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

Some people just use abbreviations of their names as usernames, but most people have a lot of names with some kind of anecdote or story behind it. Not especially unique, mostly, just something that means something to them personally. I’ve seen Elvish names, funky names and plain weird names. And I’m curious about every one. “Ultrawoman” seems straightforward but does she like the character that much, or is it something personal? How did our esteemed Editor-in-Chief become Doc Klein’s Labrat? What on earth is a Metro Rhodes? Why does Ann like to be called TOC (Table of Contents?!) Does bakasi mean something in German? I know that “wen” means maiden in Elvish but what is “Doranwen”?

So if anybody would like to explain their username, please go ahead! I’m sure a lot of us will love to know!

I’ll start. Just don’t laugh!

Lady Mirth is a derivation of my name, Hasini. “Hasaya” is the Singhalese archaic term for laughter, and “Hasayani” or “Hasini” (abbreviated) means “The Laughing One” (Female). Hence, Lady Mirth. The folk in my country lay a lot of stock in astronomy and so forth, and all our names are usually made of a long process involving star-charts, auspicious events, numerology and horoscopes of three generations. In my case, I’d say they hit bull’s eye! I live to laugh.

Okay. Now your turn!

(And yes, this is also the first in a series of shameless attempts to win my Kerth back!)

If I remember correctly, I just carried my name over from the Charmed boards. theblackshadow sounded Charmed-eque to me hah, and it made me think of Cole's shadow. So I just shortened it to Shadow when I got here. Although I'd be interested in digging up the old thread from the last time we asked everyone to see if this story is true LOL.

JD

Mine isn't all that original at all... LaraMoon is from a song title.

My absolute favorite band in the whole universe, Arena , has a song called "The Eyes of Lara Moon" on one of their albums.

I'm fairly certain none of you have ever heard the song and probably haven't the slightest idea who the band is (they're a British progressive rock group) - if you *do*, then by all means, PM me, I want to know who you are!

Anyway... that album came out not very long before I started writing fairy tales (in French) and I wanted a name that fit well with the genre, so I picked that. I kept it when I came here, because... you know... Lara... I don't think I really need to spell it out, do I?

Now, just for the laughs... If it hadn't been for that song, I would likely have been known as "The Masked Carrot" - that's my secret identity. *lol* It's a pun made from my real name + the mask, cause, you know... most superheros have one. hehehe!

Here's the thread on this one from way, way back - worth looking at as it has some interesting explanations:

Nicks thread I

[You'll also note in that thread that shameless attempts to up post counts are apparently traditional on this forum. ]

And GMTA, Hasini! I've been thinking about doing another thread on the subject for the past couple of weeks since, as you say, we have so many new nicks to wonder about these days. Thanks for bringing this one up again!

Keep them coming - I find this fascinating.

And, see, learning something already. For some reason, I'd always assumed that LaraMoon had an anime connection. Oh! Just realised that's probably because of Sailor Moon (that is anime, isn't it? It's not a genre that interests me, so not that up on it.). Duh! :rolleyes:

Anyway, this probably proves you should never assume...


LabRat

Assuming anybody really cares: Dandello has been my nom de web for almost forever. Dandello was the first victim of a transporter accident - the white cat in the original The Fly - all that was left of him was his meow.

My other nom de web is SHADO Librarian - which I am. I host and manage the SHADO Library & Archives

Ah, no, that's not a German word. At least not that I know of. No, bakasi is made from the first letters of my first names. Ba is Barbara.

Great thread!

I am just an adventurous sort of gal, that's to say I am not in for the money but for the adventure... I also wanted something to do with "Lois and Clark, the new adventures of Superman" .

Sometimes I wonder if this "In4Adventure" nick even makes sense. But I didn"t really have a lot of time to think about a nick and now I really like it!

Natascha

LOL <snort> You've got me? <g> Rhodes is my last name. I would love to live in Metropolis (and my muse does) therefore = MetroRhodes.

<sigh> It was my weak attempt at being creative.



-- DJ

Definitely fun reading the posts on this thread.

Sailor Moon is anime, yes. And that's as much as I know. Never watched it, not a big fan of the genre...

You know, it *is* possible that Lara Moon has an anime origin... I just might go and post a message on the band's message board and ask them. *lol*

Lara, where oh where, does this sig come from?!

It's not weak! I like it. Although it puts me in mind of a pert little red Formula One racing car. Now what, is the why of that?

