molly.com
Monday 14 April 2008
What About Those Handles and Nicks?
DID YOU THINK I MEANT A SHAVING ACCIDENT? I’ve had a few of those, due to certain handles, nicks and other slips.
This evening the discussion is about our online nickname stories. We all have them! My very first online handle/nick was “guitargirl” on the “Q-Link (Quantum Link)” service, offered to Commodore 64 users (some Apples, too, and later Amigas).
I had an external 300 baud Hayes modem. It was the size of a large tissue box.
Over the years I’ve had a bunch of other “Handles and Nicks” - from BBS silliness on to whatever forms of “molly” I could grab.
So what about your handles, and your nicks? Good stories always welcome,
xoM
Filed under: creativity, nmby, just fun
Posted by: Molly | 5:22 pm |
April 14th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I started off with ‘mad_Dog’ which i think my brother gave me, that was used back in my gaming day. Can’t stand the name now though.
I went from the gaming days to ‘brightside’ which was a bit of a play on my surname(Brightman) and that evolved into ‘karlbright’. A lot nicer as most services i have signed up for have the name free which means people can easily find me, although some times that can be a bad thing.s
A few friends call me ‘Kralos’, although i’m not sure why. I also respond to ’shifty’ which came around during the gaming days.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I used an assortment of non-identifying nicknames until 1998, when my college assigned me an email address starting with ‘jonesabi’. As a name that’s rarely taken, I’ve used it ever since.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Haha, I suspect that this post arose from our conversation the other day about where Kentriv and Kirren85 came from.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
I have used zuzu for about 15 yrs as a derivative of Susan. Zuzu is also an endearing character in It’s a Wonderful Life, heartwarming film with Jimmy Stewart that I can watch over and over. For some reason I prefer the design and flow of lower case zuzu than uppercase Zuzu and am always thrown when someone replies to me as Zuzu as it looks, well… oddly misshapen. My kids often will call me zuzu.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
200ok (well, technically 200 OK) is an HTTP status code, a surprising number of web geeks don’t know that!
I originally just intended it to be my domain name, but since I use it for so many things online it’s become a handle of sorts.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I’m almost 49 and still stuck with the guy-thing dross…
Wanks
Spankman
Cottontails (origin should be obvious, now hung on to my fantasy sports teams)
Sparrow (on account I’m bushy like Jack Sparrow of Pirates OTC)
Da (a familial given to me by my kids, my favorite)
April 14th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
for a good few years, i was involved in a multimedia collective that staged large-scale, surround, multi-screen events. it was enjoyable and exhilarating work, but after a while the co-founder started treating me like crap, got a big head, and pretty much pissed everybody else on the project off. after leaving it behind, i drifted aimlessly, until i jumped back in the saddle, found my own niche, and decided on a suitable nick…redux - brought back, returned.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I used the handle “Godhead” throughout my BBS days. I picked it randomly from a book of poetry by Jim Morrison I never finished.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I used to use Appleseed, only because I had an anime poster in my room and as I scoured the room for a handle, my eye came to rest on the poster. I also used Greenman which is the name of a song from “Shut up and dance”. A fun techno song that used to be my victory song when coworkers and I would play Quake matches after work. I sometimes use a variant, gr66nman, simply because it’s less likely to be taken. Alas, these days, I’m just jonathansnook or snookca.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I was Denim_grl (I wore/had a *lot* of denim mid-nineties [jeans, dresses, shirts, bags]) on IRC until we had one of those crazy/zany nights where we would all change our nicks. Since I am Kat, I thought I would do something cat related. I always thought that the sound a cat makes is closer to rowl (rhymes with owl) than miaow. To make it as long as possible (nine letters), I put it twice. That left one letter. So, because the ‘i’ craze was just starting, I added the i in the middle. And it’s unique, and I’ve stuck with it.
@Jonathon: Did you ever get mistaken for a pagan/druid with Greenman?
April 14th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I “acquired” the nickname Woofer in high school. It was a seriously warped corruption of my last name.
I figured Woofer was a heck of a lot better than other names they could call me so I let it be.
When I started to go online in the mid-80’s I started using Woofer as a handle on the various BBSs, because it was generally unique.
Still use it to this day.
The only annoying part is a lot of people assume it has something to do with dogs. I am not a dog person. Definitely a cat person.
