The rat part of this was just a toy rat with a goofy cross eyed stare I bought at IKEA. When I was at my parent’s place for winter break the year before last, I started messing with them by hiding the rat around the apartment-they’d be be looking around and the apartment and go ‘hey wait there’s not supposed to be a goofy looking rat in the fruit bowl/the stockings/the nativity scene.’ Because of this, my mom got “the rat” a small scarf for Christmas.
Last year, when I finally decided to stop lurking (as much) I needed a username, and well, ‘ratwithscarf’ was a nice, unused name, so there you go.
My first character in World of Warcraft was named Quim, after the character in the book Speaker for the Dead. About a year later I learned one of the less-than-wholesome meanings of “quim” when a GM forced me to change my name. I wanted to change it to Quinn because it looks almost identical, but of course that was taken, so I subbed a “w” to make “Qwinn”. Much later on when I made my twitter account I wanted something similar that wasn’t an actual name. Everyone I knew in WoW just called me Q, so I took it a bit further and came up with my dumb internet name I’ve been using for about 7 years now.
I was typing something one day, got frustrated for some reason, and then slammed my head into the keyboard. This was the result. On the bright side, there’s no way anyone will ever take this username from me.
I used to hilariously just use either my full name (well, excluding my second last name), or my first name plus last initial, until I finally realized that was kinda conceited and goofy.
Now I just use a condensed version of my name that fits into 7 characters (I used to be an annoyingly huge Bungie fan ) since I’m neither creative nor have friends who would’ve ever given me a nickname!
Kids, if you see someone post a stupid fake username as part of a discussion about dumb people on the Internet, don’t make a “mods change my name to x” joke about it near April Fool’s Day.
Because then you might wind up with that username and have to lean into it.
In 2004 I joined my first forum, one dedicated to talking endlessly about the Armored Core series. Even as a teen I noticed a lot of usernames were a little tryhard-ey, with names generally being variations of an anime character or Norse deity with numbers or the word Dark affixed (eg DarkOdinSephiroth.) Trying to look cool to strangers online wasn’t really my bag, so I named myself after the worst character from my favorite game in the series, who’s AI routine appeared to be hopping backwards forever and sometimes shooting his bubble gun. Nothing more nothing less.
If you ever fire up Masters of Arena you can go and gawk at him yourself in the humanoid EX rankings. Be sure to tell him he’s a nerd.
When I was about 14, I went to summer camp. I had been to summer camp before, but this time was different. This time, the first night, when I was in bed, one of the other campers asked me, “Do you like clam chowder?” “Yeah.” “Can I call you ‘Chowder’?” “…Yeah?” Somehow it stuck, and also became my go-to for online usernames, which made it stick well past summer camp (for reference I’m like almost 30). If just plain “Chowder” is taken I’ll append something else to it-usually “butt,” but I’ve been known to use “face,” “skin,” or “style” as well.
I really, really hate adding numbers or extra letters to usernames.
When I got on to Twitter I wanted a new username. Originally I wanted KamchatkaKangaroo but that was too long. Then I remembered Moscow Mules were a thing so I did that instead.
Way back in my fighting game community days I went by Free B, because my name starts with a B, and I was pretty free (i.e., how you say, not good).
A few years later, I uploaded some dumb little video to my Youtube channel where I followed a lizard around outside and at the end of the video I said “leezard” into the camera and for some reason that caught on with my friends to the point where it became my nickname.
So more or less I just smooshed the two names together and that’s where my current username comes from.
Back on SA I called myself The Rokstar and to be honest I have no idea why now. It was just some random name my young-and-stupid self gave myself 15-ish years ago.
this is such a good thread, everyone has lots of interesting stories about their names!!
I used to go by “Sonira” online for the longest time… it was an arbitrary, made-up name for one of my characters I made when I was 12. Her name was kind of made up while I was looking through a dictionary (a weird hobby of mine as a child). I liked the name “Sony” (yes that Sony) and also was staring at the Spanish word “sonido”… but I wanted to feminize it or something so I went with a -ra sound at the end. Suffice to say it got annoying after a while to have a pseudo-Japanese name online. So I decided I wanted a new one!
I’d been messing around with taking the name “Koko” as a sort of gender-neutral name, which comes from coconut, bc it’s my favorite. I wanted a longer version for a sort of username/pen-name, as well. Ultimately it’s kind of a smashed together combo from multiple linguistic roots. So we have Koko (coconut) + koronis (greek, korone/koronos - “crow” or “crown”). Another thing that kind of works is “kokoro” (japanese, “heart”)
Crows are my favorite birds and I am fond of princely attire in a sort of gaudy aesthetic way. It’s fun.
I originally went by “Spaceroach”. It was based on the Nebula-M aliens from “Godzilla vs. Gigan” (Gigan was/is my favorite monster, so I wanted to pay tribute to his space cockroach overlords).
Over the years I started adding a “y” for whatever reason and gave up on capitalization. Thus, “spaceyroach”.
My typical username pretty much everywhere is “Tatsuyame”. I was a huge fan of the Tenchu games, so I made a username out of two of the characters (Tatsumaru and Ayame). However, people online for some reason have trouble saying it, so on Xbox Live I would get weird distortions of it, my favorite being “Tsunami”. In the 2011-ish era I was a member of joe.to, and frequented their TF2 server. I never really spoke, but was around enough every night that someone started calling me “Taters” or “Tatters”. Fast forward a bit, and I think I was joking around that I was getting ignored or something, so I changed my steam name to “TATTERS MATTERS TOO”.
Tatters ends up being easier for people to remember and say, and sounds less like I’m still in my elementary/middle school anime phase, so I’ve started using it more.
It’s a very silly reason but the name always stuck around. I used to play a paladin in WoW and I had to come up with a name. My, rather young, mind went “well what do they do, they strike and they slash”. And thus, Strikerslash was born.
Well once upon a time in Left 4 Dead versus mode, the game ended up making me the Tank most of the time. Turned out I was pretty good at it, and I didn’t have a nickname on Steam yet. So I decided to go with something short and catchy and settled for Tanky. I was a dorky 13 year old okay? Eventually I ran into some things that required two names so I slapped Sir in front of it in reference to knights. I also tend to play the tank in multiplayer games so the name stuck for all these years.
About a year ago I started rebranding myself after my now girlfriend and I realized we were trans. Lady is technically the actual title for female knights but it didn’t have the same ring to it.
My name is Calli and everyone would call me California. I added the 2 because someone had taken it on another site already so I needed a number. 2 seemed like a good number.
) since I’m neither creative nor have friends who would’ve ever given me a nickname!