Not much of a story to my nick...my brother gave me that nickname when I was about 14. I have no idea why, and in fact, he also has no idea why (I asked him a few years back). So as soon as I got my first e-mail address, I started using groobie (since any combination of Susan Young, syoung, etc. is always taken), and I've gotten used to picking it as my nick for any place on the web. When I wrote my fanfic, I wanted my real name attached to it (vanity? pride? arrogance? not sure!). I like having a gender-neutral nick, even though sometimes I end up with porn spam that I would NEVER be interested in!

It's a quote from one of my stories.

Reversal of Fortune

Cornelia is very simply my first name. I´m not so creative.... :rolleyes:

But it´s relly interesting and funny to read where your nicks come from! I have always been thinking of creating one, but I never get far. All I come up with is "Conn" because my younger sister always calls me that way.

Well, I wanted something to do with L&C and I'm not a creative person. At first, I used Lane_Kent, but I grew bore with that nick. So I changed it to LK, later to my initials and for some time I used my own name. Yes, I get bore easily. :rolleyes: I change my wallpaper and screensaver every week or day. :p I wanted another nick, and I was thinking of using my real nick, Deia. But one day I was seeing the Ultra Woman episode and decided to try it. I thought that nick would be already taken, but for my surprise it wasn't. So, I took it. I liked the nick so much that I stopped changing it. Ultra Woman is one of my favourite episodes. I'd like if Lois could keep the powers. And yes, I'd love if *I* could get super powers.

Andreia
Ultra Woman

Huh? Please explain, Haisini.


GMTA?? What’s that mean?


I think I always did understand yours, DJ, but maybe you explained it way back when we did that silly round robin.


I love classical music and I'm a classical pianist - thus Classicalla. My alternate nick that I sometimes use on the web is Meowoof. That comes from my love of both dogs and cats. It's also a character (well, sort of - it's a cat) in one of my fics.

You asked Hasini, but I'm grabbing any chance to get my Pulitzer back.

Andreia (in a shameless attempt to up her post counts and get her Pulitzer back)

Hasini's referring to the recent change in member status...es.

GMTA = Great Minds Think Alike.

LOL, Andreia - you nipped in while I was composing.

LabRat

Mine's explained in that older thread Lab linked to, so I won't bore you guys (and wear out my fingers) repeating it.

I did want to respond to this, though:

Oh. Huh. I always thought it had something to do with the ancient city of Rhodes (capital city of the Greek island of Rhodes , best known for the giant statue at its harbor, one of the Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World, known as the Colossus of Rhodes .

Keep forgetting it's actually your name, DJ. Silly me.

It's the "metro" that throws me off, since it does come from the Greek for... mother? Huh. You know, I always just associated it with "metropolis," a big city. I knew "polis" was the word for a city-state, but never really knew where the "metro" came from. Just looked it up. Turns out "metropolis" (metro polis) means "mother city," which refers to the capital city of the city-state.

Which I guess means that if you're in Paris, you can take your mother to work.

Learn something new every day, huh?

(And I see the rest was answered while I was writing this up, so... never mind.)

Paul

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in another thread but when I checked the link that Labby provided I didn't see my story there. Maybe it was wiped out by that myterious crash that Wendy mentioned in the opening post.

It's really not much of a story. When I first discovered the archives it was before I had my own computer. I saw someone else with my name had written a couple of stories. So I didn't want there to be any confusion between him and I if/when I wrote something so I had to use something other than my own name.

My involvement with the message boards and subsequent fic writing came at about the same time as my first home computer. When setting up my email address I wanted something that people who knew me would remember, but not use my own name (which was being used for my, then, work account). So I picked my old college nick name of Tank. My friends have known me by this nick for many, many, (many) years so it would be easy for them to remember. So my email address became TankW1.

When I decided to dive into the fic writing pool it was natural to use Tank as my username. It would be different enough to not be confused with someone else, and I wouldn't have to worry about that other guy's stories being confused with mine.

Even though most of my friends now days don't actually use Tank any more, my best friend's dad still calls me Tank. I've also decided to not only use Tank Wilson as my nom de plume, but I have also exported the name into my musical works. You know, so I don't get confused with that other guy... the one from the beaches of California... the one who's written a 'few' multi-million selling smash hits in his day.

Tank (who finds it amusing that even though she knows my real name, Wendy refused to call me anything but Tank when we met a couple of years back)

P.S. A few years after college I found out that Tank had been my paternal grandfather's nick name

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

My name story is boring and listed in the other thread, so I haven't posted... for those who didn't look, Karen is my real name, and this is one of the very very few places where I use it. I use Briana elsewhere (a name I'm going to have to give up eventually, since I'm "reserving" it for a future daughter). I've been using it so long, though, that I'll respond to it in real life.

