Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
It's funny. Laugh.

The Etymology Of NickNames? 139

Posted by Cliff from the why-did-you-choose-what-you-did dept.
not_cub asks: "In the Slashdot FAQ CmdrTaco says he hates when clueless reporters ask where his nickname comes from but also gives an explanation. I for one find this sort of explanation quite interesting. I guess we can all guess where 'CyberBob' got his name from, but I'd love to hear Slashdotters give their reasons for choosing some of the weird and wacky nicks we see round here (especially that Anonymous Coward guy)."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

The Entomology Of The NickName? More

The Entomology Of The NickName?

Comments Filter:
  • i got mine from my frat., and it wasn't taken here.
  • Well, it's a computery site so I figured a computery name would be appropriate. I was surprised to find it untaken & that was that. *shrug*.

    For those that don't know about him (I've always assumed most people here would), he was in a lot of ways the first computer scientist, having designed & built the first computational devices as we know them today (i.e. something more advanced than, say, an abacus). Interestingly now, but fittingly for a Victorian inventor, they operated purely mechanically, without any of the transistors or other electronic components that are now synonymous with computers. Nonetheless, they were designed to do the same basic functions that a modern computer does, and (yes) it may well have been able to run the Linux kernel. :)

    I find it fitting that his assistant, Ada Lovelace, was the first programmer. It's nice to know that the field had an even 50-50 gender parity at one point, and hopefully it could again in the future. In the meantime, however, we'll make the most of the sausage party....



  • I'm a scientist-type and as such have had to way too much statistical analysis for a healthy mind to endure. I'm also a fairly average deviant (black clothing, anarchistic political views, loud goth and industrial music, some BDSM mixed in with my otherwise average heterosexual sex life (come on, who hasn't wanted to tie up their (boy|girl)friend and whip the bejezzus out of them? if roleplaying is deviant, why is the phrase "who's yer daddy!?" so common?), etc.). So: standarddeviant (one possessing an average amount of deviation).

    Of course, as my .sig said for a while, deviancy depends on how you define the norm. As an example, according to some studies, if you haven't "experimented" with recreational drug use at some point in your life, you're in the minority of Americans.

    My current signature is a Cohen v. California-inspired take on the current climate of information control by the Powers That Be.


    --
    Fuck Censorship.

  • Dude, that would be a cool hack.

    Be kinda hard to download a tar.bz2 full of gears and stuff though... ;-)


    --
    Fuck Censorship.

  • I got my nick from the game "Magic the Gathering".
    Lord Crovax was a vampire who fell in love with a dark angel he could not have.
    I took the name when I was dating a gothic girl but it has sence lost its meaning.

    A friend of mine (not a /.'er) got Kielfang froma random word generator he coded in high school.


    --
    Spelling by m-w.com [m-w.com].

  • WhyDNA? -> "Y"DNA -> ydnA -> Andy

    kinda like 'WhyNot?' for tony, etc.

    -Andy =)
  • Just to bore everyone...

    tooth == The Ogre On The Hill (I'm tall and fairly... solid, and our house was on a hill, haha... *groans*)

    From ad&d (of course) circa 1990. Also for a joke, I used to write very occasional letters to my friends, writting in crayon, large letters and lots of mis-spellings (not hard for me!) and signed them "tooth". Get a puzzled phone call in a few days... "Is this from you?"

    Yes, simple things do amuse simple minds.

  • How quickly we forget our own history!

    In programming, there's a long tradition of using someone's login name as their nickname.

    For instance, who doesn't know who RMS is? I've been called JCM and jmaslak verbally more than a few times (from my login names on previous computer installations). These names become attached to the real people because the login name, rather than full name, usually appears in source code. If I read your code, I naturally begin to feel that I know the person who typed his login name. But, I might not know his "real" name!

    A new trend, with the networked PC, may be to call people by their computer's hostname. Anyone who has used Perforce will understand this, as the Perforce client defaults to the computer's name when installed. Thus, checkins from a workstation appear with the workstation's name, not the user's name.
  • My real name is Rick Downer, so Rick the Red is a drug thing, although I've personally never taken any reds :-) I think you can see why I don't use my real name.

    By senior year they called me "Commie" (Downer --> Red --> Commie), but I'd rather use a druggie nickname than a political one...

  • This does not really tell the store of the but it is better.

    http://home.earthlink.net/~elastic/jsb/

    and

    http://home.earthlink.net/~elastic/jsb/jst/jst.h tm l
  • This does not really tell the store of the but it is better.

    Is it because you people don't see the preview button?

  • I'll give you one guess ;-)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The .tar is to gum up the gears. As for my nickname it's my name and my last 3 initials. Not too clever but something I can remember. (My bank code is NOT 1234!)

  • Muce (Score:1)

    by muce ( 181679 )
    My real name is Bruce. People have been poking fun at my name calling me "Moose" since 2nd grade. It wasn't until 10th grade that my best friend did away with the "Br" in my name and replaced it with a "M" to get "Muce".

    Now I know that "Muce" shouldn't be pronounced like "moose" according to the English language, but what are you going to do? The only time it was ever a real problem was when I was coding for Cry Havoc [planetquake.com]. Any time someone would interview our development team for the purposes of a web radio show I'd have to explain the name so they would pronounce it correctly. At least explaining it is easier than finding a new nick name. Besides, after eight years, I've kinda grown attached to it.

    -----------------

  • I'm not sure what to say.

    Actually, at various times I've gone by macaw and mrrrrow. I used macaw because I attended a school that let me change my username to 'anything that is clearly generated from your name,' and my middle initial (as evident from my current email address) is c, so macaw came naturally. While I attended that school. Mrrrrow I used in a MUD for a catlike character, since real names aren't used in MUDs. It stuck for a while, but I'm not much of a MUDer so it went away after awhile.

