The meaning of your screen name

[Jaz]

This is another old OT favorite - what does your forums handle mean? Why did you choose it? Is it your real name, a variation on your real name, a nickname given by others, a name from literature or the movies or *gasp* from a game, or a name you made up yourself? Do you always go by the same name or do you have different 'identities' depending on where you venture? If you're an online gamer, is your online gaming handle the same as your Watch forums name...?

 

[Maylander]

Maylander - A cleric in Might and Magic 8. I liked the name and figured noone else used it.

Most of the time I use the name Keldorn in games (such as WoW) and other online places/forums. The name comes from Sir Keldorn Firecam, a Paladin in BG2.

If I ever play female in games (I hardly do, it's just not my thing) I use the name Moiraine from Wheel of Time. Talk about a woman with an attitude, hehe, she's great.

Oh yeah, I was known as "Ironfist" previously on various forums, the name of the king in Might and Magic 6, given because of my hardcore approach to games. Well, I was more hardcore in the past, the name doesn't apply anymore in my opinion.

 

[Korplem]

@Jaz - I don't think you answered your own questions.

*In a gargish voice* "To mean dead one. Dead One," the gargoyle looks at you as though you are an ignoramus.

In the Gargoyle language of the Ultima games Korp means 'dead' or 'death' and Lem means 'one', put them together and you have 'Deadone'. I chose it because I really liked the gargs and Ultima in general. Also, nobody that I know of uses it.

I have several names that I use for games. In military FPS games I sometimes go by ET3 Miller which is my actual rate/rank and name. It's generic enough that I doubt anybody even thinks twice about it.

 

[HiddenX]

HiddenX = old super-intelligent entity in the Perry Rhodan/Atlan universe.

as a mathematician I like the double meaning "the unknown variable x".

 

[Danicek]

Danicek - name one would call little child with my name Daniel - my real life name - ove here in Czech Republic.

 

[JonNik]

An inaccurate amalgamation of The english equivalent of my First name and the
three first letters of my Last name.

 

[Jaz]

@Jaz - I don't think you answered your own questions.

I shouldn't post at all from here, and answering my own questions might become a lengthy affair... but I'll answer as soon as I'm home, promised..

 

[Myrthos]

I always thought my nick had no meaning. I just tossed around a few names, changed some letters and came up with this.
I recently found out it is also a beach on the isle of Kefalinia (greece). So I'm a beach

 

[JonNik]

@Myrthos

Actually it is Myrtos (lovely place btw) but close enough

 

[Corwin]

HiddenX = old super-intelligent entity in the Perry Rhodan/Atlan universe.

as a mathematician I like the double meaning "the unknown variable x".

Loved the PR series; I have the complete English version, but it got nowhere near the total of the original German version before they cancelled it!!

Corwin, of course, comes from Amber/Zelazny

 

[txa1265]

txa1265 - that is pretty much what I use everywhere. It is an ancient that I created in my undergrad days for my personal account on the mainframe. It is basically my college fraternity info - 'tx' is for Theta Xi fraternity, 'a' is for Alpha chapter, and '1265' is my roll number.

As for in-game names, anything with a standard profile / username gets txa1265 - which is funny when that is the name of your rapper / fighter in Def Jam Fight for NY ... in RPG's I have a few standard names I use depending on class and gender.

 

[Khass]

Khass -> Cass -> Casillas -> Iker Casillas -> goalkeeper of Real Madrid soccer team

Always liked to play the goalkeeper in soccer, which is kinda weird, considering my very frail constitution, but eh ...

On forums, I think I can remember the entire history of my nicks, starting from back when I first joined my first forum. It goes like this:

dan27 (RL first name and favourite number) -> HelmuttSheperd (Helmut is the name of a legendary romanian goalkeeper, who defended four penalty strikes out of five in the Champions League final: Barcelona - Steaua Bucharest, 1986; Sheperd is the translation of my last name) -> Cassilias (I couldn't spell it right...) -> some other mispellings -> CassRo (first nick on RPGDot) -> Gravo (RP forum) -> Khass. Kewl, eh? Try that, person-over-30-who's-reading-this

 

[txa1265]

I can remember the entire history of my nicks, starting from back when I first joined my first forum. <snip> Try that, person-over-30-who's-reading-this

I just did that ... spanning nearly 2x your lifetime

But I was fairly late to Web forums (~2001 starting, heavily since ~2003), as I had been a Usenet fan for ages and left only when it really dried up ...

