How did you get your username?

Interstellar_1@pawb.social to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 168 points –
315

I grew up in a very rural area of the southern U.S. back in the 80s. The internet wasn't quite a thing yet, so my window to the world outside my small town was our mailbox, located at Rural Route Box 464. I had pen pal letters, catalogs, magazines and comic books delivered in the mail and it was pure joy to run down the dusty road and check for something new every day.

The internet became my new window to the world, so it just seemed natural to use "Box464" as my address. Even got the domain!

Everyone have super random username but this warm my heart 😊

It's my name :)

i wonder how many people were lucky enough to get their name as their username

I’d wager most people on Lemmy don’t want their real name anywhere close to their shitposting.

Shitposting becomes way funnier when done in your name 😂

I'm just lucky. The random name generator gave me CrustyPelican96 initially, but I pressed it again and got my name. What are the chances?

6 years ago someone submitted a contact us form with the name Fuckwit McBumcrumble at work and we found it really funny.

Biology teacher in HS mentioned off-hand that apparently chickens can climb trees. I searched for images online, thought they were funny, and made it my handle.

@treechicken they fly up into them.

That makes much more sense now that I think about it. I think debate about whether chickens could fly was the reason this came up way back then actually...

@treechicken normal healthy chickens can fly in a limited way, eg to chase insects or to get up into trees (they like sleeping in trees because it's safer) or on the roofs of barns etc.

People who keep poultry sometimes clip their wings (cut off the flight feathers) to stop them doing stuff like that.

Factory-farmed chickens are too deformed.

I was a DJ in the 90ies and needed a DJ name. I was looking for one and when I was on my way to Berlin for the Love Parade by train - already half drunk. And the we stopped in the city Jena, in the part Paradies, so the sign Spain "Jena Paradies" and I thought it was the perfect name for me as a DJ.

Then I added another e and dropped the "last name" part and here we are with "Jeena"

Well, let me tell you a little story

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea…

When ICQ was new, I met a girl online that went by Tina. Cute blonde with a gap in her front teeth. She and I would video chat all day while I worked. Many NSFW video chats from her side.

She named me Tina's Horny Boyfriend. And I lived in Texas.

Sadly, we never met and I lost track of her.

We chat online for like 2 hours a day, so I guess you can say things are getting pretty serious.

We are a small clique of kobolds who share a Lemmy account in real life. It seemed appropriate.

I had a screensaver in the late 90's that made random but grammatically correct sentences. One sentence said "I once was a vinyl wombat"

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I take pictures and I fart

Who doesn't?

Well well, look who has a particularly talented nephew. If they can do such a great job, then why'd you even ask a fartographer in the first place??? Quit trying to low-ball the professionals out of the business!

I like sea otters. I've spotted them in the water once or twice

Back when chatrooms were a thing, me as an edgy teenager, wanted something that I thought made me appear dark and mysterious so I chose Der teufel (the devil) as my handle. Most people couldn't read it properly and called me Truffle instead and I embraced it happily.

24 years ago my dad asked me what I wanted my username to be and I was struggling and he said “hurry up or I’ll pick something silly like prettybunnys” and type it in and I said “ok”.

Not prettybunnies, okay then, that's not mildly infuriating 🤐

😄

Mine's a Stormlight Archive reference

Oh. Oh. Question for you! What did the one-armed Herdazian do to the man who stuck him to the wall?

Nothing, he was 'armless!

Haha yes! Hello cousin! I think I found my internet best friend! Lol, I'm fairly new to Brandon's work, but Almighty above, I am so excited for book 5!

Welcome aboard, gancho! His stuff is so good, if you haven't checked out his Mistborn series yet, that's top quality too, I highly recommend it!

So I hear! I'm going through Stormlight one more time, and then Mistborn is happening for sure!

I was a bookish child and my mother used to take me to the local library weekly. On the way to the children's section I had to pass the large print shelf. There was always this one hardback book there, The Spitting Image. It had a bizarre looking gargoyle on the cover and I used to look away so I wouldn't have nightmares about it, but peek at it between my fingers. Every week for years the spitting image would watch me run past it to the Tintin books. Eventually I lost my fear and I could look it straight in the face. It was a goofy thing, nothing like as sinister as I first thought.

Once upon a time the world was a magical place and I used to invent my own rituals as protection.

It was random username that Crunchyroll generated for me. I liked the absurdity of it.