    Someone else suggested that the hackers of old simply used their username, frequently assigned from their name, as their handle. Makes sense, and it's what I've done pretty consistently.

    After all, if I go by some 'l33t handle, how let down are people going to be when they meet me? As it is, people are relieved that i'm not quite as boring as most other people who use their real names :)

  • holzp (Score:1)

    by holzp ( 87423 )
    mostly to watch people try and pronounce it. good for the typing medium.
  • Well, my name originally derives from The Tower of Power (one heck of a group, if I do say so), and I've been using the handle for CB/BBS/logins/muds/gaming/etc/etc/etc since ~1993...
    --
  • well, in 5th grade, I did a report on albert einstein, and one of my friends pointed out that my hair behaved very similarly to A. Einstein's. I as had a great interest in physics, and I am a pacifist who can see the need for the use of force in extreme conditions. So, when I started calling BBSes, and some of these same friends were on these BBSes, I just used the name again, and here almost a decade later, I'm still using that great thinkers name. I would have hoped a bit more of his intellect would have rubbed off over the years, but hey, what are ya gonna do.
    ---
  • Indeed, I chose this login name about 30 years ago because it's short enough for many systems. It's also distinctive enough to prevent confusion, yet "Wilco" is a recognizable word.

    I also tried to avoid all simple names and characters. Because "All The Good Names Are Taken" was obvious.

  • I was the biggest guy in my high school (OK, it was a small school, a little over 50 people in my graduating class IIRC). When I was a sophomore a wise-ass upperclassman started calling me "Gargy Gantua". Since it was so close to my real name (Greg), everybody started calling me Garg.

    To this day, hardly anybody in my home town (immediate family excepted) calls me anything else.

    It's even been my license plate in two states.

    Garg
  • People my sophomore year in high school started calling me "Sharkey". It took me a awhile to find out why, a combination of being a swimmer, having a vaguely shark-like look and spending a few weeks perfecting a flat, discomfort-causing stare. Since I'm a LOTR fan, I kind of liked it. Ahhh, memories.

    --
  • When I started at university, user names were assigned via the standard flllllll system.

    So I got C(olin) PERCIVA(l), and to this day I explain the spelling as '"C", followed by "PERCIVAL", minus the "L"'.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Well, I got the nickname Baloo from working at a Scout camp and helping with a Cub Scout den as a Den Cheif when I was a Boy Scout.

    Baloo Ursidae came from an alter ego I developed after having many Cub Scouts describe my facial appearance to be similar to that of the bear on the Cub Scout book (I took it as a compliment).

    I've since discovered my fur [tigerden.com].

    --

  • Xenex (Score:2)

    by Xenex ( 97062 )
    My nick is 'borrowed' from the 'Star Trek New Frontier' series of books. It is the home planet of the Captain in the book.

    I pronounce it 'Zen-ecks'. It's probably meant to be pronounced differently, but too bad :)

    Anyone that makes reference to Xenix and my nick in the same sentance gets blows to the head, but that is another story....

  • I grabbed 'Kp2' from the bag of phreak terms when I was in the 8th grade. I usually tack on a sushi to pay tribute to my code-fu.
  • I think most online nicknames (unless they're brought from RL) are from band names/songs and book characters/locations. For instance, Marooned (a song title from pink floyd's division bell album) and my IRC nick Toxygen (a shortened version of Toxygene in the Orb's Orblivion album).

    A lot of people i know use mainly character names from (esp.) sci-fi books though.
  • My first and middle names are Simon and Theodore respectively, so the nickname I use is alvin, of Alvin and the Chipmunks fame. Unfortunately this is often taken (such as on this site), and so I'll then probaly use darkpurpleblob, which I made up one day, or more simply, theblob.

    In high school, some friends thought that I (supposedly) looked like David Letterman, hence Dave was also a nickname of mine. Now if you remember, Dave was the father of the three chipmunks...

    --

  • Juno is part of my usual habit of using the names of ancient goddesses. I've always been interested in ancient history and read a lot of Greek mythology when I was a kid. As it happens, my usual name, Artemis (which I've used for many years, since my MUD days), was taken, so Juno was a second choice. The name Artemis actually reflects some elements of my personality, but I chose Juno mostly because I like how it sounds.

  • nick (Score:1)

    by iso9k ( 185654 )
    iso9k...

    ISO9000 - Im sure you all know it. But in case you do not:

    ISO 9000 certifies the process or system used to manufacture a product or service. The emblem tells you that the process used to build our products complies with the requirements of the ISO 9000 quality system standard. ISO 9000 is a family of international standards for quality management and assurance. These standards cover design, procurement, production, quality assurance, and delivery processes for everything from banking to manufacturing.

    Because of the diversity of the various industries involved with ISO 9000, specific quality elements have been grouped into distinct models that are based on the functional or organizational capacity of the supplier and its product or service. Listed below are the models that make up the ISO 9000 family of standards.

    The above was taken from Here [fenixheat.com]
    If you want to know more go on and check it out

  • This nick came into existance last year, from when I played EverQuest. For each of my 20 characters, I tried to create a nice name, with a decent meaning (Somber Forebodings the Dwarven Rogue, Dyllon Thyrn the Halfling Warrior, Vocal the Wood-Elf Bard).

    My brother came across daegred while looking through an Old English section in a book on English origins. We chose our names by their meanings, Sincgyfan was my brother's (giver of treasure), while Daegred means "red dawn". While the meaning was somewhat cliche, I thought the word itself sounded and looked nice.