What is it with halflings and cooking? I recently played a game where I was a halfling sorcerer/cook. My backstory was that I'd been travelling the lands learning new recipes, and looking for a certain type of recipe that I'd found a book about: magical foods. I was still trying to figure what that character would need to make those foods, though... muffins of mage armor, cookies of resistance, stuff like that. I miss that game.

Lady Mirth is scaring me now .... we have way too much in common. I read what you read. I know what you know.

Tank's real name is ..... Brian Wilson is it not? "Lying bed just like Brian Wilson did." Of course there were many Wilsons in the Beach Boys but he was/is the most remembered so I am guessing that's who you are referring to when you say you have a doppelganger of sorts?

The Little Tornado is not my usual nickname. I decided to use a completely different nickname for this so that no one would connect me to my other online identity. Suffice it to say that that online identity consists of a name I created during a period of fantasy roleplaying when I was a teenager. It became an online identity once I decided to take the role playing online which didn't work so well but ended up giving me a weblog and a few sites.

Though this online identity is not famous in itself, a simple google search for it reveals my real name and though I don't usually care about my real name being known (it's everywhere, I am so slutty with it), I wanted to be myself but be seperate from it for awhile. So while you may not know much about me, I will be blindingly honest.

Plus my partner calls me his "Little Tornado". And I love my real name and my usual identity. I am sure the moderators would be able to find out my id if they wanted to.

I might tell you some day. Hope this explains it for now.

The Little Tornado.

Eh. This is kind of embarrassing.

Okay, when I was going to join and had to think of a name for myself, I was going to join Zoomway's boards first, if I remember correctly. At that time, my best friend had just found and taken care of a miniature, two-week-old kitten, whom her daughter called "Tossig" ("crazy" in Swedish). As I was trying to think of a username for myself, I thought of the kitten. I thought I could use the kitten's name, but I decided to shorten it to TOS. Later, when I needed a username for these boards, I decided that TOC looked better than TOS. How embarrassing to discover that these boards already had TOCs (table of content, eh?).

Embarrassing. Oh well.

Ann

No real story behind mine. When I first joined I went by Kaylee but since Kaylle was already here I decided to give her her nick back and changed it to my RL nickname, Jackie. Why I kept the K I have no idea.

What do you mean, Tornado? Are you referring to The Code of The Woosters, by any chance?

Brian or not, Tank will never be anything but Tank to me. How his parents didn’t look upon his red little infantile face and not think “Tank” immediately, is beyond me!

And Ann, I don’t think it’s embarrassing. Having TOC for a username always gave me the impression that you were an integral member of the boards. The fact that you are probably it’s best reviewer definitely helped matters!

And somebody please knock the Pulitzer post count back to 2000! Just seeing 2500 up there makes my head spin and makes me contemplate the futility of all things.

I have suddenly gone from cub reporter to blogger for some reason - can anyone explain this - I thought the next one was once you hit 50 posts and was a beat reporter or something.

Lady Mirth: I was referring to Pratchett & Jeeves ... and no doubt any other titles/authors we share in common if we both are huge fans of these two.

The Little Tornado.

That's cause Pam's gone and changed the order again. Check out the Member Statuses thread for the new list.

Well my screen name is actually the initials of my
name. My name is Lois E. Flinn,however, since I share the name with my mother I use my nickname Lollie. So, I've been called Lois Lane and Lollipop my whole life. So, I just switched the first letters of my name for Elflinn. Otherwise, I would be "Lef",like I lef da keys in the car again!! What a field day for all my "teacher" friends. Now, I am Elf 'cuz it fits me!!

P.S. Besides, it is still my name spelled the way it sounds-

Well, I was excited to see this thread! I remember how much fun it was last time, and I hoped that someone would link to the old thread. Lab linked to the old, old thread, but I remembered sharing the story of my nickname way back when...

So I dug up this thread , in which you can read the fun story of my name.

I've had a blast reading everyone's stories!

As for that real name vs online name thing...

I had no problem calling Kaylle by her real name when I met her last summer (which is probably because I still pronounce her nick wrong in my head every time I read it :rolleyes: ), and the same with Doranwen, though I still tend to call her just "Doran" in chat. Now, Julie, on the other hand... there's a funny story that goes with that. I stayed over at her house when I was in Toronto this last summer and she told me what her mom had asked her.

