How did you get your username?

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!

Permanently Deleted

I blinded a cyclops and got stuck with it.

It's my name :)

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.

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…

I can't deal with absolutes

I typed it in. Lemmy said it was available.

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.

I am an idiot.

RAWRGWAWGGR

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"

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

it's my name. i'm jerome.

I take pictures and I fart

Well....

Edit: seems my gif doesn't load?

Edit2:Thanks!

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”.

My name's Hiram. I was born in Chihuahua, and raised in Chicago.

Both are home, and both start with "Chi."

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

Someone else took Karl first

It’s a long story

For some reason, it wasn't taken. Some people are just lucky, I guess.

I made an account

Came to me in a dream

My name is kostas, I was 6 years old, and I didn't know how super was spelled.

20 years I wear that spelling mistake as a badge of honour!

Because breakfast is the most important meal.

Hello World

Mine's a Stormlight Archive reference

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.

Character in the world I made up when I was a kid

Apathy during the reddit drama

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

I got plastic in my brain 🧠

I casted spells

Am Gen-x

Am liberal

Easy as.

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.

I didn’t.

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)

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"

Because Reddit is run by morons.

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

I like crab and i'm easily annoyed.

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

All the other names I use were taken =]

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'm ready good at killing rocks in Minecraft

Big fan of the Polish Hussars.

I got it off of a hair dryer.

From Ren and Stimpy. Powdered Toast Man,

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

I thought it'd help to be descriptive.

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"

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 was my user number in high school. A decade ago.

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.

Total mystery to me

The intro of Power Stone on the Dreamcast.

I got a gift.

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

Random word list

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

It's my name

Honestly? I was trying too hard.

Uhh. I was inspired by a manager.

Hmm..

Divine inspiration more than 20 years ago.

I like dark souls

I use a Dvorak keyboard and am not very creative.

A fun conversation about goats milk while on acid and whip its lol

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.

It's my stage name

JustTheTip was taken. So I had no choice what so ever

My daughter gave me this name.

i just wanted to sound like an american mafia wiseguy

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.

Govt-issued

What are you, a cop?

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

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

.

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.

Pure Pwnage reference

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.

Data structure and algorithm class in college.

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.

It sounded funny. It has nothing to do with Linux, but yet I still run Linux.

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.

Who knows?

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.

I was in a 3 little pigs mood at the time.

I just like that short comic/meme of the Muscle Wizard

Alliteration, Rhythm, Rhyme, and I like properly made tea.

Pulp fiction.

:,(

It's embarrassing. I'm not telling.

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

Folded space.

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!

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.

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.

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.

They were out of Bort usernames.

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

Hal from 2001 and AMD Ryzen 7 5700X.

In memory of the Apollo app.

Well it started when I was born and my mom named me Bill…

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.

my name + super withour -er + favourite number

Not so wild as I used to be.

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.

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

chu

I have plans to find a better one.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_have_two_cows

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 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

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

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

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

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...

Preteen me was bad at Japanese.

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

At the time, I was playing a lot of Diablo.

I'm a gentleman that enjoys neon lights.

Self explainotry

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.

Iain M. Banks' "Culture" series. RIP

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 was tough, but I squeeked it in just under the wire.

I eat a lot of pasta

One of my favourite characters from a book.

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

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

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

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.

It's a reference to Hollow knight and Subnautica

Also it's a double negative

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.

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.