave." I kept Sir James with me until I was about 12. At that time I had been playing the Baldur's Gate series and was halfway through the second game (though I never actually beat the first). There was a weapon- specifically, a warhammer- that was my most favorite weapon in the entire game. It added a lot of damage, was very easy to hit people with, had the fastest speed rating for a weapon in the game due to its enchantments, set your strength to as high as it could go in the game, would slay stone golems, clay golems, trolls and ettins in one hit AND.... and it added bonus lightning damage to your attack.

Now, if that's not overpowered in the game, I don't know what is...

At any rate, it was my favorite weapon because of how badass it was (and it had a cool history, though I can't remember it now) and as a result I adopted it as my name. Nobody else had thought to take a WEAPON as their name ever before, and thusly Crom Faeyr the Wood Elf Acrobat was born. Yeah, I did flips. I never roleplayed with the name (until Elidoris) and used it for 3 or 4 years until I was around 15 or 16. At this point, I had gotten onto the webcomics scene and thoroughly enjoyed one such, namely Bob and George (a Megaman comic). My favorite character on there happened to be "Ran", a Communist-built bot who would fall apart at the slightest touch. Though he was obscenely weak physically, he had an amazing weapon that would blow everything to kingdom come. To top it off, a system was in place to replace his dead body with another Ran every time he died, moving the memory of the old one into the new one using teleporation technology.

Now... I wanted to incorporate "Ran" in there, but it was too short. I also wanted to reference my last name, but "Crom Ran" sounded silly and "Faeyr Ran" sounded too clunky. I fiddled with the words a bit and figured out that I liked the "n" to come before the "r", and after various names like Faeyrn Ran, Farren Ran, etc, I adopted Faeorn Ran as my nickname.

Of course, I just go by James now because that's my name, both IC and OOC. Huzzah.

I guess that was kind of long. I also have a scary story behind my real name, but that can wait until another time.

[Joe]

hmm, this is actually an interesting thread, unfortunately for you, I think I can make it boring. Joseph is my middle name and, because I was a bit paranoid of this whole internet thing, (this is back when AOL was first starting) I opted to use my middle name and tagged on something stupid at the end of it. I don't even remember what the first AOL name was, but I used it for all the chat rooms I used to go to back then. I switched it to josephthedragon at some point I think after changing internet providers and getting new email and all that, and mainly, it was just because dragons are cool. and I wanted to be like bruce lee. and dragons are cool. but now dragons are overdone and, well, I'm old now anyway so I just dropped the whole dragon thing.

see, I told you I would bore you.

[Agustus]

heh mine is boring
i needed a screen name and i couldnt think of anything so my sister used my nick name Goose or rather GUZZ (i am/Was a lazy kid) as for the numbers my birth month and year

as for my char names Siragustus was my first char name it was given again by my older sister who gave me the bane again Gus is short for my middle name Gustavo

after i lost interest in DC i stopped playing and the char was deleted a year or two later i had forgotten my pass and created various characters Siragustus01, Sir claud01, Sir wranglar01 Wrangler Mange, GUzz,
all names i could think up and see around me....

needless to say un original lol

lately my favorite names are ColdFire, WangChung(yes that song lol) and EnlightenedOne(NA3) and Genesis

ColdFire came from a book title of one of my favorite authors Koontz iunfortunetly i forgot wjat it was about... all i can remember is that i really loved the story.
the char sheet i am creating for this name is still on the iffy side but its getting there

WangChung well i just felt bored and used the name it sounded funny

EnlightenedOne: I believe in a mixture of faiths taosim, buddhism. christinaity etc. there is no such thing "one true faith" because none of them are true yet none are false. i believe in Karma you do good you get good in return you do bac your SOL lol

as for Genesis... it was something that popped in my head i guess i wanted to play my old game system lol

no matter the char name or sn i will always go by my middle nick name Gus
its just easy to remember...

[Curulan]

as for Genesis... it was something that popped in my head i guess i wanted to play my old game system lol

Sorry, Gus, but I am now forced to refer to you as The Mega Drive.

As for myself... I have a long string of names to use, and all of them ultimately fit in with my roleplaying, though the writing project I began in 1995 called the Ardan Source Files (ASF).

