Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic What’s the story behind your usernames?

This is true, though you're not the only one I've done that with I know LabRat's real name too, but I've even call her LabRat when we've spoken on the phone.

On the other hand, I use Kaethel's real name with her - but that might possibly be because I find Kaethel very hard to pronounce

I did think I'd told you why I couldn't quite bring myself to use your real first name, though - you share your name with my brother. Oddly enough, all my life he's been the only person I've known with that name. So... let's say it's weird trying to think of anyone else by that name.


Wendy

Growing up my dad had several nicknames for me, but the one that stuck (and he still calls me to this day) was "Sister Sue". I have no idea why - Sue is not my name or even my middle name. So when I started writing fanfic (in another fandom) years ago, I used a combination of Sue and my maiden name to write under. When I got here, I shortened it to "Sue".

I understand your amusement, Tank. I became really good friends with a couple of my former betas in that fandom and, to this day, one of them still calls me "Sue" whenever we meet up. I find that I actually feel like Sue *is* my name just as much as the one my parents gave me. So much so that last week, while waiting for my lunch in the snack bar, when the worker called out "Sue" I actually started to stand up before realizing that she wasn't calling me.

jojo_da_crow: Okay, so over the years I have had a ton of nicknames. In college however I was a member of the Student Activities Council. We planned fun events and shows for the campus. I had a ton of friends in SAC and one day one of the guys decided that I needed a nickname. He figured that Jenn and JJ were just way to boring. My last name is Johnson so I guess at some point he decided on Jojo as the nick name. The next day, we were working on a homecoming project. The theme for homecoming was "Back to the Future" and so one of the projects we did was a "time delorium" made out cardboard, chicken wire, and tissue paper. It ended up looking awesome... but the night before it was supposed to be done we still needed to spray paint it. This ended up being a problem because it was raining outside. So being the bright college students we were... we dragged one of the big fans from the gym and spray painted inside a room. The room had a door that went to the outside and so we had the fan pointed outwards to draw the air out of the room... we probably should have faced it inwards to blow fresh air in... but it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway.

So, at this point we all get high off fumes. Everything became super funny and one of the guys in the group made a comment that sent me into a major fit of the giggles. I have only had giggles like this about 3-4 times in my life. I can't stop laughing and I laugh as hard as I can. I once did this in college to a boy in one of the labs I was in who was just an idiot. I started laughing at him and could't stop. I had to leave the room twice and it took me about 15 minutes to calm myself down... This is how bad the giggles are.

Anyway, so I start laughing and everyone in the room starts to laugh at me now. Because apparently my laugh sounds a lot like a crow going "Caaaw Caaaw" and so it was decided from that day forward that my nick name would be Jojo da Crow. I would even have people get my attention in the hallway by making crow sounds at me. LOL very fun. I still have a ton of people refer to me as Jojo in real life. ^_^

There is also more to my nick name than Jojo da Crow. The full nick name is Jojo da Crow Spandango Know Potato. But that is a story best left for another day. LOL

I dumped my old login due to close association to real life.

shimauma is just Japanese for striped horse and it's a cute little icon.

When my husband started his blog a few years back, for privacy reasons he didn't want to use his real name, so he chose to call himself "Alonzo Mosley, FBI" from the movie Midnight Run. When he had occasion to refer to me in his blog, he called me Mrs. Mosley. I thought it was funny and when the need for a screen name arose, I stole it.

Uh.... yeah.... that's what I really meant.

Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket...

:p

That's awesome, Paul! Thanks for sharing that. I learn the most interesting things on these boards. <g>


And sweet Sue... I know your real name, but you will always be Sue to me... can't be helped. <g>

-- DJ

I’d no idea of the kind of earth-shattering revelations I’d face when I started this thread. Sue isn’t really “Sue” or even a “Sue”!

About the member statuses. Only I could have made a simple post asking an explanation about a technical detail and get a community-wide plug marathon as a result. My life is so weird. But I like it!

Lara – oh yeah! I remember I read it for Kerth voting! Wonderful story!

Mrs.Mosley (or whoever you are! I assume the Elisabeth part is still real, right?) I LOVE your sig and the book it comes from. The Code Of The Woosters, right? My first Jeeves book and the first time I laughed so hard for so long I actually got scared I wouldn’t be able to stop.
Eulalie and the eighteenth-century cow-creamer!

I'm one of those boring usernames. I think I mentioned it when I introduced myself, but BJ are my initials. Now if you were to ask about my email address, that'd be a horse of a different color.

Brit is a childhood nick. No idea where it came from and although my maternal grandfather immigrated from England, the friend that dubbed me didn't know that. Second half of the email address is an abbreviated form of my maiden name.

I know, it's more than you wanted to know, but I just couldn't just reply with my initials, not after learning all about Jojo da Crow Spandango Know Potato ...

BJ

I guess I can answer this (I also want to increase my post count ).

My "nick" has no mystery, I guess. It's just the first letters of my first and middle names. I guess it's actually a very common nickname for people who have the same first and middle names as me. In real life nobody ever uses that nickname (they just use either my first or my middle name), but I haven't seen anybody use anything close to it so far in the boards, and we already have a Maria on the boards.

My original user name is actually a mixture of my last initial and my middle name, which I got way back in 1995 during a summer internship in high school.