I change usernames every couple years. Betch is just something a couple of my friends started calling me a while ago. It basically became my name until I found something I liked to replace my deadname and it also became my new online identity.

When I got to the username prompt Sagat's voice jumped into my head. While I enjoyed SF2 way back in the day I haven't played in probably 25 years, so I'm not exactly sure why I thought of it.

(pic is AI generated, close enough)

Well, I try to be an optimist, but life sometimes is just shit

First time I was prompted for a username, I happened to have a Roadkill Cafe poster on my wall. Couldn't find anything better in my room unless I was going to use "LampBookDumbassCat"

Trans, wasn't ready to use my new name IRL, or come out to anybody, so I took the word "Somber" and shoved a Y in it because it makes it really similar to my chosen name, so I could feel like I was being called my preferred name every time somebody said it.

Now that I'm this far into my transition it's nothing but a relic, but I like the username anyway.

From Ren and Stimpy. Powdered Toast Man,

❤️ Ren and Stimpy.

I have a group of friends that did a lot of camping when we hit early 20's. We actually put a cardboard 6-pack holder around a piece of wood... it was our "Log". We kept it for a few years. Then burned that bitch during a blow out pre-wedding camp out.

QA for a 3PL. Apparently QA didn't prior to my arrival try things like entering words in zipcode entry boxes, typing 65537 letters into an address field, or holding the shift key when selecting which State to ship to.

I made a lot of, well not what I would call enemies but I wasn't exactly friends with any of the developers.

I'm really bad at name creation and wanted to try a character in an online game. Who could have guessed the name "try" was already taken... So I turned it around, it sounded alright for a dwarf char and 15 years later it's still my username.

I played with someone on the psvita that had this name. One day he said see you tomorrow and never logged back on. I took his name now. I only use it for forums tho

I'm in witness protection. Turns out not all girls are made of just sugar and spice.

I was 9, I like video games, my first name is Harry

Almost 20 years later and there are people IRL who call me "gamer" and not "Harry"

I was in a hurry creating a lemmy account and spewed out the first thing that came to my mind

Same here. I just couldn't think of anything and I didn't wanna reuse a name. I also wasn't entirely sure if I'd stick around, so it didn't feel super important. Oh well!

For reasons I no longer remember, about 14 years ago I stumbled across The Endless Forest. I poked around on the web page a bit, decided it was interesting but not interesting enough to actually install, and moved on. A short while later I saw something on Reddit that I felt like posting a comment on, and so I created an account and this was the first username that popped to mind.

Quite some time later I got into modding a game called Minetest, and a very common element in its API is the "facedir" of a node - short for facing direction. I had a lot of people assume I'd drawn my name from that, but it was sheer coincidence.

There was this user named dolphinfucker69 that posted a really elaborate text post about fucking dolphins and became a sort of microcelebrity on certain subreddits that I am not proud of frequenting so I won't name. If you know you know. Anyway he eventually got banned and it was memed on for a while and he did some ban evasion. I needed a new account at the time and figured a name similar to that might make some people laugh. So here we are

It's a mnemonic major variation of Jake that is usually available... And I came to dot world before the first 2k users joined but after "Jake" was taken.

It got rejected when I suggested it as a name for a Corvette class light frigate, despite it sounding awesome

How about using the name for a racing pinnace instead?

I was a teenager and I thought RadX sounded cool (this was a full year before Fallout 1 came out, so I don't think it had any other inspiration). A few years later, I wanted a little continuity, but also something not quite so cringe-worthy. A single "i" fixed it.

What are you, a cop?

Jk but for real, how'd you get your username?

I got it from valarin, an obscure Tolkien language for the Valar. Without the h it means 'the storyteller' I thought the h would help in pronunciation, it usually doesn't.

I've always used wildcard since the early 2000s. But nowadays wildcard is often used up already without adding numbers to it. So I combined wildcard and cardology and no I don't know anything about cardology.

What is cardology?

Cardology is a science that connects playing cards and astrology to guide us through life.

Maybe something Tarot cards are used for.

Im a pig with a doctorate, and one has figured it out yet!

.

Well, the box was staring at me when I created this account.

My cat’s name is Shadow. I do a lot of techy things, so “EXE” felt like a cool thing to add. “ShadowEXE” doesn’t flow as much as “ShadowCatEXE”. I also have alt names with DLL instead of EXE, but it’s not as cool.