    I use another, more derived nick elsewhere, mainly since it's a real pain trying to change your nick in a community that's known you for a couple years.. I know, I've tried before. :)

    - Daegred
  • My nick is actually the name of a charcater from Larry Niven's Known Space Universe
  • I got the nickname Keg Dude from a guy named Bubba.

    In high school and college, I was very likely to be either throwing or attending keg parties. A lot. It's a little hobby of mine. :) I have a collection of keg lids that numbers in the hundreds.

    During college in the mid 80's, several of us took a roadtrip to a little cabin on Lake Norris in Tennessee. Bubba and I didn't know each other, and when I bought the keg for the weekend, he just started calling me Keg Dude. It stuck immediately and consistently. From that point on, I was always introduced to others as Keg Dude. There were a lot of people at school who never heard or knew my "real" name.

    The nickname followed me home from school, too. My family got used to it, although they don't call me that. At my wedding, the napkins had Keg Dude and Betty Love imprinted on them. (Betty Love is my wife's college nickname - another story entirely). The first place we lived, out on this little farm, we painted ourselves up a sign and christened the place the Keg Dude Ranch.

    So, after more than 15 years of being Keg Dude, it certainly wasn't hard to figure out what my login name would be for Slashdot!

  • I used to wear a blade in my ear in College (yeah, yeah, I know)

    So, ever since then, I've used bladerock or bladeroc as a nick, when I don't want to use my real name.

  • anagrams (Score:3)

    by greenplato ( 23083 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:57PM (#468892)

    My nick is an anagram of my real name.

    Try out the Internet Anagram Server [wordsmith.org].

  • I get asked a lot where mine came from (Mul Triha).

    It's a random collection of syllables that came to mine when trying to find a name unique enough that it wasn't already registered on aim.
  • "are you a man or a mouse?"

    "i'm . . . mouseman!"

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • [This is pretty much just lifted from my homepage]
    Well, I didn't think that quadong meant anything in real life when I started using it, but I did some fairly exhaustive searches and this is the grand total of what I found that has nothing to do with me, none of the following links mention "quadong" outside a list:

    1) It is a fruit bearing Australian tree (referenced here [green.net.au], here [ka.org.au] and here [agbina.for.ru])
    2) It seems to be a game for Amiga (referenced here [sulinet.hu], here [fh-muenchen.de] (tried to follow up, no luck), and here [deja.com]) that can be sold in German for 5DM.

    In reference to me and without knowledge of the above two meanings, here [ethanet.com] is an IRC log showing one amusing incorrect interpretation of quadong.
    And finally, you may chose between a well written but inaccurate story [ethanet.com] (free verse psuedo-poem) and a correct, but boring, story [ethanet.com] (prose) of how I came to use the word.

  • I first started BBSing in 1981. Yes, they existed back then, as did TeleNet, which I spelunked through as well. I went by my first name back then (mostly).

    Not quite sure when I chose Gandalf, but I was the proud sole owner of the appelate for awhile (at least in the 407 area code). I can't quite remember if it was before or after I started my own BBS (later titled The Crystal Wind) in 1983/84. 200k of storage! Wow!

    Sometime mid/late 80s, I gave up on trying to retain Gandalf and tired of explaining that "No, I was the first", and switched to the Grey Elf. Later, I found another Grey Elf and switched to the made up name "Xandar", which soon was dubbed by the local community Xandar the Magnificent. I always pictured one of those awful carnival magicians when I pictured the name.

    Of course, eventually I ran across another Xandar. In frustration, I mangled the name of a poem I liked (yes, it is *very* intentionally misspelled and interCapped), and produced "JabberWokky". Since then, it's been fairly unique, and I've only run across one other guy who uses it (apparantly he dosen't know how to spell it correctly). Also, I've given up on finding a unique handle... I had to mangle names for a half hour to come up with a AIM nick: Wokky4711 (the number being the tattoo on Frank'n'Furter's leg in the Rocky Horror Picture Show).

    I'd be very interested to see InitZero add to this discussion: he was rabidly anti-handles for quite awhile.

    --
    Evan (oh, and I sign my own name now, as the handle is merely a reference tag).

  • AN INSULT!...I'LL GIVE YOU A LAMENESS FILTER!

    oh and now they don't like my yelling!

  • Lemon Curry?
    signed Ira S. Kiddy.
  • I think he means that the double loops make a symbol which looks a lot like the two-dimensional double-loop symbol for infinity.

    Or not.

  • I made up my nickname in the sixth grade (I am a junior in college now) whem I discovered all "real"-word names taken on the Internet. Several years later I discovered that the word also represents a Kingdom of viruses, the memetic viruses. You can do a Google search that will turn up several links proving this. Apparently even words I make up had already been thought of in the 19th century!
  • Name is Eric, had a teacher that called me Erk, then it became Erksum and thus Irksome. On other boards I go by EA, just because that's my initials (and the fact that EA sports makes a good hockey game).
  • And if it won't run Linux, you know it'll run NetBSD... :-)

    --

  • Once, long ago, I got drafted into Staffing Utena MUX

    Now anyone that's seen the show (Shoujo Kakumei Utena) Knows the prevalence of Rose's in it so all the staff got X-Bara name's when Bare=Rose in Japanese

    For me it was Kuro (Black) bara (Rose) hence Black rose

    Just kind of fell in love with the name and used it
  • My nick is a very, very obscure Tolkien reference. The only other person I ever met who knew what it meant spoke Elvish. It was delightfully obscure until a year or two ago, when they came out with that #!%^%@! stupid Middle-Earth clone of "Magic: The Gathering". One of the prominently-featured cards featured my nick. I was horrified...I started running in to people everywhere using my nick. For a while I couldn't get on irc, even. I considered getting a new nick, but too many people knew me by this for me to change. I was really ticked that a bunch of "Magic: The Gathering"-playing gaywads got for free a cool name that took me much study to find. I picked my nick specifically for its combination of coolness and nobody-else-would-ever-find-this-edness. That, and the fact that it started with "A"...my last name is far back in the alphabet and I was tired of being last all the dang time.