April 14th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
My first wad Cliche52. It was meant to be Cliche22 - an amalgamation of ‘cliche’ and ‘catch22′ - but I, somehow, miss typed and didn’t notice and it stuck. I used it a lot when I was 13/14 and did nothing but play Halo and CS online all day. Then as I got older I dropped the numbers but found that most places Cliche was already taken so some places, especially IRC, I was Cliche and other I was still Cliche52 which I didn’t like.
At my first attempt at blogging I wanted a new domain name and bought binarytales.co.uk which was the result of weeks and weeks of head-scratching and checking to see what was available. I started to use Binarytales as my handle/nick and it’s worked out really well. It’s been available pretty much any site or service I wanted to sign up to and a Google search for it used to comprise entirely of results based around my online presence which is very cool. It’s been a little diluted now. I found out about a year late there is a book of the same name which was brought to my attention when someone asked me if that is where I got the name (it’s not).
Just under a year ago I started using a silhouette of a flying pig on sites and services that allowed for avatar/icons as well as a username and the combination has become my personal brand.
There is one thing that bugs me about it though. I never know whether it should be Binarytales BinaryTales or Binary Tales. I need to come up with something canonical and then stop fretting about it.
April 14th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
I got the nickname/handle “Neo Geek” from a Visa advertisement (Flickr link below) someone gave me back when I was in middle school. It didn’t end up sticking until I got to high school and I’ve been using it ever since. Luckily it’s a handle that only gets used on the Internet. However, sometimes I get called “Neo” in the real world and I’m always caught off guard by it.
http://flickr.com/photos/neogeek/159456059/
April 14th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
At high school I got called ‘Weedy’ by the computer studies teacher who said I was always in the place where he didn’t want you, like a ‘weed’. Everyone started calling me Weedy, even though I’m a little wide around the belt line. I guess the name ‘grew’ on me (ha ha. So PUNishable!). I used it as a nick for BBSes and later the internet.
After the people I would meet online asked me if I was into ’smoking my [accidental] namesake’, I changed it from Weedy to Weednix, to try and say that I don’t partake in the grass, but I still got asked.
Around the time Hotmail started getting lots of press, and friends were unable to get their own generic handles (how many people went by the name Wolf back then!?) I thought now would be the greatest time to pick a unique made-up name.
I picked a sound that I thought was cool and underutilised: Gluh, and adapted it to Glutnix.
As a backro-definition, I guess Glutnix could mean ‘nix on the glut’ — which works well with my web development hobbies and career.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
I began with phobonetik when it was cool to have a hacker-style pseudonym; this was quite suitable for fragging people in Doom2 and Quake through to helping debug my linux compile issues when chatting on IRC. Psyched was another one, especially for playing (IRL) laser-tag games. Also, phobo was a common abbreviation and some people used to call me that. Some of the older social networks I’ve signed up to, like flickr, contain that behavior.
I find it interesting that one of the unspoken norms of the web2 world is to throw away handles in favour of real names; facebook, blog comments, and linked in being large catalysts for this. Nowadays if I were to use a nickname I would feel I was deliberately obscuring my identity in the face of a norm, rather than fitting into the the bygone normality of anonymity. As a result, I strive to get a name close to siggy and sigurd. I wonder if I will come to dislike that in the future and revert to a handle again.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I went to high school in a small town, graduating class of roughly 120, with eight Erics. Needless to say we were all known by our last names, and mine was eventually shortened to DeL. Coincidentally, Dell the computer company was gaining traction at the time and since I was the geeky kid who could fix computers it made it stick even more.
In college I encouraged the nickname, and even stopped responding to Eric after a while, but since graduation and entering the professional world I’ve let the nickname die to avoid the potential lawsuit; especially since I had been using a ripped-off Dell logo (minus an “l”) as my avatar on LiveJournal. del.livejournal.com if you’re interested.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
I don’t wanna reveal the two that I still use, because I don’t associate them with my real name.
The first message board I ever joined was a fan forum for Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I used the name “True Power” which was one source of magic in that world. It got abbreviated to TP, and all the jokes associated with it ensued.
Incidentally, from that forum I found Faruk Ates, the forum he was running at the time (which he’d probably be embarrassed of now), and from there naturally came best practice web design, so on and so forth until I found myself reading you, Eric Meyer, and a few other of the big names.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
My main handle is Woogychuck, which I’ve used enough that it’s a much easier way to find me than my real name. It started a while ago when I had the nickname woodchuck, but it was already taken on AIM, so the woogychuck was born.