Julie's Mom: *sounding worried* Should I call you Julie while she's here?

Julie: Mom, she knows my real name.

I died laughing when she told me that! Nevertheless, I still call her Julie... as did everyone else when we met up.

Sara

I love this thread!!! very interesting

I thought up my username when I joined a different site.

I had a red betta fish at the time named Fin. His tank sat next to the desk where I wrote.

As I would write, he would watch me from the tank. He didn't swim around...just hung out on the one side of the tank, like he was reading over my shoulder. He sort of became my muse

I usually would end up writing him into my story somehow.

I also was/still am, a huge fan of the martial artist Jet Li.

So when I was trying to come up with a username I put Fin's name together with Jet's last name.

Hence: FinLi

A lot of people end up asking me if I'm Chinese

I'm sure I've posted this before, but what the heck! Jo (shortened from Jo-jo) was my childhood nickname. Both sisters thought I'd make a better boy than a girl as I was such a tomboy, so they gave me a boy name. (my little sister and some friends still call me this.) In junior high, my best friend gave me the nick Murf. No clue why... probably had something to do with the smurfs, but it's been so long that she and I have completely forgotten why.

When I had to go online and use a nick I just put 'em together and have been using it for almost 2 decades now!

Jo

I can't remember whether I posted this in an older thread or not, so here it is anyway.

Back when I was a senior in high school (about 6-7 years ago), I spent lunch time with the same three guys almost every day. Two were friends of mine from way back at the beginning of middle school, and the other was a friend of one of the two.

One day when I was at lunch, I was reading a book (I did that a lot), and my friend Ryan (who currently holds the status of my only still-single best friend in the entire world--I have two MARRIED best friends too, although they're not married to each other) made a remark about the cover image on the book.

The book was Dragons of Summer Flame, from the DragonLance series. Ryan had said something along the lines of "Wow, that dragon has really dry skin."

The four of us started joking around about the dry-skinned dragon, and eventually Ryan suddenly came up with this idea that I was the dry-skinned dragon. Although, HOW I could've been is a mystery to me, because back then I almost never had a need for lotion or moisturizers of any kind (as opposed to this winter, when the air's been so dry that if I don't use it often enough my skin gets so chapped it HURTS).

So, since my initials are also DS, and the conversation I remember is one of those "good times" I always love to reminisce about, I decided to use it to create an online identity for something (I can't remember exactly what--it WAS 6 or 7 years ago, after all).

DSDragon has been my online nickname ever since--unless it was already taken for something I was signing up for, then I use my backup, which is Darcy783--a mixture of my first name, and the month and year I was born.

This is fun. I didn't realize the member status feature changed! OOOh I wonder what I am. I'll find out in a few seconds.

SuperRoo...Well Roo is my nickname, however it was suppose to be my real name and I ended up with Ruth instead. I'm very attached to Roo. I added Super just because I wanted something Supermanish.

Not very creative.

Also, when I signed up I sat with my mouth open having NO clue what to put. I wanted think of something quick and not change it later. I tried to change it once (try and be more creative), but that only lasted a little while.

Lately I've been tempted to change it again because it has Roo in it. Some of my co-workers and friends now know I like LnC and if they see 'SuperRoo' they'll know it's me. Then again, one of my friends thought I was RAC so it may not be as obvious as I thought it was. Those are my initals until I got married (add a B at the end). However, I am what I am so I shouldn't be shy of my presence here. Well anyways, that's my story du jour .

[edit - Top Banana? My hubbie says monkey related things follow me everywhere. He's convinced I was a monkey in another life. This is just another thing to proove it. I've been jumping from thread to thread and I can't find Top Banana listed. Perhaps there is more recent one I'm missing...off to search! I enjoy searching. Very Jimmy-ish.]

[edit #2 - ok I found it. HAHA. I like the changes.]

LOL SuperRoo, I was always reminded of the Disney movie "Winnie the Pooh" when I read your name; I like to think of the litte joey, ROO, wearing a towel cape around his neck and hopping along after Tigger.

DS, you know they're doing a Dragonlance, movie right?

http://www.dragonlance-movie.com/

Keifer Sutherland is doing the voice of Raistlin and they got Lucy Lawless voicing Goldmoon.

Actually, I didn't. It's been years since I read any DragonLance books, and I'm currently missing my copies of the Chronicles Trilogy, so I can't even re-read it to refresh myself before the movie unless I a) find out who has my books, or b) buy new copies with the stupid new covers.