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I've been using Monster ever since I randomly chose it during a Mario Kart race while on a school trip. There were 8 of us playing Mario Kart DS and I wanted to stand out.

A cheesy 90s drink, they were fun to see how far you could spit the jelly bits, or just a kinda fun drink I rarely saw as a teen. Nothing great but when you lived in the middle of nowhere it didn't take much in the mid 90s to be entertained as a teen.

I was messing about in a fighter simulator (previous milenium) and the game told me I did an insane move. It sticked, so I called myself TheInsane. In an online game, that nick was already in use, so I got the suggestion to take TheInsane1... nah, there is only 1 answer to everything, so I added that. It stuck since then. I got me the matching domain in '22.

I'm using KoffieNu as well, as it matched my domain koffie.nu (proud owner since '98), mainly on mastodon, git and some dutch lemmy instances.

My friends' band in high school was called Dances with Bread. I was their biggest fan, so I wanted a username that was bread themed. But I also felt like a username that had a sci-fi feel to it. ToastedPlanet was available on Reddit and it was available on Blåhaj Lemmy. But I managed to mistype it on DeviantArt as ToastePlanet which is embarrassing to say the least.

I asked chatGPT to come up with something that combines forests and debate and then I just started making different variations of that for each of my new accounts and this is the latest version. Hardly any resembalance to the original one.

I got it from a random generator after I had to change my Minecraft username when I was a kid. Been using it ever since.

My original reddit name. It is on my 2 Guinness World Records for "Largest Online Secret Santa".

It means = Paramedic, guy(pig), and I did "save" two babies as a Paramedic.

I like making up names and wanted a unique name for myself. So.. I ended up with Thelsim.
I wanted it to be unique, gender neutral, and easily pronounceable.

It was the in-game alias of a very skilled swordsman and skirmisher in the MMORPG called Vindictus. We became good friends and played regularly for several years, conquering the toughest horrors, but one day, he never logged back on. So I started using his username to honor his kindness and prowess with the blade. If you're reading this, just remember that everyone in Lost Paradise [LP] remembers you!

It's like when kids make up a ridiculous nickname for you in grade school, but it sticks and you end up using it on your business cards.

It was going to be my pen name. But the two years into the pandemic, I started evaluating the costs of the sunk cost fallacy of writing. Still, it was too good of a name to let go.

My favorite cyberpunk book, Neuromancer has a bartender in it named Ratz who serves drinks to the main character in a bar called Chatsubo

Went to a party in college where I didn't know anybody. Back then, my solution to not being able to remember other people's names was just to not give my own unless pressed. So they gave me a new name, and I've used it ever since.

Deep cut Expanse reference. Specifically to an episode that had a lot of personal meaning for me.

Sleeping pills and a misspelled person. It was my pirated minecraft username first.

I very briefly hosted my own Lemmy instance at endofti.me. The username seemed appropriate there. Just kept it when I moved instances.

i thought that my old username (that i came up with when i was 8 and creating an account for runescape) was too childish.

At some point after i watched donnie darko while being really high. The rest is history

Just made that shit up. I was trying to think of something stupid that wouldn't identify me in any personal way, and this one made me chuckle

I based it of the kid who goes “fahfahfahfah” in the pork chop sandwiches gi joe thing but everyone thinks it’s a reference to Jeff Dunham

I was tickled pink about this prehistoric fish that went viral a little while back and I thought I would adopt its name.

First word that came to mind when I was like 13 followed by an arbitrary number and letter. It just means ball or sphere in German. I took up naming things by simple shapes by then so I guess there must be something I like about it.

Mine is just a combination of a shortened nickname from just out of high school (Donkey) and my D.O.B. Not secure, don't care... I got sick of writing out my original when logging in as it was too long. Donkey_Snickers That was back when the tagline for the Snickers chocolate bar advertisements was "Really satisfies"... I had a bit of an ego regarding my sexual prowess 20 something years ago...

Abbreviation of my real name yields "NW". I decided to add wind to make it a Hong Kong slang.

I had a boss back in the day that I had a really good rapport with, and he would jokingly call me Shrek because I was almost a foot taller than he was. I also worked in a lot of restaurants in my late teens to early twenties and found a love for cooking that has never really gone away.