  • About a half-decade ago I worked for AOL. This was shortly after they "got" the internet. I was in the one group (Web development) that really had a clue about what went on in the net at large, outside of AOL's little gated community. But we never had much support from our VP, so most of our efforts were fruitless.
    I digress.
    I *will* digress.

    Boy, will I ever digress:

    Back then, the bosses tried to distribute the new AOL 2.6 software via the internet, in addition to the ubiquitous mailings (at least the floppies were more re-usable than the later CD's). The problem was that damn Certification Code. (You know, the paper with "Garble-Grabel" printed on it.) The Cert was the key to letting the software install. They made it necessary, because it would tie your account into whichever mailing list or magazine attachment got you the disks. (AOL paid a premium to the mags and list sellers for everyone who signed up.) The Certs were designed to all be unique.

    So the problem was that no-one was going to download the software from AOL's FTP site or homepage, and then have to WAIT for snail-mail to get them their Cert. So AOL decided to make an exception. There would be *one* non-expiring Cert, and it would be published with the software on the FTP and web site.

    And that was just the chink in the armor that AOHell needed.

    AOHell was a script kiddie tool for AOL. It could fake the system out to think you were in a "free" area and still let you access premium content. It had canned macros that let you fish clueless lusers for passwords. It could "bust" into chat rooms by sending the entry command several hundred times a second until either you got in quick when someone left, or sometimes the overloaded system just *let* you in. But most of all, it had a fake credit card/name/address info and could reset your software so that you didn't have to re-install it. And it had the non-expiring Cert wired in.

    Your (current) account would get cancelled after you got caught. AOHell would let you roll another account up in seconds. Of course, the screen-names couldn't be released for reuse until the account had been dead for more than 3 years.

    There was such a proliferation of l33t haxors during that year that AOL *almost* ran out of screen-names. They'd hang out in known private "WAREZ" chat rooms, forwarding emails with attachments of pirated software to one another. (Yes, AOL *knew* about the chat rooms, but figured that if the policed those areas, they'd be legally required to police ALL private chat rooms.)

    Since screen-names without numbers appended (Icarus4639) were becoming hard to find, they were pretty highly prized by the AOHell kiddies. I saw some pretty hilarious ones. I'll give the kiddies that. Many of them showed at least some inklings of creativity.

    Sporktoast was the first one of them I could remember when it came time for a Slashdot NickName.

  • I originally used the nick of SERPENT in Descent 1 games back when I was into gaming, then messed around and added the illegal character ! making it SERPENT! which made me seem different from all the other Serpent wannabe's (I was a pretty good player on kali).

    When my soundcard died I gave up playing games for a few months and ran across IRC. Since it didnt allow ! in the nick space I ran around as Serpent- in #loonybin and #ircaddicts (and got my arse kicked often in #eggdrops). Then that nick started getting used by other people so I decided to find a new nick. At the time I was fascinated with art and scupltures with dragons depicted in them. So one day while watching Dragonheart, I logged in and started using the nick of DRACO- (keeping the - from SERPENT-).

    Now Im quite well known on the undernet, and an op on #eggdrops #eggys #dmsetup and recgonized by helper friends on #zt and #cservice by some (except for the commando Channel Nazi, we all know who he is).

    It's very true that many geeks get attached to their Nick, I have had DRACO- for over 4 or 5 years (I cant remember far enough back). I have and will ask people who take my nick to change or enlist the help of other users who insist the imposter to change nicks. The most I will deviate from my nick is to change the o to a 0, (sometimes i will clone and use both nicks at once and confuse people :P )

    I work at a concert venue called Millennium Fortress, and the lady who coordinates everything calls me DRACO- because we keep in contact via email so much and remembers my nick faster than my realname. I dont mind, I think it's funny when the kids I work with call me DRACO- too. What is silly is I actually instinctively answer to DRACO- if someone calls out my nick. I encourged some people to call me by my nick cuz my first name Justin is so common. I think there are 4 younger kids that work at the concert named Justin, and a 3 kids named Jason (if you are named Justin you know why Im mentioning Jason everyone mixes them up but Jason is closer to Justin than steven,travis,tyson,cody or jacob).

  • My old nick was LPT1, being my initials, and me being the first in my family with the initials. Add to that the fact that I'm a hardware nut (think printer port), and well....
    But, alas, people on IRC using windows and auto-logging got a rude suprise. GRIN! So, now LPT1 (and COM1) are locked out. Since I use lpX for quite a bit of interfacing, DIGItalPORT 1 seems to work nicely.
  • My nickname is Welsh, for "green woman". Basically I decided what phrase I wanted, then went to a few web language pages and experimented with different languages until I found a phrase that sounded pretty nifty :)
  • My name is Jonathan, and I'm a nerd. That's basically it. On ICQ et al, I use Nerd314159, because it's <= 10 characters. And on Slashdot, I quite often go by Anonymous Coward (especially when trying for a first post or posting goatse.cx [microsoft.com] links).

  • bopo (Score:1)

    by bopo ( 105833 )

    When I first started ircing (7 1/2 years ago) I wanted to use the nick 'bobo.' For some reason I wanted to pretend to be a small monkey, dunno why. It was taken, so I inverted a letter, and never bothered to find a new nick.

    For the record, I am not associated with Bopo Records [boporecords.com], Bopo Books [bopobooks.com], or Bopo.com [bopo.com], I am not this guy [flink.com], nor have I ever joined the circus [opengroup.com].