Thanks for the info and the link though!

I love this! I've always wondered what was behind everyone's nicks, but it never occurred to me to *actually ask*!

Foxy-J isn't my usual nick. For ten years it was Jenelf. Jen for my first name, and elf for the initials of my middle and last name: L and F. I got kind of sick of it, so I decided to do a different play on my name. My last name is often misspelled or mispronounced as Fawkes, so that's where Foxy came from. J is obviously for Jen.

Happy first day of spring!

haha mine is I think kinda obvious

I chose it when I joined Zoom's message boards about 5 years ago. There really is no story except for the fact that I have always been refered to as Lois Lane by one of my best friends from middle school. She is a big Batman fan so I called her Barbara Gordon naturally, and the names just stuck.

I have always admired the charachter (to the point I even have a team shirt with "lois lane" printed on the back) and it just seemed fitting to have a nickname like Lois Lane Wanna Be.

Some of your stories are cute, it's been nice reading them

~Lois Lane Wanna Be

Anyways I have decided to explain my usual nickname and come clean.

My usual nickname is nothing special : Lady Kiadri or in certain cases just Kiadri.

Lady because I did online rolepaying at some point and Kiadri was a name I made up out of thin air and I liked it so much I have kept it. Especially since it has no relation to anything to do with me or my real identity (ie: not a derivation of my name or the name of a character or a nickname) but i have used it so much online now that if you run a google search for it, you will find my real name.

I love my real name too - so one day I am going to name a daughter (if I have one) Kiadri Marisa. It would be Kia Maria but then she would sound too much like an alcoholic beverage.

Little Tornado = being cute and demanding and wanting my own way and being completely overwhelming = Lois Lane. Though I do take offense to the fact that she cannot cook - there are women who are career driven who can cook too - they can do both things and still manage to mess up their lives the way she does. Grrr....

Shutting up now...

The Little Tornado.

LabRat

Well, I know I've told this story before, but I couldn't find it in either of the two threads Labby and Sara quoted, so I guess I'll tell it again. (I did find it in a really, really old thread on Zoom's boards!)

I've been using Kaylle off and on for the last 10+ years... I got onto the internet when I was about 14 years old, and for security reasons I didn't want to use my real name. Besides which, I was still in the adolescent "change your name to something exotic" phase. I was Kaylle on AOL Instant Messenger all along, but for years I tried to come up with a more exotic- or dramatic-sounding name, or I used a different name for each fandom I was involved with. Nowadays I use Kaylle or Kayl for everything. It's normal enough that people take it seriously and unusual enough that it isn't always already taken.

Although as Sara mentioned, everyone mispronounces it It's supposed to be pronounced Kayl and rhyme with hail and mail and pail. But apparently most people glance at it and see Kaylee, which to me sounds like a 12 year old girl (no offense, JackieK! It's just the weird mental picture that pops up!) or, possibly, the mechanic on Firefly. I hated that for a long time, because I don't think of myself as a 12 year old girl <g>, but I've decided there are worse characters to be associated with than Kaylee Frye. I do sometimes register for things as Kayl, though, to avoid that issue.

Anyway, why did I pick Kaylle? Three reasons:

1) My first two initials are K and L. When you slur them together, you get Kay-ell

2) The main character of my favorite book, a little-known fantasy by Patricia C. Wrede, was named Kayl Larrinar

3) When I was a freshman in high school, my best friend and I went through a nicknaming phase. Eventually my nickname settled on Leia, after Princess Leia, but we went through some iterations before that. One of them was the vegetable names phase, where we all took the name of a vegetable that started with the same letter as our first name. Not too many vegetables start with K, but there's a kind of lettuce called kale. (I know, this is a really stupid story, but we were 14 <g>)

So after all those things conspired against me, I just decided to read the writing on the wall... At least I got this way I got to pick how I spelled it

As for calling other people their real names vs. their online names... Some people I just cannot learn to call by their real names. I learned to call YellowDartVader by her real name instead of Alicia (the nick she used back then) without any trouble, but I cannot for the life of me call Bethy or Doranwen their real names. I don't know why some people's nicks are more firmly entrenched in my brain than others...

Kaylle

LabRat: I know it's funny ... but still....

*kermit face*

The Little Tornado.

Mine is pretty self-explanatory, but hey, why not post anyway? I always like a chance to babble about myself.