I read Les liaisons dangeureuses my second year in France and loved it. Misspellt de Valmonts name though :-)

The upside of the misspelling was that the name was always free on any forum up til not that long ago where bots started to recycle existing usernames all over the place.

Named after Jubei Kibagami of Ninja Scroll, first anime movie I ever watched. The 08 was my jersey number when I played soccer.

Ninja Scroll

I was making a WoW character (back in the days even the Burning Crusade wasn't there yet). It was a troll with big tusks, so I thought he'd need a toothpick or two.
And the spelling is from "Don't be a menace to South Central...", there was a stupid gangster under this name, he's my soul animal.

Back in the olden days I played Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast at a buddys home. I didn't have a username for online play and I think he had gotten his from a Majoras Mask guide, so I flipped through it and randomly chose Gibdos. It's been my one and only username for over 20 years now.

my friend's username started with "int" and I wanted a similar username, and interstellar sounded cool (I was also 12 when I made it) and then I added a 1 because interstellar was taken

kill cry > blacklisted word on whatever I was trying to sign up for originally > jumbling intensifies > kryllic

If someone had a gun to my head I would have said your username is obvious a reference to the cyrillic alphabet and I guess I'd be dead.

One of my favourite characters from a book.

It came from a one-off inside joke with some online friends (I don't remember the context) as PopeJoeI (Pope Joe the First). I eventually embraced it fully and changed all my online handles. At some point, Discord added crowns to server owners where it wasn't immediately obvious who owned it and it evolved into "Pope-King Joe".

I don't remember where my name came from but maybe it's a variation off the NES game The Astyanax

It's just a name I put into a BBS when I signed up 35ish years ago and I've used everywhere since.

I like glitchy stuff, and I had friends who added "-ington" to everything for laughs.

I'll let you guess the second half 👍

The first half is actually short for Indigo.

Back in the day my old internet alias was Indigo Michigan. I eventually dropped the Michigan when I became a Brony. "Indigo Brony" didn't really sound great, so I shortened it.

It's a reference to Hollow knight and Subnautica

Also it's a double negative

Mine is an old Black Crusade character name. The original Xariphon was a scholar-warrior.

Resol = bunch of jumbled letters that are completely meaningless, but can be interpreted as either the first 5 letters of "resolution", or the backwards spelling of "loser"

van = Dutch word meaning "of" or "from"

Lemmy = this is insanely obvious

It makes me seem like someone from Belgium/the Netherlands, but to be honest, this is not my legal name, nor am I from these countries (I would like to live in Belgium, though), I'm actually from... ugh, Morocco.

Shit!

I got bored of winning all these fuckin accolades for porn.

Then the world started runnin outta french fries and burrito coverins, people starvin and shit.

Enough was enough!

President Camacho 2024!

It was my username on my porn account on Reddit. I derived it from my not porn account that I also used for other things and people IRL knew. I ended up using this one way more so kept it when Reddit banned me and I came over here.

Golden Sun for GBA... except it was taken so I added an I... it's occasionally taken so sometimes I switch it for a 1 but I hate doing that

I made it up myself. I came up with the phrase decades ago, and recently decided it was time for a new online moniker since a number of people were able to deduce my real identity based on my old one I'd used for a couple decades prior.

Mistakes.
I created a test account on SDF pubnix. Since it was a test account, I didn't use my usual username, but just user224. Then some good user (xiled) decided to verify my account. Thus I had to stick with it.
Then later on Twitter I've seen SDF announce their Lemmy instance. Not knowing what Lemmy is, I've used the same username as on SDF pubnix, which was an accident.
I can't change it either, and this account has some history already. Just building up on mistakes. Just like when I find a "temporary" solution to something.

It used to be the name of my character back when I played DnD, and the very origin was some online dwarvish names generator.

I just love the Kirby game series cuz it’s really cute but I also love Kirby himself as well at it being a reference to Kirbo from TerminalMontage, who I also equally love as is one of my fave YouTubers.

808 is a reference to the Roland TR-808 drum machine, referencing to many of my favourite electronic/alternative/hip hop musicians that have used it.

Also I love being cringe too so there’s that too xD

I have always loved magic/mages/wizards/locks/witches/shamans in video games. When you have to make tons of alt accounts on MMOs or RPGs everytime i did another mage playthrough I started coming up with names for the memes. Some were okay, some were bad.