    A few people have pointed out that phoenetically, 'bopo' means 'beautiful skin' in French, and supposedly is the word for 'kiss' in Korean.

  • Its kind of a long boring story involving cheap beer...

    but to cut to the chase it is a very vague reference to popular culture. Thanks to america's really short attention span, not many will remember a mousy guy that ran around swiping other peoples limos.
  • My nick comes from a Spartan general who led a band of 300 troops to hold a mountainpass at Thermopylae against the invading Persian army. The idea of a few hundred troops facing off against an army reported to be a hundred thousand strong seemed very cool.
    I first heard the name from a story in the Bolo series from Baen books called "The Legacy of Leonidas" where a monstrous sentient tank sacrifices itself to fend off an invading army. (Those cheesy Bolo stories are big on self sacrificing sentient tanks :)
    A interesting side note: my mother was very mad at me when I told her about my hotmail adress, eduardoleonidas@hotmail.com. She had never heard the story about the greek fellows, she just knew the name to be the middle name of the former dictator of the Dominican Republic Trujillo.

    "Go tell the spartans..."

  • ooze (Score:1)

    by ooze ( 307871 )
    Organon, (the name I used on several other sites) was taken. ooze sounds good and is a mangling on a fancy project I just started called oose (object oriented system environment).

  • well... I've gone by the nickname “nihil” (a Seigmen song; also Latin for nothing) for just about all my online life; though when I signed up for a /. account I was reading R. Jordan's Wheel of Time, and I couldn't get the name “Moghedien” out of my mind.

    Some people also know me as “lavpuls” (low pulse) because of a weird incident involving alcohol some years ago. I think someone still has a video recording of it... :D

  • fishy gives "Fett" for fat, and "fat lightning" gives "fetter Blitz"
  • I thought you were named after the industrial dish washers found in almost every restaurant in America. They were, coincidentally, an amalgamation of Horowitz and Bartok, I believe.

  • Re:Moebius (Score:3)

    by The Mayor ( 6048 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2001 @01:01AM (#468918)
    If you cut a Moebius strip down the middle, trying to cut it in two, you end up with a single Moebius strip that's twice as long and half as wide. Do it again, and it gets twice as long, again. There is a very strong correlation between Moebius strips and infinity.

  • radja (Score:2)

    by radja ( 58949 )
    I used to play basketball. Dino Radja was a basketball player. he was muscled, tall, strong, a good basketball player and made the occasional block.

    I just made the occasional block. And Radja kind of resembles my real name. IMO, the best nicknames are the ones given to you by others.

    //rdj
  • and those are my last nicknames :)
    on slashdot i'm kipple, a work that I found in 'blade runner' (the Philip K. Dick book) meaning 'chaos', everything that grows up until it covers and eats up all free space left.
    alt255 is the other irc nick (well it's kinda different but that's the meaning, looks like there are others alt255 out there), for those of you remembering ms-dos when there was no dosshell (add a alt255 char between a REM and a letter, let's say the char A, into AUTOEXEC.BAT; then hide a file called REM_A.BAT where _ is the alt255 char, and viola - hidden executables) or when you wanted to hide a directory with the ALT255 char. And yes, alt 255 looks like a space, but it's there and it's not a space, in few words it's there but you don't see it, and that sort of fascinating mistery stuff.
    latin 'cause I was nemo on FIDONet, considering myself basically 'nobody' (the meaning of 'nemo' in latin), being a little kid at the time.

    have fun

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Back in the good old days(1985) i was sitting at my c64 and played F15-Strike Eagle. I had to enter a Nickname for my Pilot. Since i've seen "Dr. Strangelove" the night before, i named myself after the pilot who rides the bomb at the end of the film : Major T. J. "King" Kong.
    Ever since my name on any system where it is allowed is Kong.

  • Re:History (Score:3)

    by biglig2 ( 89374 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2001 @03:25AM (#468923) Homepage Journal
    Any geeks visiting "London, England" as you so quaintly call it in the colonies, should definitely check out the Science Museum. They actually finished one of his Difference engines.
    Try http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/on-line/treasure/objects/186 2-89.html [nmsi.ac.uk]

    In one of the more delightful of life's little ironys, the only way they could make it precisely enough to work was to use computer controlled machining. ;-)

    Back on topic, a big Lig is Ulster Scots for a very foolish person or idiot.
  • Ah, yes, artificial languages are very useful for this sort of thing. Thlingan 'Hol is what I use for passwords etc.
  • Circa 6 years ago i was scoping out a website on hockey fights. There was a mint picture of Bob Probert in his terrifying prime, chucking the knuckles with Tie Domi. The caption underneath read:
    "Bob gives Tie a taste of rink justice".
    From that point on my alias has been rinkjustice. I guess it's an homage to the hockey enforcers who make hockey such a great sport.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I registered this account to see if I would be automatically flamed/modded down by people who mistook me for Signal 11. Guess what? I am. Constantly.

    Even after Sig11 packed up & moved on, I still get the same shit. So, I decided to keep using this account. I figure those of you who judge me by my nic are only making yourselves look stupid, and I'll gladly help you do it.

    I post whatever I feel like posting. Overall, I don't take Slashdot very seriously. I usually don't post unless I have something to say, but if I'm in the mood, sometimes I'll post a blatant troll, or something completely offtopic, and I've been known to flame a user or two, but I never post as an AC. I don't give a shit about Karma, but I'm regularly called a Karma Whore -- even after the cap was implemented.

    I recently submitted a story [slashdot.org], and (much to my surprise) Hemos posted it. I assume he noticed my nic, and credited me anyway. Good for him. All the bullshit those guys get from /. users has got to wear on them, and it's refreshing to see that my submission didn't get swatted down in a knee-jerk reaction to my nic.