My nickname in college was Lunch Box due to my resemblence to Kevin Smith’s character Silent Bob (who was frequently called Lunch Box). It made sense at the time.
My official old school nick name was PitViper007. Unfortunately, it became associated with some of my earlier forrays into network security exploration, so I abandoned it around 1999.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I despise the “internet gibberish” word “nick” and refuse calling my pseudonym this way
My very first pseudonym aka handle was Da BugMasta - as in “The Master of Bugs”. That must have been in 1995, when I started into bbs-ing (and also running such a nice thing by myself
).Many many years after abandoning it I found out I’ve even inspired a good friend of mine to re-use this name for himself (”Bugmaster”).
Next on, I called myself just dbm (abbrevation of before mention handle), which soon had to give way for w0lf (about 1996). I’m still using this name in my farewell message at the end of each bloody post, mail or thing I write.
Another one was “oxygenius”, which I’m still using for the rather few painting and sketches I create. Out of the blue I decided to change it to “ginsterbusch” (about 2003), because I was fed up with getting called with my handle instead of my real name IRL.
Now Mr. Ginsterbusch’s both a classy and an odd one - thus truely fitting me
cu, w0lf.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Update to my above comment: “fwolf” is just my UNIX user name
Around 2002/2003 I started working with a very UNIX-ish company and told them to use a combination of the first letter of my first name plus my family name.
Simple, eh?
cu, w0lf.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
mine has been dehog, for as long as I can remember !
April 14th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I’ve had Charp which is from my favorite kung fu strike, so I named my first Warcraft character that and its stuck. Also ninja for people that don’t realise I do kung fu, not ninja. Also El Hardcorlio from when I was younger and thinking of a masked mexican wrestler name
And last one, for accounts where I need a US address, my name is also Alan Stanton from Phoenix, Arizona.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Apart from a brief episode at the end of primary school being referred to as “Gollum”, on account of my surname, I’ve not attracted nicks.
I deliberately chose my handle (Mr. Tines) for Usenet when I got home dial-up, and now for hobby coding and general fanac, based on this quote from a favourite author:
“So who is the real Mr. Tines? The monster who’d smash a world, or the nice guy I’m hearing now?” —— The Blabber, Vernor Vinge.
to reflect a generally laid back guy who occasionally gives in to the temptation of bouts of on-line snarkiness.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:09 am
My yahoo ID is rossbruniges10. I originally had rossbruniges but forget the password and decided to put my basketball number on the back.
To the best of my knowledge I am still the only Ross Bruniges in the world - I’m just forgetful over passwords…
April 15th, 2008 at 12:47 am
I started out on newsgroups at university as “.j.o.n.”, but since joining various forums, I’ve been - and expect I always will be - known as “dotjay”, a more form-field-friendly contraction of that nick (”.j”).
April 15th, 2008 at 2:17 am
Always been ravidor (my first name first letter joined by my last name). When I register to a new application if it is taken (very rare it is hardly a common usernam) I will probably not use it. I’m vain like that.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:38 am
My first computer was the incredible ZX spectrum compatible “БК Башкирия” and I had many games with the title on a splashscreen: “Cracked by Bill Gilbert 1986 (c)”. I was young, the english was unfamiliar to me, so I thougth that Bill (this is actually also a pseudonym of a polish guy) is a developer of all these games. He was my superhero
So when I started to play with Basic and Pascal I always used that name.
When I discovered the Internet I started to use Makes (based on Max, my real name) or Kvakes if the first one is already occupied.
April 15th, 2008 at 4:01 am
Paul D. Waite. It’s my name.
I stuck the D. in because I felt bad about the idea of stealing paulwaite.co.uk from all the other Paul Waites. After 6 years of none of them taking it for themselves, I figured I should register it when I went freelance. When I finally went to look, some bloke had nabbed it and used it to put up like 8 photos of his son. WTF? So now, I’m pretty much stuck with the D.
I was Small Paul for a while before that. That’s now firmly my DJ name.
April 15th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Lots of times it’s nothing more than a handful of scrabble letters.