The first nickname I ever used on the internet was my original AOL account, Blitzkeg. Originally, it was a reference to the german word blitzkrieg, but I was 12 at the time and you know how those things go. I then created a second account, Clerann. Clerann and Blitzkeg were the nicknames for my first two characters: Clerann Goldinarsen and Clerann Silvenarsen. When I discovered GemStone III (as all AOL accounts were given one character in GS3 at no charge), Clerann Goldinarsen was my first character's name. "King-General Clerann Goldinarsen of the Holy Army" was also my first non-GemStone MUD character on TeraMUD. Although those two characters' stories are ancient history, the term clerann is still used in the ASF universe as a rank in Curulan's secret organization, the Mediators of the Balance -- as the name itself means "master of <something>". Clerann was my first Dragon Court character in 1999, and Clerana (the feminine form of Clerann) was Curulan's wife before she died during a story I wrote in 2001.

The second name I used largely was also for my first email address: AlphaStar. I continue to use this nickname, or rather variations of it, in online games. My Hotmail account was AlphaStarA@hotmail.com, and even though I no longer use this email address, I still use it as my MSN login. Likewise, my third AOL account and my Yahoo! address were AlephStar. Using AlephStar on AOL, I created my second GemStone III character, Clerann Maginarsen. I also created a Clerann Maginarden on Dragon Realms, a sister-project to GemStone III, but I found the game's leveling system too coumbersome at 14. As for ASF relevance, the AlphaStar was originally a sentient planet or star that was worshipped by the mortals of Arda, at least in my early drafts. In the final version of the ASF stories, AlphaStar was the name of the sentient AI/android that was in charge of the Starseed Project (for those who are following my writings of Titan's history, the Starseed Project was the space exlporation program that ended up populating the planet of Dragon Court with Elves, Humans, and Dwarves). I also had an AlphaStar character in Dragon Court briefly in 2001, though he was not in Titan -- he was in the clan Red Rose, run by a friend I met on the DC boards before the clan was disbanded. I often used the nickname Alpha -- a shortening of AlphaStar -- on IRC networks, though I have lately abandoned that nickname, and the character of Alpha (Thomas Dupre) is my primary character in the Elkandu roleplaying system, which was pioneered by a friend of mine.

My next major name, which I used for several years, was my first AIM account, fourth AOL account, and first major Dragon Court account: Glofinje. In my original ASF drafts, this character was called Glorfindel, after the Tolkien character, but was changed when I decided to stop imitating Tokien and write my own damn words. Glofinje was also the nickname I first joined Titan with back in 2000, but he was replaced by Curulan when I realized I accidentally registered Glofinje as a local ezboard account on Titan's board, rather than a global ezboard account. When I realized this, and registered the ezboard account of Curulan, I retconned a lot of the story I had planned for Glofinje and instead thrust that on the Curulan characer. In the ASF stories, the first Glofinje was the child of a dwarf and an elf during the era of the Cleranns, and the current character of Glofinje (Curulan's right-hand man and General in the Holy Army of Arda) is named after him.

Finally, I come to Curulan himself. This was my second AIM screen name, which I created when some dumbass at my university decided to be stupid and anonymously warn me all the way up to 100%. Not understanding the warning system, I logged off of AIM only to find out I could not log in again until my warning level had cleared (this was back in the days of AIM 3.0). I then set off to make a new screen name, wanting to use Curufin (again, from Tolkien). Finding that already registered (obviously), I combined the name Curufin mentally with Círdan to create Curulan.

I don't think I need to explain to you all who Curulan is in the ASF stories.

[TBeck]

my realname:

Thomas Beckett

[zipcat]

Wow nice stories.

I picked the name zip a long time ago, and when I started DC it was taken. Back then I loved cats more than anything. I even wrote a song for my first cat, Bobby. So I added Cat to it to make it up. And there it was; zipcat.

I've never capitalized it because, along other reasons, I didn't think names or titles were important; which was the reason my teachers gave me when they said to capitalize names. I had a lot of other titles back then that I didn't like, and they weren't important to me because I didn't believe in them.

I figured if I made one title unimportant, the others wouldn't be either.