    I had another account, but I've abandoned it. I like my nic. I have no intention of going back to the old one - even for the low UID. Frankly, I don't give a shit about that status symbol.

    --

  • Since I was very young, people in school always shortened my last name of Flickinger to "flick" .. mainly because I hate to be called Daniel by strangers and disliked being known as "Dan F." all the time. I never really suggested to be called flick, but over the years people call me that anyways. In high school, a girl I knew always called me flikee (and even spelled it as such.) This stuck as an online handle for some reason. flikee usually got shortened to "flikx", so most people wouldn't assume I'm female. (though that doesn't happen often since I don't spend time on irc.)

    I'm usually protective of my first name, so most people do not know it and only know me as flick. On another note, I used flikx online quite a while before I came to slashdot, so there is no relation to spiralx.


    --
  • JON Ragnarsson - used it since 1989 or something, tried a few hax0r names, but never liked them, they make you look stupid.

  • HGTTG (Score:2)

    by Stavr0 ( 35032 )
    Lesse...
    ArthurDent - Nick taken
    FordPrefect - Nick taken
    ZaphodBeeblebrox - Nick taken
    Slartibartfast - Nick taken

    Stavro [everything2.org]

    Stavro was taken on slashdot so I switch o for 0 and there we are.
    ---

  • I read somewhere that Java bytecode can easily be identified because the first 8 Hex digits always spell out "CAFEBABE". (Supposedly, the team that developed Java had a certain 'appreciation' for one of the female workers at a local coffee shop and decided to immortalize her in their work.)

    I'm a girl, I code Java, and I wanted an appropriately geeky name, so that's how I picked my nick. I considered 0xCAFEBABE, but I figured that would be going a little too far.

  • Count me in.
  • My name is Latin and means unattractive or uncharming, specifically in a sexual way. It was an epithet used by Gaius Valerius Catullus, my favorite Latin poet, for people he really didn't like. Slashdot, you think you're geeks? Try hanging around with some Classics majors. It's a whole new standard of geekhood.
    ----
    "Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
  • Mine's pretty boring, but I'll post it anyways. Basically around 9 years ago I got a modem (2400!) and I logged onto a BBS that required the use of a nick name. So, I sat and looked around to see if anything around me would spark a nickname. Then I saw a pack of Mr. Sketch markers (you know, the scented ones :) ), and I've been using it ever since. In college, my friends shorted it to just 'Sketch' and called me by that instead of my real name, in fact I think one of my friends [kettering.edu] hasn't call me by my real name in well over two years. But on informal boards and online, I still like to go by Mr. Sketch.

    So that's the history behind my name, if anyone cares. One of the drawbacks of it is that people assume that I can draw which is sooooo far from the truth: I can't even draw a stick figure well.

  • My nicks (Score:3)

    by CrayDrygu ( 56003 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2001 @06:59AM (#468935)

    Well, I've only had two nicks that stuck for any amount of time.

    The first is my old AOL name -- DOOMGuy. I was obsessed with the game at the time, and as everyone knows whether you've used AOL or not, all the good nicks are taken. Took me the better part of a half hour to find this one (I refused to pick a name with numbers tagged onto the end). That stuck with me for at least 2.5-3 years.

    Near the end of my AOL years is when I switched to this nick. I picked up "Cray" from a short story I have since lost, with a character in it named Cray that could easily have been me. Since we were so alike, and I was looking for a new nick, I picked up the name.

    The "Drygu" half of it comes from my boyfriend (no, the "DOOMGuy" above wasn't lying, I'm male). His online monicker had that last name, and since I was lacking one, I adopted his.

    P.S. If any of you knew me as DOOMGuy on AOL, could you reply to this? I'm just curious to see =)

    --

  • I don't use it here, but I created this one in college. I had created a webpage (running on a webserver the school didn't know they were hosting *grin*) called "The Hitchhiker's Guide To OBU". Take the first letters (THGTOBU), mix thoroughly, and you get Boghtut. I basically did it because I wanted something nobody else had.

    human://billy.j.mabray/
  • Hrm... this is one of those stories that should be immortalized on a web page with a picture of my cats and a (loud) midi file of some horrible 80s ballad playing.

    WAAAAAAY back in the olden days - 1981 I got my mitts on a -real- computer (with drives and everything) the Osborne 1. About two years later, I had snuck into a "business" computer show/conference under the pretext that I looked 16 - hardly as I was about 12. In one of the interconnection hallways, there were the usual crop of guys hawking cheap hardware, including a "VolksModem 300" for $99CDN. I jumped at the chance to get it and pulled out my hard-earned newspaper money to buy it. Got home, hooked it up and used Modem7 to dialup a local BBS. Got hooked on BBSing in about 15 minutes and started using my firstinitial, lastname as my nick. This carried on until '86 when I got a freakshow call from someone who had looked up my number on the basis of my username.... needless to say, I started looking for a decent replacement. As that was a rather fateful year in space exploration, I was waffling between MIR and cBomb (first one should be obvious, second was a grim teenaged angst view of the challenger disaster). I went with Myr because it was -=way=- more 'cyber' than just plain Mir. Over the years, I gave people lots of interesting explanations as to the origin and about a decade after starting to use it, I discovered that people weren't pronouncing it properly (usually pronoucing it as 'myrrh' instead of 'meer') and made a little change to make it more obvious how to pronounce it - 'Myr as in MEER' was a common phrase. After a few months of that, I relented and accepted the pronunciation - changing to Myrcurial (mercurial) as an apt description of both my nick and temperment. In '98 I made one decision to reuse my original nick 'Myr' when I had it tattooed on my right arm in 7digit binary ASCII code with a stylized @ above it. Turns out that people shake their heads when I'm wandering a choice goth-industrial bar with the tat exposed, but man, it draws a crowd at real geek places (Novell Brainshare 99, I had a dozen pencil protector geeks trying to decode my arm while I was listening to a presentation by the CEO of Caldera)
  • I got mine at school.
    It's a traditional Yorkshire (County[1]: Northern England) thing to simply add a Y to the end of any name to make it a nickname Hence I became Reedy.
    I've since replaced the Y with an I to conform with various edicts on usernames in the companies I've worked for over the years.