I started out as Jessi Untalented. Jessi short for my name, Jessica. The nickname Jessi Untalented came up years ago (5 or 6, maybe), when I needed a name for a website I was making. I've used it for all sorts of things since then. It's my typical SN for most things. Even my fanfiction.net count is under jessi-the-untalented, which was a good reason to use it to post my fic here. But with that name I get a lot of "Change it!! You're not untalented!!" and I didn't exactly like the idea of becoming Jessi Talented. So, I needed something else.

I had changed my Myspace display name to Cape Fetish a few months ago just for the fun of it, to match my Superman themed page. Then my MSN display name became Cape Fetish to match that. So when I was tired of being nagged to change my name here (*cough*Lara*cough*) I figured that ought to work.

Plus, Supes' cape is sexy.

Jessi

my nickname is just because my last name is similar to woody and someone gave me the nickname four years ago. It was the only one I allowed people to call me so it stuck.

How did I become Olympe? It's a long story.

It all began with me signing on for a German online game called 'Stadtvater' (city father). It's a game involving tactical stuff, and I wanted to use a name that sounded more male than female. My then favourite books were from the Harry Potter series - back in early 2003, there were only four books out. I decided to play an evil character on this game, so I chose a name from the book that could be taken as a hint: Marvolo. Yeah, the middle name of Lord Voldemort - at least in English (in German it's 'Vorlost'). Since it's a German game, I thought that not too many people would get the hint. *g*

Well, I liked this game and joined an alliance called 'Ars Magica'. Soon, a Mr. Stadtvaterland contest was held, and somehow I ended up participating. Not that I ever signed for it, mind you. I even got the second place. (Most people agreed that I would have won if one of the three gals from the jury hadn't made sure that her real-life boyfriend won. What could I say? I told everyone that the best *man* had won! )

Of course, this left me with a dilemma, for I intended to one day go meet other players. So, what is a girl to do? I left the character 'Marvolo' for my thence boyfriend and started anew. Once again, I chose a name from the same source, a name that, up to then, had been mentioned only once: Olympe, after the headmistress of Beauxbatons, Olympe Maxime. (I'm a sucker for French names...)

Anyway, I've been using Olympe ever since. If I can't get it (like on yahoo!), I use a combination of Olympe and my real name, Melanie: Melympe.

Hmmm... Where does Catherine Bruce come from?

Well, I think my mom came up with the Catherine bit, although there had been a battle over the middle name and I was almost Catherine Elizabeth, until my daddy 'accidently' gave the nurse my name. The Bruce part originally came from Scotland I believe, and there's some dude named Robert that's rather quite known for it, as well.

I used to go by ladydragonflyz, which is why that's a part of my email address, but for some reason I decided to say 'screw it' and use my actual name. I WOULD use my first and middle name, but it makes me sound like a romance novelist =P

Oh my gosh! I haven't been on the boards in SOOOOO long (Jan 20, 2006), no one will probably remember me! :p

Been meaning to get back involved more since I got my laptop a couple months ago (my computer crashed, and can't log on at work, so I was on hiatus).

I wanted something to do with Superman, and have always loved Smallville. I joined Zoom's boards the summer of 2000 (I think) and chose Smallville Girl. Lo and behold a new show started up a few months later... and people started thinking I chose the name for "Smallville". I like the show, but am forever a FoLC.

It's great to read some new name explanations. Funny how you're commenting on post counts, seeing as how the first time we did this "nickname" topic was just after the boards here started, and it led me to doing that poll about how LabRat got so many posts in such a few days at the start up. :p

Anyways. Good to be on again.

-Breanna Kay

P.S. Interesting, I never read your name as Kaylee... though, I have to say, I LOVE the name. Incidently... Kaylee is actually the name we have picked out if I have a girl in September. I should find out the gender in three weeks! Here's hoping for pink!

Oh, wow. It has been a long time, Breanna!

Welcome back!

And... Congratulations!

Thanks Paul!!

... btw, speaking of "it's been a long time"... any news on what's going on with "House of Cards?"

-Breanna Kay

lol, that's been quite a long time, too.

I dunno. A couple of people wanted to edit their parts. And one or two sent me edited parts which I'm pretty sure I've lost in the intervening years.

We could just put it on the archive as-is, I guess. Or... I dunno. Since you're interested, wanna take over coordinating it? Huh? Huh? It'd be fun. Or something distinctly fun-like...

Story behind my username. Hmm...well...

My real name is Anna (which is how I sign my posts, surprisingly!). So that's where the 'anna' part comes from.