This one’s from a quote that I use as the signature on my email: Forgive and Forget … Forget what? … (from PrintPerfectScrapbookDeluxe “Phrases”)
Forgiving is kinda like a brain transplant.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:41 am
This is a really cool post. Love these kinds of stories!
I apparently lean toward obscure musical references in my screenname selection. In the late ’90s, I adopted the name ‘gazeglow’ based on a lyric from the song “Lewis Hollow” by Jeremy Enigk: “Gaze, glow and rowing under silver moon.”
I’ve pretty much stuck to that until recently, when I just started to go by ’sunblush’. I’m a really pale-skinned kid, and burn easily… and it’s also the title of a great song by the Autumns. When the shoe fits…
April 15th, 2008 at 9:27 am
At first, bobo_arthur. BoBo was my ‘Spanish’ name in school (a faked ‘Bob’, and I did claim that it was short for Roberto). We learned that ‘bobo’ is spanish for clown, and it stuck pretty tight.
I swear that a friend used to call me ‘Yarthur’ in high school. He doesn’t remember it, but by then I’d already used it on Counter-Strike, had the domain, etc. Now it’s my main handle.
I’ll sometimes go by Jack Mackerel if Yarthur is taken. I worked a grocery store, and once stocked a few cans of Three Diamond brand jack mackerel, and realized that would make an awesome band name. Being a ‘John’, I could adopt the moniker of ‘Jack Mackerel’, too, so bonus points to that.
Finally, my cousins used to call me John The Dumb-Ass, with my initials (John Thomas Darlington Arthur) as the inspiration. As much as I’d like to fend this off, I am the one who’s publishing this on a none-too-obscure blog, so it obviously fits.
JA (I suppose that, too, is a handle, but I just use it to sign off on everything. Thought a few people use it in person.)
(JA)
April 15th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Well lets see, for a while I remember my first nickname was Monkey, and then KC but those are both very generic. It wasn’t until high school where I ended up being Freddie_98 (freddie seemed like a goth name to me at the time) and then that evolved into NadaPulse (again very goth to a highscool student). Now I’m resolved to what I do (Project management and I take pride in it!) so my name is ususally Manage_Kelley
April 15th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
“Kibitzer” is my preferred nik. I’ve used it since around the early 90’s. It’s a dig at myself — it means “a meddler who offers unwanted advice.” I first saw the word in a Mad magazine take-off of the 60’s Batman TV series — Bats-Man! Sparrow (hero identity of Gray Dickson) mentioned a villain called “The Kibitzer” which I thought was really funny. It stuck in my brain to rattle around with all the other useless stuff I remember.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Hmmm… my first online handle was “sampo” from episode 422 of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I used it on our VM/CMS system at my university as well as school email address. After school, I moved on to “lego” for my love of the colorful bricks
Unfortunately, someone else loves them more than I, since it’s impossible to get “lego” on most systems these days and often end up using some mutation of it. Most recently, I’ve taken on “malfunction54″ in reference to the therac-25 incidents. I’m not trying to be morbid, I just got fascinated with the subject while studying software engineering. As you can see, I have a bit of an online identity crisis 
April 15th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
One of my favorite handles from my BBS days was pl0kta (Press Lots of Keys To Abort). I had a lot of other corny nicks (from board games, geocities, hotmail accts etc) like soapman, wakko, jasoff but none of those stuck. I picked up jasongraphix in 2000 while trying to find an available domain name for my personal site. I’ve been using that for just about everything since then in order to establish a personal brand.
April 15th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Always has been spiky_simon - I used to have very spiky hair
April 15th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I’ve been goatlady for quite a few years now… because I like goats, have kept them in the past, and given opportunity and without more sensible influences, I *would* become “the crazy goatlady of *some location*”
Story of my goat obsession (with pictures!) here: http://enterthegoatlady.com/2008/01/24/i-have-a-rule-i-dont-do-memes/
April 17th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
When I was in the 4th grade, I was moved into an advanced Math class with the 5th graders. They asked my name (Bill), and then proceeded to rhyme it with anything they could, eventually settling on “dill”. One kid, apparently a fan of Beavis and Butthead went ahead with… well, you can guess. It rhymes with “Bildo”.
Bildo quickly became my nickname, and not in a bad way. It was just dangeously close to a bad word and in elementary school that’s all one needs. It stuck as I moved onto the internet and gaming communities. Eventually, because there are many, many Bildos out there I added the “Jo”, which is my wife’s nickname.
