Well, mine is kind of just dumb, fun wordplay, and says a little about me, I think, if you get the joke. PanicOtter kinda sounds like how I’ve always pronounced panna cotta - I really like food, and dumb wordplay/puns. Also, I love otters, and I am kind of an anxious, easily frazzled person, so the dumb word play is also accurate to at least three things about me.
That’s kinda it. I’m bad at names.
The first time I ever considered the need for a username online (that wasn’t garbage) was for a Pokemon forum. Most of the regulars already had Pokemon-themed names, and most of the good ones were taken. I went down the list and picked the best one that was left. I’ve never bothered to come up with another one, and by now, it’s so much a part of my online identity that I can’t even come up with another one when I get the “that’s copyrighted, you have to choose something else” response. When Nidoking is unavailable on its own, I usually stick 042 on the end, and in the one instance where that also wasn’t available (Twitter), I went with IAm at the front, which is not too bad and probably a better convention to stick to, if I ever need to do it again.
My username is from the Russel & Norvig Artificial Intelligence textbook, third edition. Throughout the book, they use this hypothetical vacuum cleaner robot that cleans squares in a grid world for all of their algorithm examples. As you can imagine, this book is very dry. At some point in the later chapters, there was an example I remembered that was something along the lines of “now say we have a devious vacuum, that, when it comes upon a clean grid square, will deposit dirt on it.” This was such a departure from the rest of the tone of the book, which was even drier, that I remembered it and thought that it would make a good username. I also got my usual avatar from the diagrams in that book, although here on LP’Zone I used an inverted-colors version of that “Henry” vacuum cleaner, because it more accurately reflects my face when I make posts.
I’ve gotten some tweets from computer science students who are using the same AI textbook I got my name from, and that always makes me smile.
Whatever my name means, it’s Not Obvious To Me…
I got the name “Blue” from Mega Man and the Pokemon manga back when I was in high school. Blue was a bit too simple and the name was always taken so I added some endings to turn it into things such as “Blue Sky”. However, it still wasn’t unique enough so I just took “Blue Sky”, put it into Japanese and just stuck with it.
I needed a username for here because I’d figured all of my older ones were kind of bad, I’ve always liked Final Fantasy Moogles so I figured I’d work with that somehow, and ConfusedMoogle was the catchiest thing I came up with.
They can’t all be winners, folks.
i like marceline the vampire queen from adventure time
well the actualy thought process behind it is i wanted to move away from my old username, which was quite gender neutral but I kind of get annoyed when people online assume i’m male because that’s just the default thing to them, so I wanted my new name to be obnoxiously femme (like the stereotypical gamer girl that i am) and marceline has been my avatar for a while in most places so i just went with this, for the sake of My Brand.
Sometimes in online games, dense boys still assume i’m male, which baffles me.
When I was a teenager I really really liked Max from Tales of Eternia. Because he’s a big idiot with a giant portable canon who punches his way throw puzzles and just wants to be a nice world dictator. The day I wanted to register on some forum or another, what a surprise, but “Max” was already taken, and I wanted something that didn’t look silly (no numbers or underscores allowed, no camelcase, I was really serious about my e-fashion). In the game, Max really likes tiny fantasy animals called the Miacis (Miaces in plural…?), so I went with that.
Months later, I discovered that the genus Miacis is more or less the ancestor of most small carnivorous mammals, which is a pretty cool genus to be if you ask me. It’s unique, simple and sounds nice, so I stuck with it.
I also resorted to using “IAm” for my Twitter name and some other things. Ever since Undertale came out, the name Skelebro got a whole lot more popular…
I used to be a dumb kid (rather than the dumb young man I am today) and I read a lot of a certain online sprite comic about Mega Man. When I joined the forums, I wanted to name myself “Zero” (because Mega Man you see) but that was taken, so I named myself “Zero (0)” because I was super original.
Later I made a second account on the forums (because I thought I was so clever) and called it “ELECMAN”. When I made an account somewhere else (don’t remember where) I just combined them into “Zero-ELEC” (or “ZeroELEC”) which is a fairly unique string as far as usernames go.
I go by RadicalEddie when I can these days because my first name is Eddie and it’s both a nod to Cowboy Bebop and it invokes 90s cool, with backwards hats and kickflips and things like that.