Oh - and why is VB still your idol?

 

[Khass]

I just did that ... spanning nearly 2x your lifetime

Darn old people!

Oh - and why is VB still your idol?

Better now?

 

[xSamhainx]

I got into the habit of putting an x before and after any name I wanted to get the one I want. Samhain is the name of one of my fave bands of all time, which is named after a pagan holiday, the modern American derivative (Halloween) of which has always been very special to me. I grew up a horror kid, and I'll always be.

 

[txa1265]

Better now?

That's just weird ...

 

[Ragnar]

My real handle is Bluebark. It was my father handle in the AF (Fighter pilot for the 64th FIS). But that really didn’t fit it a Gothic type scenario. So I chose Ragnar. It’s a name from one of those old Viking B movies that came out in the late 50’s early 60’s.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

In the "The Dark Eye" RPG system, "Alrik" is a more than common name. Virtually every child of this world with parents who are not able to imagine better name have "Alrik" as the first name.

My Alrik arose in a beginner's session for that system back in the late 90s. Could be 1997. The game master wanted a proper name for everyone, and "Alrik" was found very, very quickly , because it is so much common.

The "Fassbauer" is a little bit more complex story, though.

I wanted a reference to the fantasy genre, and The Hobbit in particular. "Barrel rider" was one of Bilbo's nicknames, which is generally translated as "Faßreiter" or "Fassreiter" into the German language. I decided to put this reference not too near to The Hobbit, though, so I changed it a bit into ... Fassbauer, which means "barrel builder" or "barrel manufacturer" in English language.

I used it since then.

Edit : Just a quick note on "Myrthos" : To me, it sounds like a mixture of "mythos", the German word for "myth", and "myrthe" is the German name for a kind of flower : http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrte.

 

[Jaz]

The handle 'Jaz' is one I've been using on and off for RPG-related stuff; my primary Elder Scrolls characters (with the exception of Cyrus from Redguard ) all bore names starting with 'Jaz': Jazintha, Jazeera and so on, but originally 'Jaz' was the name of my beloved first p&p Star Wars character who died a most gruesome (and heroic) death back in... '97 *sigh*. All other Jazes are named in his honor, but none ever came close. He himself was named after the IOmega JAZ drive; our GM demanded that we came up with a nickname/handle/whatever for our guys within 2 minutes or they'd have to go by number only, and folks at the next table were discussing magneto-optical drives (so I thought "MO drive... ZIP drive... JAZ drive...that's it.")

Kewl, eh? Try that, person-over-30-who's-reading-this

Okay...
Doom: Speeed (with 3 e). Because I was such an incredibly slow player.
Descent: Compass. I couldn't find my way out of a room with just one exit.
Quake: Kobalt (one of my RL nicknames is 'Nickel' and when playing on my first LAN I didn't want the other guys to know it was me... and the elements bordering nickel are cobalt and copper)
HL: Krefeld (I have a special love-hate relationship with that town), then Crowfield (for globalization's sake - it's still the name I use most often for online accounts).
CS, Q3A: Crowfield
UT: Bite-Me_Willi (don't ask)
Battlefield, DoD: [LYONER]von_Hoell ([LYONER] is the clan's name, and it's an in-joke, so... don't ask)
RO: {GD}GG while I was in the {GD} clan, otherwise Crowfield. They called me GG because I always chose the RO model that looked a bit like GG from the movie Stalingrad, but later it came to stand for 'grenade girl' (at that time, nobody hit anything with those potato mashers and their fickle physics... I did).

So you see, I do remember all my online gaming nicks, and I tend to choose different handles for different games. When it comes to forums, I usually pick a gaming name suiting the forums' topic.

 

[Prime Junta]

Everyone knows that no photograph taken with a zoom lens can have any artistic merit. We're here to enforce that.

(For the uninitiated, a prime lens is one that doesn't zoom.)

I don't have any standard names I pick for games. I try to think of one that fits the character I'm creating. And apparently unlike Corwin (going by his essay on role-playing in RPG's) I have no trouble role-playing a very wide variety of characters; in fact I play RPG's to get out of my real-life persona. Which is why I rarely play evil characters. ];-{>