[Choroba]

Choroba means "dying of a fatal illness" in polak, i useto use the name disease but its always taken, so i figured, well im polish, ill jus use the polak word for disease haha. i also use the name Murshy on mmorpg's, which was my dog Iris' nickname(don't ask me how i came up with murshy because i have no idea)

[Pennier]

My very first online name was also the name for my first (and current) AIM account, ShwJmpr771... it stands for show jumper (horses) and the 771 was the number that was available and I was like 12, it was my first online name of any kind. ShwJmpr771@hotmail.com was also my first email addy

I picked up the name Pennier, from a character that's been floating around in my brain since I read my first sci-fi/fantasy novel (Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series). For some reason it always seemed like a really whimsical name. Clearly my yahoo, and current msn messenger accounts come from the name Pennier and the numbers 771 from the aforementioned AIM account...now Penni's animals all have much better name stories.

Albert the Dragon is the mental picture I've had of the dragon tattoo I'd wanted since I was twelve (I finally got it three years ago for my birthday, and I love it).

'Shine the dog (who I still use in RP to this day) is based on the very first dog I ever had, who's name was Little Miss Sunshine. The char looks exactly like Miss Sunshine, who was probably the smartest dog I've ever seen. She was a houdini dog, and she'd passed away the year before I joined Titan, so the char is in homage of her.

Shatan the horse was based on an Arabian gelding I knew, who was mean as sin, but could jump almost anything you put him in front of. He had gelded himself on a barbed wire fence, so he was still a lot like a stud horse, but he was cool. I learned to jump over 3 feet on him, so he's very special. The rest of the horse chars I RP are based on RL horses that I've known (it's good that I've known lots of horses).

Let's see, I had this char Whitman for a while, and I'm starting to RP him some more again. I was bored one day in lit mag and everyone else was watching Passions and I was playin' DC (because I'd used up all Penn's quests) and needed a new name, and what did mine eyes spy, a box of whitman chocolates, and thus the char was born. Ok that was longer than I thought it would be.

[Agustus]

my realname:

Thomas Beckett

Gwah?!?

[Ominous]

my realname:

Thomas Beckett

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

[Teatamira]

Mine is also my Middle name. its a maori word meaning morningdew.
i use a variation on names the whole time ive been online. Normally its my RL nickname (not mentioned here)..or names of characters from sci fi/fantasy novels i read.
now i just use my real middle name. or other maori names when i can be bothered.

[Jerric Morneth]

Jerric Morneth is my alternate personality, the other half of my spectrum you could say. i got his name from the dark recesses of my mind, where Cyric holds sway and criminal actions happen daily. as for my other selves, well ive left subtle hints if you really want to figure it out, but it wouldn't help most people any. only a select few I've practically spelled it out for. and i suppose thats the most youll get out of this prince of thieves as far as the truth is concerned.

[Carzal]

Yeah, I know I'm awesome.
The mystical story that I am about to tell you is partly true, and partly me procrastinating from doing my English homework, because once that's done, I'll have to study for Humanities. And I don't wanna.

The aesthetics of the name Carzal are really, really simple. And, like most of you, I invented it when I was twelve, or something like that. My name is Carlton, and I liked (and still like) z's and a's. Don't ask me why. There's probably some creepy Freudian complex ticking away at the back of my head that would explain it, but there are some things that I'd really just rather not know. Like what a sleen looks like (and I just KNOW that either Curu or Ominous is going to post a picture of one as soon as they read this). So when you take CARL (which means "Strong One" as opposed to Carlton which means "he who comes from Charles' town and makes everyone our age think of the Fresh Prince and everyone older think of a stoned doorman) and add ZA to it, you get CARLZA.
Wait, no that's wrong.
CARZAL.
That is it, in essence.
Now, the original name that I tore out of the bowels of my skull (not a pretty image, eh? skull bowels? just imagine if you actually had-im gonna stop now) was Alcalz. In the version of StarCraft 2 that my friend and I wrote (the story and units and species for, not the program) the leader of of the Viz'Alcalz (there's that name again) was Alcalz. His brother was Carzal. They were your typical uber-gods that every 13 year old boy wants to be. With swords (I'm big on swords).
Carzal somehow got himself into every story that I imagined, of which there are many. Usually a sword weilding elf or something, it was all that I ever wanted to be.. *sniffemotionaltearssniff* and stuff.
It's Lazrac backwards.
AND now I should go do my English.