[oliverkeers13]

OK. Now while you may be able to guess where the oliverkeers bit of my handle comes from fairly easily (if you can't, then how are you even able to read this?) But the 13 is a bit more cryptic.

It all started a few years ago...
I was trying to sign up to some site or other, and I didn't have an email address at the time (I hardly ever went online back then). They required email confirmation etc. but would only send the email once. I entered various combinations of oliverkeers, oliver_keers, and oliver-keers. Unfortunately, I managed to screw them all up. However, as I was 13 at the time (and 13 is the coolest number) i suffixed it to my email address. I use the same username on every site I register for. Why? It's hard enough to remember 50 passwords, several pin numbers, and where I live, so why confuse matters. Anyway, I sort of like it. It's enigmatic and provides me with anonymity

[misery_of_pain]

Many moons ago, in Yahoo GOTH CHAT!!! I started talking to f******l. My username at the time was angel_****_***** (omg it was lame) so I said to f******l, "I need a new name". He said "misery of pain" and I said... "ok". The end

Don't ask me what it means because I really have no idea. f******l doesn't know either... But I liked it and it's stuck ever since. Altho, now I'm starting to use my secret agent name, Siobhan (my real middle name, for those of you at the back, it's pronounced Shee-vorn) Misery.

*name's censored to avoid embarrassment

[Ozy_y2k]

Yes but Giskard wins FOREVER because he has an honest-to-Spinal Tap UMLAUT in his name.

[Omnie]

Giskard wrote:

R. Giskard Reventlov is obviously the best choice, although R. Daneel Olivaw comes in a close second, yet Daneel is too much like my real name (Daniël) and would only confuse people probably

Heh, I used Daneeel (ok, so I really like the letter 'e') as an alternate nick in a few places. The result was that people absolutely refused to believe that I was female. Good times.

[Axys Denyed]

I already explained mine once in the PXC thread for this, but I might as well explain it here as well. Now, I play RPGs. I don't mean the console ones, I mean the true pen and paper, dice rolling, buying too many books RPGs. There was a great one a while back by the name of Shadowrun. Futuristic-type game, there's a character type called a decker. Basically it's someone with a computer in their head. Well, I made a decker once with a street name of Axys Denyed (I liked the pun) and when I came around to the internet, I figured it'd make a good screen name as well

[terminalskeptik]

It all started one fateful day when I was supposed to be home schooling myself to personal fulfillment and career development. Instead, I was waging a battle royal ala Duke Nukem 3D with my good buddies AsSpEn and Razz. As usual, I was losing. I blamed it on the lag in my 28.8 modem connection. They of course, answered by RPGing the smack out of me. I began to think about how my poor performance in the gaming arena most likely stemmed from my lack of a pseudonym.

Flash forward to summer 2001. The Beast was on in full force. I needed a name to introduce myself into the budding world of ARGs and give myself the confidence i sorely lacked from the old days. So, being the skeptic that I am, I decided that I probably would die this way. Thus, terminalskeptik was born. TS for short.

[Giskard]

mmmm Kwak! Erh, sorry, got distracted there...

Well, no real cool stories attached to my nick I'm afraid... there's this really dorky story about my former nick though

Back in the day (I think my first online presence was somewhere around 1994), I used "Rabbit" as my handle/nickname a lot. This was mostly because of the little rabbit-like logo I had once made up and used instead of signing my name.

As the years went by, I kept shortening my nick, until I habitually only used 'Rab'. I still use that nick on some other IRC networks and some forums. I wanted an alternative nick for Rab at some point, probably because I wanted to anonymously register at some forum or something, and as I had became a big Isaac Asimov fan over the years, I thought it would be cool to pic a name from his series of novels.

R. Giskard Reventlov is obviously the best choice, although R. Daneel Olivaw comes in a close second, yet Daneel is too much like my real name (Daniël) and would only confuse people probably
I started liking my alternative nick better than the original one, so I stuck with it...

[joebrent]

My name is not actually Joe Brent, as many people think. Joe Brent was a 17th century pasha most notable for his conquest of of the Ottoman Empire, and for inventing the internet. He also had a passion for a dish known as 'Aufsaluches', which was sardines wrapped in ham fat and cooked in dirty bath water in the sole of your shoe, a dish which I myself make quite a bit, frequently adding ramen and crushed oreos. It is traditionally chased with massive amounts of Kwak. We also share a taste for Motown records, and a hatred of the Yankees.