Off topic, the Internet had barely started back then, and I actually used gopher in UNIX to read some news from my home country, Brazil (has anybody around here ever used that? - in college, during a Computer Network lecture, the professor asked how many students have ever used it, and I was the only one ). I also used "talk" to write to my father while he was at work.

malu

I can't remember if I wrote something in that earlier thread, but I'm too lazy to check.

Mine's easy. RL is my initials. I originally started on these boards as "me", a very simple name that's completely ambiguous. I noticed people used RL a lot to refer to real life, so after a few weeks I changed it for grins, and it's become somewhat of a running joke with people blaming me for everything. It stuck, but it took me forever to get people to stop referring to me by my real name for obvious reasons. I think it's still somewhere on Annesplace under Reader's Choice.

On IRC, I started out using RL, but some guy in Norway seemed to be on IRC 24 hours a day, stealing that nick. So Missy Gallant suggested an alternative, R-El. So here I am on chat as R of the House of El. Kal is a distant cousin. Of course, some people keep thinking that I'm Elena because she goes by El.

On other places on the Internet, I usually go by Pleiades. It doesn't actually refer to the constellation but my old college days when I played a role playing game by the name of I.C.E (Iron Crown Enterprises), aka Rolemaster, a game in the same genre as Dungeons and Dragons but infinitely superior. My favorite character was a thief halfling (naturally) named Pleiades, whose claim to fame was that he was an excellent chef. I had a great time playing up that character, spending much of my time looking for cooking ingredients or trying strange recipes, sometimes to the detriment of whatever quest we were on at the time.

Boy, at this rate, I'll never get my Pulitzer back.

Well. C_A is short for Coffee_Addict, which... I am.

Actually Marcus Rowland is really short for M'ar'ssplodyknikfudh'cus Ro'dedewok'wla'fufgug'nd, but nobody could pronounce that. I am an intelligent shade of purple from the planet Zog with very good photoshopping skills, which explains the icon.

And of course all of this is entirely true, us Zoggians never lie...

My nick is one that I've had since I was very young. Apparently there used to be a character called Sammy Sparrow on one of the local radio shows. I never heard it, I guess it was before I was born or something, and I don't know which channel hosted it. My dad and my uncles would say "Sammy Sparrow" in a sing-song voice every time I entered the room.

Sam

Mine actually doesn't have a really interesting story behind it; my Elvish name (according to one of those nickname generators) is Selindë Cyriatan (or was it Ciryatan?). But, well, obviously, even I cannot really remember that correctly, so it became just Selindë. But then came the problems with the ë, because most forums, chatboxes, forms, etc don't support those characters. So, then it became just plain old Selinde.

Funny though, because some time ago there was this girl who thought my name was Selina for about two or three weeks... and I had never even told her about my nickname and she still accidentally calls me Selina

What an interesting thread!

My name is not Caroline or anything like it. "Caroline" is nothing more than a nod to my home state of South Carolina. When I came here, I had reasons for not wanting to use my "regular" pen name (Kalina) so I chose another one that was close enough to feel a little bit familiar. I'm mostly over that now and kind of wish I'd just stuck with Kalina - but don't worry, I'm not going to ask everyone to start calling me something different .

Sue said:

That's how I feel about "Kalina". That name has become as much a part of who I am - the fan fiction-writing part of me - as my real name. It seems strange, but when I write or when I talk about fan fiction - even here, where everyone knows me as Caroline - I still feel like Kalina. And yes, I know that's weird !

Caroline

Yes, my name really is Elisabeth, complete with the S. I promise.

I love Wodehouse in general and Bertie and Jeeves in particular, but I've read so many of them that I can't recall which book this story is in. I actually nicked this particular quote from the TV series, but I think it's very similar to the one in the book.

Lisa - who is also feeling rather stunned that Sue is not Sue. I knew Caroline wasn't Caroline, but... Sue?! *lower lip tembles*

*reaches for security blanket, needing something stable in light of this news*

Tzigone - fictional character in novels by Elaine Cunningham. Before that I often used Arilyn or Liriel, who are other fictional characters in Elaine Cunningham novels. I like other fictional characters, too, it's just that all the more popular ones tended to be taken on the bigger sites, and I like to have the same username everywhere so I don't forget it. And I'm not creative enough to make something up.

Actually, Lady Mirth, I have been a Tank for decades.

As I said, I got the nickname in college, and unfortunately college, was DECADES ago.

Tank (who is pretty sure most people have figured out his real name over the years)

Actually, Nan Smith is my real name -- well, it's short for Nancy Smith, as I'm sure isn't a surprise to anyone, but people have called me Nan, Nance and Nancy. I picked Nan because it was short and to the point. I figure there are enough of us out there that people would have a pretty hard time identifying me in person unless I wanted them to.

I use hachiban for my email address because everything more common was already taken and I don't care for adding numbers after my name. Hachiban means number eight in Japanese. We had a cat that had seven kittens and about the same time we adopted a little stray that she took in and fed with her own babies. Since my imagination boggled at naming eight kittens (and remembering which was which) my husband and I counted from one to eight in Japanese to name them all, which was where the name originally came from. When I needed a name for my email, no one else had it, so I took it and I've been hachiban ever since.

Nan