The 'princess' part is just 'cause lots of other little girls, I always wanted to be a princess (and have my prince charming turn up...but more about that another time!). I have a T-shirt too, which says 'I didn't ask to be a princess, but if the crown fits...' I like that T-shirt!

And...that's it!

~Anna.

I've said that story before, but it's not long so I might just as well reitarate it.

I had first joined the boards as Anna_B., because I'm creative like that (In case it's not painfully obvious, Anna is my real first name. My last name actually begins with M, in the Greek alphabet - it should look like "MP" but the sound is a B, so in English it's spelled with a B.) Then I learned that BanAnna is also an Anna B., which made me realize that Anna B. didn't exactly distinguish me from her. So I went for Anna_B._the_Greek for clarification purposes, and AnnaBtG(.) for short. (I like it with the period in the end, but then it feels like it's the end of a sentence. So, if it's in the middle of a sentence, I don't mind either way.)

The underscores left when I realized what a huge word they made it look like on the boards.

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

Hey, AnnaBtG, I've told you that for the longest time I didn't notice the R in your name, right?

Heh, yes, you have, Cat. I don't mind being considered a geek, though. I'm enough of that, too.

And, Breanna, I missed that earlier - congratulations!!

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

You could be Anna B. the Greek geek. Say that five times fast

To be completely honest my husband came up with my user name a few years ago--I just haven't used it much. It is a combination of the school I currently teach at and the school nickname for where I graduated from with my BA. I teach at a school called Mergenthaler ( Shortened form: Mervo) and I attended (now back for my MA) Park University (hence "Parkite"). Not to terribly exciting, but there it is. I suppose I have always identified myself with my schools--I tell my students I'm a certified Geek so I suppose it fits.

Paul... uhh... I don't know. I'll have to think about it

AnnaBtG. Thanks!!! I'm REALLY Excited!!!!

Okay, please don't judge me everyone, I really really love animals but my dad has a kind of sick twisted but amusing sense of humor. With that said, here it goes.
My real name is Stephanie. When I was in elementary/middle school my dad would come upstairs to wake me up for school (I know, I know; so spoiled). To keep from having to get up right away, I would ask my dad to scratch my back and tell me a story. So... here's the story. (Side Note: he always used a variation of Stephanie as the main character, it depended what country she was in on what her name was: Stephnachia was Russian)
Stephnachia, the little russian girl lived on a farm in Russia. They had a white snow dog that had puppies one Christmas. The momma and her puppies were staying in the barn and Christmas morning, Stephnachia got up early to go check on them. When she went to the barn, they weren't in there. She started back to the house and noticed blood in the snow in the path where she had walked. (okay, please know this is just a stupid story). She hadn't noticed the puppies when she was walking to the barn because they blended in with the snow and she had accidentally... *gulp* squished them... So... her family disowned her and kicked her out of Russia and she was given the nickname "Bloody Boots"
So that's the end of the story. But the next morning when he would tell me the story Stephnachia would be in a different country (because she was kicked out of Russia) and her name would be another variation of Stephanie. I.E. Stephania in Spain. But every where she went she always ended up accidentally stepping on and killing a little animal so the name Bloody Boots followed her everywhere she went. Very sad...
So I told this story to my friends in college and they all cracked up and thought it was hilarious. They all started calling me Stephnachia aka, Nacho for short.
There. I said it. Do you all think I'm a sick individual now?

I really love animals! I swear!

Oh, stephnachia, does it make ME a sick individual for cracking up at that story, as well? But awww, your dad and the stories, those are just so sweeeeet! ^_^

Oh, my gosh. Sue isn't really Sue?! My world is crashing...

I've really enjoyed the stories - thank you, one and all.

mmouse

Well....
in our final year of school I was "forced" to "choose" a Nick to have printed on the back of my school Jersey (aka Guernsey/Rugby jumper...)...

Having my name as HELENA... and the alternative to Beethoven at the time would not have sat well with the authorities of my Catholic school...

People without a nickname were considered really boring people, and this was discouraged by all, from the principal to all the littlies in Kindy (the school went right through from K-12)

As I have some rather curly hair, it was a choice between Einstein and Beethoven (an artificial choice made by my orchestra budds, because I did science and Music), and

Beethoven won because I did not want the rest of the school to think I was in any way up myself, and it sort of stuck with me as an online name

As for my SIG; Last year I completed my undergraduate Bachelor of Science with my major being neuroscience... the rest is a joke my little brother tells, and I think it is apt for this forum...

otherwise I sometimes sign emails as
Lenny Benny Canary

I started this in University, when a friend said that HELENA NEEDS A NICKNAME because I am fussy about not being called HELAINA, and like it to be pronounced HELEN + U!
(Short sound as in UP...)
Lenny=Helena, Benny=Beethoven, and Canary is the closest word in the dictionary to my surname.