But that’s relatively recent. Elsewhere on the internet, I’ve gone by “Dante Reborn,” which has no special meaning at all. The absolute truth behind that one is, when I was 13 I had heard that the main character in Devil May Cry was named Dante and that sounded cool. I would also watch the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, even though I never played it, and the card “Monster Reborn” also sounded cool, but rhythmically. So, I just mashed them together, and voila, “Dante Reborn.” In essence, I made my gaming handle out of two unrelated games I hadn’t played.
My username is a step up of a very old inside joke that is only funny to me at this point.
A while back, we’re talking pre-World of Warcraft, there was an MMORPG called Ashen Empires. No idea if it’s still around at this point. A friend of mine was into it, and he convinced me to give it a try. While building my character I was drawing a complete blank when picking a name, and my friend randomly suggested “How about Colonel Sanders?” Ok, that’s mildly funny, I’ll be the founder of KFC inside this MMO.
And the name stuck. I picked Colonel Sanders as my username wherever I got the chance. But, eventually, after a few too many people beat me to the joke on forums/games/etc, I decided to switch it up. But I was still fond of the name so I kept it close and just gave Colonel Harland Sanders a promotion. General Harland. Enough of an original name that it’s never taken, but still enough for me to laugh at being the guy who started Kentucky Fried Chicken on the internet.
I made a Guild Wars PVP character and wanted to name it something bizarre, and the first thing that popped into my head was Thorn in the Brain. Eventually I shortened it to ThornBrain and started using it as an alias.
I previously went by “comicstripdude” because I used to draw comics as a kid, and I took it from my old email “comicstripkid”, but I changed it to dude because I was afraid of child abductors.
I got my current username because the one I used to use was taken on Steam, so I tried to rearrange the letters into a new one but that didn’t work. I then had to come up with a new one so I used an anagram maker with the word Online and got one close to what it is now. Added an R just to even it out
As a big mythology nerd, I always felt Hades/Pluto got a bad rap so of course he was my favorite. Though even to this day Pluto is my favorite Greco-Roman god, but for less edgelordy reason. Anyway, Hades was always taken, so since he is lord of the underworld and Tatarus/Tartarus is the edgiest part of it I’d just be LordTatarus and threw in the extra ‘a’ because that name was already taken on whatever forum I was joining (I don’t remember when I started using the handle). I still kind of like it, even though it is kind of edgelord.
Because i’m incredibly original and creative, my username is my first name combined with my last name.
When I was 11 and making an account on gamefaqs (but, this says you have to be 13!! do you think they will be able to tell?!), I was reading Harry Potter at the time, so I took that and plugged a classical element onto it and got heatwizard.
Then I was 23 and decided, hey y’know, I’m proud of you for thinking of your own handle 11 year old me, but maybe it’s time for a change. However, like most people in this thread my username-generating skill hasn’t gotten any better, so I looked through my skype call for things that were funny. Ah, a picture of the Hulk! I will be the Hulk, but sad. The Incredible Frown. Yes. Flawless. Print it.
I went through a bunch of names when I was a teenager, the most dominant one being “shinyzubat”. Which I still use for a few things. In college though, I really wanted something new, semi-unique, and not tied to an existing property. Unfortunately I’m really uncreative with words, and I was eating a salad at the time, so I became “CrispyLettuce”.
I like flowers and gardening, and stuff. My favourite flowers are gardenias, but thanks to a .hack// character using that for her username I have no doubt people would think it was a reference to that instead. So, I just thought for a while, ended up looking out of my window, and went “y’know, waterlilies ARE pretty cool too.”
Plus, it’s better than the weird edgelord nonsense I’d used since I was like 12 up until, like, 21 or so.
…So, what you’re saying is you’re a vampire? 
After being tired of my what was probably 5th username I thought I’d make self-deprecating name (FreeIdiocity) because I thought that’d make me seem more fun and grounded by not having some made-up word or 2 random nouns as a username. I was also visiting a friends streams from time to time and he refereed to me as Free and I thought, hey, that’s actually a really nice-sounding username and I’ve been sticking to that one since.
Plus I realized that having a self-deprecating username can make you look even more awkward than intended. Nobody likes to hang around with new people who constantly talk down on themselves. Don’t do that kids.