In the late 17th to early 18th century, the descendants of Joe Brent were conquered themselves, and scattered throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, some sold as sex slaves to wealthy menopausal Prussians, and some setting out for an enclave they established in Hokkaido which still exists today; you can visit Joebrenttown in Sapporo and have Aufsaluches sushi, a variation of the original dish which is wrapped in seaweed and topped with wasabi and motor oil. Those that escaped came to the New World, settling in South Carolina due to a navigational error (they were shooting for New York, but the guy steering the boat was also the guy in charge of the Kwak -- you do the math). Many of these Joebrentian immigrants were conscripted into the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, but none actually fought. They told their commanding officers that this was because their ancestors had felt the sting of slavery themselves and therefore could not in good conscience fight on the pro-slavery side, but really it was because of their hereditary low arches.

In the late 19th century, the American descendants sent word to their European brethren that they were sick of the South, and were moving en masse to Malibu to start breeding a master race of professional surfers. The Europeans wrote back, "What's surfing?" Not being able to come up with a good answer, they simply left without them.

Meanwhile, the European Joebrentians were enjoying the good life, having mad, pasionate affairs with the aforementioned menopausal Prussian women (it is said that Sigmund Freud, Arnold Schönberg, and Thomas Mann were illegitimate progeny of such couplings) when not wondering what the hell surfing was. One of their later descendants, a young Serb named Gavrilo Princip, in fact came close to inventing surfing when he successfully rode a bloated donkey carcass across the Adriatic, but a vacation in Sarajevo in 1914 ended badly, curtailing his surfing career.

Back in Malibu, the American Joebrentians had, by the end of the First World War, given up on the surfing thing and taken up a new hobby, professional bass fishing, which they were largely unsuccessful at due to the lack of bass in the Pacific Ocean. Then they tried zeppelin manufacturing, which they had some success in until the industry took a big hit after the whole Hindenburg thing. Today, they are mostly amateur philosophers of little accord, although one legendary exchange between Bertrand Russell and a Joebrentian named Nils Kwakpounder at a party at Louis B. Mayer's house in the Hollywood Hills led to Russell's brief flirtation with nihilism.

In 1983, the sarcophagus of Joe Brent was discovered in Cluj, Romania. His mummified remains were entombed, along with his servants, wives, pet goldfish (also mummified), his weight in Aufsaluches, and a box containing his top 5 CDs to bring along in case of mummification. They were, in order:

Marvin Gaye, What's Going On
Stevie Wonder, Songs In The Key Of Life
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Greatest Hits
Rick James, Street Songs
Yes, 90125

How he was able to obtain these CDs in the 17th century remains unknown; it is theorized that he must have pre-ordered them on Amazon or obtained promotional copies from a DJ buddy of his.

[imbri]

Mine is a bit of an accident. I have a couple nicks that I usually use and have used for years (river/littleriver, mirlandano, and, as those of you on KOL know, avala) however I needed to come up with something new to hop into #jawbreak back in the LockJaw days. For some reason long since forgotten, I had about two seconds to come up with something. So, I glanced over to my bookshelves and the Xanth novels jumped out at me. The Night Mare with a half a soul seemed oddly appropriate for a puppetmaster (dreams & nightmares, the interplay of what we think is real and isn't, guiding people through a world they didn't normally see, etc etc) and so imbri it was. As thoughtful as that all seems, it was something grabbed quickly and meant to be a throwaway that I'd never see again after that night... certainly not something that I'd be using 3+ years later!


* for those that haven't read or have long since forgotten, Xanth is built on puns. The Night Mares are horses that bring, you guessed it, nightmares. The whole night mare thing was taken a step further by the horses being named for the seas on the moon (the maria or, singularly, mare) including Mare Imbrium.

[Omnie]

Ok, so this story never ever sounds cool when I explain it to people, but hey. I'm too lazy to make up something more interesting.