    Ian

    [1] Some would say occupied nation. Are there many Yorkshire nationalists on /. ?

  • I live in The Glebe, hence I am glebite...

    Strangely enough, glebite was a word bantered about in a response to Ayn Rand's "Who is John Galt?" back in high school. Every once in a while, this guy would say "What's a glebite?"

    I am.

  • >I used to use Tactical Neural Implant, which is the title of a phenomenal Front Line Assembly album. [but got tired of it being shortened to Tac or TNI, so I switched...]

    And on another "tack" - I leeched my nick shamessly from Gary Clail's "Tackhead Sound System".

    For those who haven't heard of Tackhead, they were a late-80s industrial group - their musical style is almost impossible to describe - imagine a really weird blend of heavy bass and dub-like riffs, heavily processed, and then overlaid with multiple layers of samples from military/religious/political figures. Probably responsible for the start of the whole "sampling music" genre.

    Their influence as individuals was far greater than their influence as a band per se - the names of the four main members (Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald, Adrian Sherwood, and Doug Wimbish) seem to crop up just about everywhere in music from about 1980 through 1990 in a range of styles from old-school rap (e.g. Grandmaster Flash), to funk/dub (George Clinton), to jazz (BB King, Miles Davis), to pop/retro/industrial (Annie Lennox, Depeche Mode, NIN).

    The mix of solid beats and heavy sampling, plus some seriously geeky artwork [nl.net] served as inspiration for many a late-night assembly-coding run.

    I recently paid a bit of homage by doing the obligatory boot logo thing and "rebranded" my hacked I-Opener in the same vein. After all - what would be a more appropriate name than "Tackhead Sound System" for a project that involves hacking a 6.4G MP3 boombox out of spare parts? (As long as I don't have to power up my I-Opener at an airport. My boot logo [yimg.com] might be a little more imposing than it should be ;-)

    Recommended tracks: Mind at the End of the Tether, and What's My Mission Now?. Y'all know where to find MP3s.

    Finally, if you liked those two tracks, the "Power, Inc." series (3 CDs released in the late '90s) is highly recommended. (Feel free to buy the original CDs - I believe Keith LeBlanc released these on his own label, so he might be getting more than the usual $1/CD when you buy 'em. ;-)

  • Well, I wanted a second handle some time ago, and I had a CD with Chaostrophy as a track title (Coil, the album "Love's Secret Domain"). Then I needed a vanity domain, and it was availible. It's a cool sounding word, and unique. A web search on it pulls up me, band refernces, and a Cal Tech physics prof's paper.

    It is not the best track on the album though.
  • Back in university, my roommate met up with someone on a co-op term. This guy was the drummer for a "band" - just a bunch of friends who got together and made a few (!!!) albums, consisting of original songs (plus one really bad cover) and various skits. The skits are what made the albums. A couple of these skits on _DAS; The Evolution of Puke_ featured what started out to be as a queasy restaurant chain patron (said chain will remain anonymous), who, due to queasiness, was only able to mumble, "Ska...."

    In one of the skits, some happless conservatory judges start judging Performance Art, and call in a "Mr. Ska". I just liked the sound of it, and it's since stuck.

    As an aside, it was only about 2 years later that I even realized that there was an entire genre of music called "ska", which I moderately enjoy.

    If anyone has any info on the whereabouts of any of the members of Chill and the 4 Brother Fresh, please let me know!

    Mr. Ska

    I slit a sheet
    A sheet I slit

  • You mean it's and AD&D reference, and it's not from Grimtooth, the trollish author of the ever wonderful Grimtooth's Traps?

    (Heh. I have a friend who goes by Four Skulls, after a character or his named after what he thought was the deadliest trap rating in Grimtooth Traps. It's actually five, but since he was a Chinese sorceror, and four is a homonym for death in Chinese and Japanese, it just fit too well. ...but I digress.)
  • I had a friend who wrote a C program back in the DOS days to rename a directory from NAME to "NAME.space-DEL-space". He had a few other hidden utility programs to move in and out of those directories. Perfectly valid as far as any program and the OS was concerned, but truly impossible to type on the command line.
  • The Skinny Puppy/FLA continuum had HEAVY use of sampling in the early 80s, but I agree with Tackhead's more probable influence samplingwise outside of pure Industrial.

    The members of Tackhead managed to achieve what Bill Leeb of FLA has been trying to - critical acclaim in more than one genre of music.

    The weak, anemic, bland pap that "Delerium" is producing now does nothing but shame his accomplishments in industrial music. And on a Canadian government artistic grant no less, the kiss of death for any project and a certification of bush-league status.
  • All my user names that aren't variants of my real name are based on RPG characters. Valdrax is the name of my all-time favorite character, even though I only got to play it for 4 sessions, and the character cannot really be replayed outside of that game world. So, I use it as a screen name, in lieu of getting to play the character again.

    Most of my passwords are also really obscure RPG references too -- with numbers thrown in because of draconic password requirements. I had to give that up on the public server at my college where they force you to change it every 90 days, they remember the last 5-6 passwords, and they won't let you change it twice in a 24-hr period. You just have to pick a consistent series at that point.
  • I chose Hermetic long ago becuase of how I view most people's reaction to technology. So many people are simply flabergasted to learn that I didn't go to school to learn computers.

