I wonder about this from time to time when I see other people’s names
If you’re up to it, mind givin’ your story on how you got your online handle? I’ll start first:
I ended up taking it from my brother because why not (he had an alternate username so it worked out), and it sorta stuck. I always liked how people didn’t know how to pronounce it (except when they do) and i didn’t know either until I asked my bro about it. I will keep it that way until the obnoxious end
I needed a username, so I combined Roy, the person i was playing in Melee, and Pyro, because ???, then changed the y to an i because Pyroy looks stupid.
I basically just typed out as many Final Fantasy spells as I could think of, sighing in disappointment as the large majority of them had been taken, until I eventually used a spell from one of the debatably lesser known portable titles and it just kinda stuck. I use this name anywhere it’s available now.
Combination from my two nicknames in college. I had to get a nickname because in my social circle i was like the 6th person with the same name. Kip came from the fact that I played a bunch of Pokemon at the time, and the stupid Mudkip meme was still a thing. Scurvy came from when I had shingles and people just said it was scurvy, so I got called Scurvy after that.
I used to go by an even more unimaginative username, but when I joined SA, I wanted something new. So I just looked at my intended avatar and chose it based off that.
I was trying to think of a username to register on SA, and I just happened to be watching the intro to that Johnny Quest spoof from Freakazoid. Then I saw this and thought, “Okay, let’s go with that.”
I made this username while I was starting my thesis (for online personal reflections originally), and now that I’m just starting my PhD it still fits nicely.
I was 12 years old, making a runescape account at 2 AM, and I wanted the username “paranormal.” It stuck when I realized that nobody would ever have this username and I wouldn’t have to sully it with “xX______Xx” and numbers.
I snagged this one from a Whitest Kids U Know sketch wherein a bored child pitches his idea for a new Star Wars movie to George Lucas. Plus I wanted a name that would look funny in a kill notification in death matchy games. “You were killed by Two Chewbaccas”
I first discovered the internet when I was 15, in high school computer science class. We were told not to go in to chat rooms, but the computer lab was open during lunch breaks with no teachers to supervise, so I joined a Beseen chatroom for a Sonic fansite and noticed a bunch of people in there had fan characters. I wanted to make a good first impression, so I made up one of my own (again, I was 15, it’s just what you do).
Eventually “Blaze the Hedgehog” became just “BlazeHedgehog.” It’s what people knew me by, and even though it was kinda dorky, there wasn’t tons of impetus to find something else and I didn’t want to go through the effort of finding anything that I liked. It was easier (and lazier) to just stay BlazeHedgehog. As the years wore on, eventually I decided it was worth keeping simply because it made me easier to find. I’ve reconnected with several old internet friends over the years because they remembered the name and found me. It sort of became my own sad personal “brand.”
I was a sophmore in college when the manbearpig episode of south park came out, and it was around the time when facebook didn’t police fake middle names, so my roommate kept telling me I should make that my middlename of facebook since it fit me so well. I didn’t want to just use manbearpig wholesale so I switched it around a bit, and it just stuck
and lo and behold a goddamn decade later and I got a south park joke tied to my identity forever