When I was somewhere in high school, I decided that my middle school username was really lame (which, yes, it was) and, apparently on a whim, added "omni-" to my first name. After a while, I realized how stupid this sounded, and so dropped the real name and went with omnie (with an 'e' because omni is often taken, plus it looks prettier that way). Then, one day [cue suspenseful music], as I was brushing my teeth over my bathroom sink, my eyes focused on the tap and I saw that it had "OMNI" written on top of it in big letters. Because that's, like, the brand or something. See, I'd been staring at the word for years and had never consciously noticed it before. Ooooh. Yeah, I did warn you.

Then, a few years later, some of the MU PMs informed me that omnie anagrams to "I'm Neo." I still think that's freakishly awesome.

[Dno]

Hey it's early Sunday morning, the house is quiet so let's play thread catch up time!

Nothing spectacular about my nick. My name is Dean and most people call me Deano, etc. Anyway, you know that most arcade games only let you put 3 letters into the high score table I just shortened myself to DNO to fit.

And that's it!

[QBKooky]

Yay reviving older threads.

Back when I was nine or ten, I was way into QBasic - yknow, the BASIC language that came installed with MS-DOS? Well I got really into it, and actually ended up starting (not finishing) some really really cool games.... then Windows 98 (or thereabouts) came out and DOS because obsolete and I was very sad.

The first website I ever made was "QBKooky's QBasic Madness!" - I had a thing for "madness" back then. The name stuck... I just keep using it. I like how it sounds (cue-bee-kooky), it's easily abbreviated (qb), and it confuses people who like football.

[wraith]

Well it took a while to stumble across it, but this was a fun thread to read.

I ended up with wraith while working on the Beast. Whenever we would monitor the irc chatrooms we'd pick names which started with letters at the end of the alphabet. The theory being that our nicks were more likely not to appear in everyone's user list because they would have scrolled off the bottom (not that it did any good, but at least we FELT less obtrusive that way). To make a long story short I used a lot of different nicks that started with "V", "W","X","Y" and "Z". wraith happened to be one of those, and liking spooky things, it's the one that stuck after it was all over. Unfortunately its a rather common nick so I have to get a bit creative with the spelling now and then...

[JimmyImpossible]

Duh, forgot to log in. Stupid auto-login unremembering computer.

[Guest]

OK this is really long winded and weird, and involves links...

One day me and my ex-boyfriend had this joke thing where we started to call each other "Jimmy"...I don't really remember why. It got all blown out of proportion (as these things tend to do) and it evolved into the creation of characters, a pair of fraternal twins, both of whom were named Jimmy (including the girl, that's me). Somehow they got the last name Impossible (again, no idea how). Then we decided they needed arch-nemeses, and who better than a pair of evil fraternal twins named Jimmy and Jimmy Possible? Then came a dog named Little Jimmy (sensing a pattern?) and a Sheriff who was searching for the Possibles for one of their evil schemes but instead got them confused with the innocent Impossibles and started chasing them down.

Anyway, I (in a fit of boredom) ended up actually writing a story about them (still unfinished). Then my ex started playing this web game called the Hollywood Stock Exchange (www.hsx.com) and started writing for a web site that was game related called Hollywood Stock Brokerage and Resource (www.hsbr.net). He used Jimmy Impossible as his handle, and actually posted the parts of the story that are written. If you're so inclined, here's the links:

http://www.hsbr.net/columns/jimmy/19991028.01.hsbr
http://www.hsbr.net/columns/jimmy/19991223.01.hsbr
http://www.hsbr.net/columns/jimmy/20000724.01.hsbr
http://www.hsbr.net/columns/jimmy/20011217.01.hsbr

Links one through three are the weird, unfinished story, and link four is a special Christmas poem.

Anyway, ex used to write his columns and post under his version of the Jimmy nick, and I sometimes contributed my own columns (I also played HSX) and the only way you can tell the difference is the signature at the bottom. Mine was (as it is here) "I'm not crazy, I'm fun!" while his was the even better "Off with their hot pants!".

Eventually we stopped playing HSX, and even later still we stopped playing with each other. Jimmy and Jimmy kind of died out until I needed a nick for this site, and figured enough time had passed that it was usable again...so there you go.

Incidentally, HSX is a fun game until you learn it inside out and upside down and making money becomes almost too easy. Highly recommended for people with too much time on their hands. Either that or reading this post.