As such all my family for generations have had Canary as a nick, but I did not want it on my jersey as my older brother had Canary on his,


On one of my online names I accidentally typed: Beethove"M" by accident, so it stuck... on that forum at least, because I don't know how to change it and cannot be bothered making a new user...

So I thought I'd resurrect this thread so any newbies can add their name stories. It's been fun reading through all these again.

I never saw this thread the first time ... hm, until Steph Skywalker here brought it up today. My user name is decidedly uninteresting: I'm an editor, and Jax is a play on my maiden name. I started using EditorJax when I was on theknot.com planning my wedding, and it stuck.

On IRC, though, and among my FoLC friends, I'm Pinky/Pinks/PinkyPie. Something about me having a fondness for a certain color.

As any "Firefly" fans out there could most likely tell you, my alter-ego is the sly minx who managed to embarass most of the ship's crew when she took over their ship, Serenity, in order to sell it to a gang of ship-thieves.

Of course, we learn over the rest of the too-short series that 'Saffron' was only one of the names she goes by, so some fans would be more familiar with her nick-name of 'YoSaffBridge' but that's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it??

There's an old, old song by John Fred & His Playboy Band that one my friends in high school used to sing to me constantly (which, in itself, is a really long story). The short version is that the song, "Judy In Disguise" has sentimental value for me. So, when I wanted to stay somewhat anonymous on the internet, I altered my name to "Judy D'guise". I shortened it to JDG here on the boards.

J.

Ooh, I missed this last time around.

A few years ago I (finally) saw the Matrix films and became obsessed with them. My obsession with Keanu Reeves was born, and Trinity was my favorite character. I love a strong leading lady and Carrie-Ann Moss did a phenomenal job. I loved the films so much a few of my friends started called me Trinity as a joke, but it never stuck as a nickname until I joined the Focldom. And now, like Sue said, it feels as much like my name as my real name does, even if no one except my folcs friends use it.

I already mentioned mine, *these* guys think my login name is funny.


TEEEEEEEJ

Fauve is a character from the 1984 Judith Krantz mini-series 'Mistral's Daughter'. I always loved the sound of the name which means, I believe, 'wild cat or beast' in French. When the child was born with a crop of red hair, her father thought she looked like a little wild beast so named her...Fauve.

There is a secondary reason why I love the name...the character of Fauve, with her fearless nature but gentle heart, eventually redeems another central character in the story and she thereby contradicts her name in a way.

I don't want to give away the story for anyone hasn't seen it. This many years down the track, it is still a story I enjoy.

Fauve

Hmmm... well lindseysevilhand wasn't really appropriate for these boards, so I picked something LnC related.

And I like it!

I changed my nickname 2 days ago. I won't change it again, I'm sticking to this one really!!
McLeod's Daughters is another tv show I LOVE.. and therefor: Mrs. McLeod. I just think it's more fun than: another folc. I'm sure my friends would tell you I'm very creative, but.. I'm really not

Camy

My nick is just a substring of my first name combined with the middle and last name initials...

Ankit K. S.

Alisha is taken from a pop group I used to love when I was younger and Knight is a family name.

Ironically, a couple of months after I decided on this name a relative of mine had a baby girl and called her Alisha!

This is a fun and interesting thread.

I joined my first message board way back during my second year of college and being as it was a He-Man one, I chose the name Zoar. Zoar is the falcon form of the Sorceress of Castle Greyskull, a character from MOTU that I admire. 3 is simply my "lucky number."

Mona

My name is in honor of my favorite and most relatable Lois Lane, Teri Hatcher. Of course 9397 stand for the years LNCTNAOS, was on.

Mine is pretty boring.
Smiley is my last name, and D is the initial for Desiree (my real name)

I was assigned this as a username at school, and it just kinda stuck. I also sometimes use D_Smiley1, which I have on occasion stretched out into 'the smiley one'

by the way, some have asked what to call me. In real life most people call me Desi. It's easier than convincing people to say Dez-ir-EE instead of the Dez-ir-Aye they insist on. So you can call me desi, desiree, smiley or smileyd. I'm not really all the picky, so long as you pronounce it right! (and really, it's not like I can hear you trying to say it :rolleyes: ).