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!
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.
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"
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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"
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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'.
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.
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. 🎶
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.
It's the name of my sona, as well as the species. "Arx" came from one of my previous usernames which was railroad related (I'm a railfan, and went by RxR). My friends started calling me Rx, which then became Arx. "CyberWolf" comes from my fursona being cyberpunk themed, with cybernetic augmentation. Hence, Cyber Wolf.
It's supposed to sound like "pattern" and was meant to evoke that. It's meant to refer to sort of "patterns in life", a sort of interconnectedness that binds us all together and these universal experiences that we all seem to share. Or something like that. There's probably already a word for it, but whatever, it's what I've been using for internet ages now.
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 posts, it's short for the one I've had at birth. You can change how your name looks in the account settings.