When I went to do a hardcore playthrough of a game and was trying to think of a "sweaty" (sweaty being someone who puts in a lot of effort, for those unaware) pun, sweatyfireballs was born. I was so proud of if it, it became my new go to user name over my long running previous name that I came up with for my mage on vanilla wow. I peaked that day.

Was my reddit username for ten years. When I joined reddit it was through the swimming sub, looking for info on waterproof MP3 players so I could swim laps while listening to AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Slayer, etc etc. I'm a bogan that swim laps pretty much every day.... therefore waterbogan

I think mine is kinda obvious but in case it isn't, it's "GNU" in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. I got it because I like aviation and Linux... and also because I'm too autistic to get a more normal one

I was originally called deadlok, it was a gaming name I came up with when I was 10 and stuck to it other than contracting it a bit.

Had it for forty years, it was my CB radio call sign.

I had to make a new name for the then brand new game: league of legends. I was high af and came up with this. Inspired by boss names in wow I guess.

I mostly enjoy but not competitive online player from UO and Everquest era so I tired of typing good game no re do

I used to like soda a lot when I was a kid.

As with all my online accounts:

  • Visit a name generator website.
  • Find one that doesn't suck.
  • Check if it's available.
  • Here we are.

And each has a different email address. I hope adtech loves me. 😁

Huge fan of GWAR and always used their lead singers name for online accounts.

Can’t wait until some internet rando types “GWAR” into a search engine and watches a video… fantastic.

Easily my favourite band. Seen them in concert many times and it never gets old.

RIP Brockie

I learned how to solve a Rubik's cube and figured I could make a username out of it.

Plus, it doubles as a reference to a pixel on a screen and I'm a security engineer, so... It kinda works both ways.

I wanted to upgrade my cringy username and realized it was very hard to choose something, after a while I decided to do the same thing Seba Jun (rest in beats) made for its stage name. 🎶

Combined a few numbers that are meaningful to me, turned it into hex, and here we are.

wanted a zerg sounding name when I started playing SC2 and then mained terran instead

A resemblance to Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon. It's my nickname amongst my friends and round the pub (some of whom don't know my birth name) to the point you could go into my local and ask for the Emperor and someone would point you in the eight direction. So when I signed up online, it made sense to use this name and it has since became my nom-de-plume and is, in effect, my Common Law name.

A half-assed variation of "bah humbug"...

If by that you mean the URL one, it's a combination of different anime characters, but if by that you mean the one you see on comments, it's short for the one I've had at birth. You can change how it looks in the account settings.

I like penguins and 90s nostalgia. It's a Legends of the Hidden Temple fake team name.

Could I have gone for the alliteration? Perhaps. But Purple Parrots already existed. And I don't like pink.

Trimmed down version of my 'sona's full name "lythlphene" which I came up with kinda randomly in a weird creative mood early in the morning, it's intended to mean something like "earthy creature". I decided that I shouldn't change or tweak it afterwards since I would have just kept overthinking it and never been satisfied

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. It's the name of an optional NPC that writes you a few letters and then dies. He has no relevancy at all, but I like him. Based on where you are, he may be written without the 'r'.

I used the username blackandred56, until one day I used blackrose56, and since then it's blackrose56 or roserose56. I just liked rose.

It's a drink that makes you feel good and I drink a lot of it

I am the pretty Guardian in a sailor suit who fights for love and justice!!!

Main character from The Darkness that Comes Before/The Prince of Nothing series by R. Scott Bakker. Liked the character, liked the name, loved the books.

My xbox Gamer tag was oXOrangeBudXo because i was very cool and unique and just started smoking weed. I then went normal and was OrangeBud in different ways. Then Orange because i didnt smoke anymore. And then PixelOrange because i like the pixels. And if that name is taken, its PixeIOrange with upper i.

I was playing a silly game online and I was so good at it I was basically stomping other players. Tac tac is how we describe the sound of walking loudly in Slovene (there are other ways to describe it: lomastiti, topotati...) and so I combined my name (Gregor) with tac tac and GregorTacTac became my username almost everywere.

no idea, it's a part of my name and the number 300... yeah

I wrote several stories about a gardevoir named Azula.

She then later became my fursona, so the name stuck as a replacement for a past username

pewgar is my defacto English name and seemsimandroid was my previous Reddit username but i couldn't put a slash so i put a underscore

Took the windows shortcut "Control-Alt-Delete", removed the delete and trol, and replaced the c with a k