    Why are people scared to play with their computers? Or the VCRs? Does your grandma know how the light gun in Duck Hunter(and similar games) worked? Would she care?

    Hermetic knowledge is no longer about alchemy and summoning of spirits...
  • My original login (#3800) used the name Otter, which I've been using since my first Usenet access in the late 80's. I got the name because someone thought I looked like Otter in Animal House. I still use the nick on IRC.

    I started this account to see how quickly I could karma cap a new account. (About 4 weeks, with pretty contrarian opinions. No whoring here.) I picked the name because I'd been doing some Qt programming the night before and had been calling update() a lot. I've kept posting mostly on this account, to protect Otter from karma erosion* and because if people know one of the names, it's more likely to be the one I've used lately.

    * Yes, I know, karma isn't really good for anything. But it feels like a reward I've earned so I'm resisting letting it get eaten up by crack-addled moderators.

  • "Mr. Slippery" is, of course, from Vernor Vinge's famous and most excellent story "True Names".

    Other nicknames I have used, or that have been applied to me, include:

    • Spock - given to me by my high school physics teacher. Kinda obvious for a science/computer geek, especailly a dark-haired one. However, tucked away somewhere in my parent's attic is a school photo from 1976, of a six-year-old me in a blue Star Trek shirt. I'd like to use it for an author photo someday.
    • Spaceman Spiff, Cybernetic Kid - I used these on various BBSes in the late 80's. Spaceman Spiff is a reference to Calvin and Hobbs, Cybernetic Kid is my own invention.
    • the infamous tms - in graduate school, I was tms@cs.umd.edu, and in my first job afterwards I was tms@tis.com. I was active in USENET in those days (remember USENET pre-Cantor and Siegal?), and (unlike the quiet, bland, and throughly mainstream person I've become today) rather vocal in my opinions. Several people who met me in meatspace after encountering me on the net said something along the lines of "Ah, so you're the infamous tms." Thus, infamous.net. I usually sign code comments with "tms".
    • Duck Dodgers - used this one for QuakeWorld. "Duck Dodgers in the 24th and 1/2 Century!" is a Daffy Duck cartoon.

    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

  • Beats me... I just like it.
  • I have an award jacket from making regional band in H.S. It says "Mark" on one line, and "Trombone" on the second on the front where there would be a breast pocket. Once college arrived, the name evolved from "trombone" to "trommy" to "tbone" to just "t" because everyone was usually stoned and eating, and "t" took less time to say :) But I took TBone.
  • namespan is meant to be an all-encompasing nick.... one that "spans" an entire namespace.

    The derivation comes from me trying to get an AIM nick, and EVERYTHING (and I mean EVERYTHING -- even some of the most unusual words or pet phrases I have in English or in SAMOAN for cryin' out loud) was taken already. I thought "Gee, this is a small name space", which really it wasn't (it was just crowded), and so I happened on the intermediate nick "smallnamespace".

    Later, when signing up for my second slashdot account, the linear algebra classes I'd had kicked in, and I came up with namespan.

    --
  • This might be a little hard for you all to follow (yes, especially you linear algebra freaks [slashdot.org] or you history buffs [slashdot.org]), but my parents came up with my nick. It's on my birth certificate. It's... it's...(*gasp*)... my REAL NAME!

    Apparently they came up with it sortof on accident. One said "How about 'Winston'? and the other said "'Weston'? How did you come up with that?" and the other said "I didn't, but I like it!" I don't beleive they remember which said what.

    --
  • coz Prosthetic Conscience probably aint gonna fit.


    Zetetic
    Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.

    Elench
    A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
  • So many handles, so little time. I'll do a list..

    Gendou
    Comes from my favorite character in Shin Seiki: Evangelion. I like the character because he's incredibly focused and determined to accomplish his goals. *shrug* I think there are good qualities here. :-)

    the Silicon Dragon
    Yes, he was a member of Future Crew, but when I saw his alias, I just could believe how cool it was... so I ripped it. (I actually though the fact that I did was good when I found out he was killed in a car crash. Some people will remember... and the name floats around.) The reason I like this handle is because, well, I love dragons - they're majestic and fantastic creatures. Now, imagine a robotic one. That's this. :-) To those of you that saw the NY1 H2K Video: that was me. :-) The reason I said that I was one of MANY silicon dragons is because well, how many people pick an animal they like and tack on "silicon"? Pah! I'm cooler though. I got on television and I own the domain. :)

    Lethyos
    Main character from a book I'm writing. He's an underdog with some very impressive skills (much like hackers, yes?) Not very well liked (also a common factor with geeks), but everyone will depend on him to save their asses in the end. Very poetic.

  • Back in the good ol' days of the Internet, before the advent of the WWW (1990, to be exact), I started using telnet BBSs from school. When the time came to create my very first account on the Mars BBS (Greetings to those who remember T'ruth, Xenia, Lynn and the rest), I was wondering what nickname to use.

    Being a teenager, I tried a few names that came to mind. Let's see... "Maverick"! Taken. "TopGun", taken too. "Montana", ditto. (Don't ask me why I wanted to chose those names. Please don't).

    So, without any other fresh ideas, I just glanced down and saw that I wearing a Vuarnet t-shirt. So, I tried "Vuarnet", no one had used it, and therefore started using it as a login name in several BBSs, DikuMUDs and IRC.

    Most of my friends which I made during college, met me in the computer room. Online, most of the time. So there's still a few friends who cant remember my name, but they dont care since they always greet me by my nickname.

    Hell, it could've been worse. I could've been "Fruit of the Loom" or something like that...

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close