JoBildo was born. I still use it over at TenTonHammer where I work on the Age of Conan portal.
I don’t think I’ll be using it professionally though…
April 17th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Always late to the party… but I think I’ll still dance…
My nickname growing up — mostly from family — was OliveOyl. And I used it a bit when I first went online (yes, I was tall and skinny as a teenager!)
Then, when I started gaming with my kids, I went with TankGurrrl. A mutation of the post-apocalyptic British comic. She was edgy and cool and my boys weren’t embarrassed that their mom was playing RPGs with them then.
My boys generally reversed their names to be Noremac and Retnuh. But Hunter now uses Drafin, I name I made up for him out of thin air, most of the time.
Now, I just use Stefsull. But that’s mostly on social networking sites. Don’t game much anymore. Too busy.
April 18th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
When I first started gaming online, I had a whole raft of various names … most too generic/short-lived to really bring up, but two that stuck (at least for a while) were CoronTever and GreyZenith. The first was a bit of hodge-podged together gypsy names (I was *real* big into the White Wolf RPGs, and this was just an extension of that obsession brought into the various AOL gaming chat rooms and bulletin boards (I’m a touch young to have done much with BBSes…). I’m still a fan of it, and I’ll pull it out from time to time, but I’ve outgrown it a bit.
GreyZenith (or Grey Zenith) I was rather proud of; this has been, by far, my longest lasting handle, and was another AOL RPG character (the character himself evolved in various different ways that even I can’t remember anymore). It was an amalgamation of elements - “Grey” came from a Piers Anthony character, Grey Mundane, and Zenith … well, I needed a second name, and that was the brand of the TV in the room. But it’s a unique enough combination of names (Grey, spelled in that manner, is less often used) that I’ve never had issues registering it.
I always hated having to add numbers in to my various names, so I tried to come up with unique enough names to prevent that. I’ve used variations on my name for some things, but there are enough “Michael Tierney”s out in there world that it often runs into conflict. So, starting in 2006-ish I started using “panpainter” as my primary; this one fits my uniqueness requirement, but also is truly personal. I play pan (quads, to be specific - a four piece Steel Drum, to explain it really briefly), and my background is in illustration, of which I was always drawn to the borderline fine-art side of it (portraiture, editorial illustration, etc), and so I spent a lot of time, well, painting.
Anyway … that’s my (really long) history of handles.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
My first thought is, you have a lot of young(ish!) readers, Molly
- all those “gamers-as-young-uns”…
Then I was thinking how boring the handle I use pretty much everywhere now is - just my initials and a personally-meaningful number, gkkk04. But then I remembered the myspace name I took - mataji04 - because the only reason I signed up there was to be able to check in on my kids’ pages - thus, mataji, Punjabi for mother, and that same number.
And then I also remembered the handle I used to use on a crochet list I used to be active on (no more, but still belong to) - crochetlady4. So. I do have a story after all!
April 20th, 2008 at 7:15 am
In 1988, after transferring to Boston University, the game of quarters, the no-name rule and LOTS of alcohol landed me with the nickname “Zork”. When I graduated and worked in film production for Troma Films that name really fit my style. Years later I became a touring National Slam Poet and that also fits me for that.
BUT as you may know, Infocom locked that up as a login, website and URL etc many years ago… so when I created a live journal account my user name became “zorkisNOTapoet”.
This was merging my nickname and my book title [I wrote a book named “I am NOT a poet”]
But now, for simplicity sake my main user names and such are iamNOTapoet. One should always where there bookname and website name as much as possible. I my entire sense of fashion is 10 pairs of black jeans and 100 custom t-shirts that say “I am NOT a poet”
Sweetie & I enjoyed your Lynda.com Blogger tutorial, We may tweak our BedVlogs.com site with some of the new knowledge…. thanks.
– Eric ZORK Alan [National Slam Poet]
– Professional poet & BED VLOGGER
– StolenSnapshots . com
– www . IamNotapoet . com
April 20th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I used Jazz, Jazzy or some derivative(e.g. jazzygirl) for many years (especially on IRC), due to my love for jazz music. It started getting more difficult to register that nick at various websites as time went past and the “internet got bigger”.
Now I just tend to use my full name as my handle. Pretty boring but it means that I can sign up for accounts at the first go