I like not being easily identifiable on social media.
When I was a kid my parents taught me to not reveal my real name on the internet and nowadays it seems that your real life and internet life should be the same.
I didn't. It's my IRL nickname. It means 'short circuit' (as in 'easily frustrated'). I'm the opposite of it, I'm the calmest person on this planet. My friends thought it would be funny. (the full word spells 'Kurzschluss')
I had a T-shirt with a toaster that had flame decals and just the word toast underneath. People kept asking me what it meant, as if there was a secret meaning to warm bread.
I grew up in central Flordia in the 80s and 90s. I loved saltwater fishing. Because of this I started to have lots of interactions with pelicans.
After awhile I became kind of close with them, we somehow seemed to communicate, I would spend hours with them, sometimes I would take out the boat and float around the shallows for these huge schools of pompano that would swim around the deep shipping channel then they would come up in the shallows for a few seconds and hit the bait fish really hard, it made them an easy catch and an unbelievably hard fight on ultralight gear.
I would go alone, sometimes with friends, but the one living being that always showed up was the pelican, and in this particular case it was a fishing spot I found near the Skyway bridge in St. Petersburg.
This is where the pelican became my favorite bird, we had some good times together, one bird in that area though new me and followed me around, never bothering me, never once trying to catch my bait that obviously has a hook in it, it seemed to know what was up, I'll never forget those pelicans and especially my buddy who always loved hanging out and getting fat from my catch.
So I carry the name because I love pelicans and the more people see the name maybe just maybe they might think twice before harming one of these magnificent birds or littering which is heavily contributing to their extinction.
Se got lots of immigrants from Ukraine these two years. One girl started going to our summer camp/all year group (something like Scouts) and started dated my friend. He keeps "dictionary" of mispronounced words.
There is lots of good usernames but "plactagonic relationship" was best at the time (it grew a lot since).
TLDR: in our current capitalist and technologically advanced society, we increasingly live in a world where reality and fiction mix, so much so that it's hard to tell what is real or isn't real. They blend into each other. This is hyperreality. Arguably what's real doesn't even matter as much. The 'truth' generated by (social) media is often far more consequential than something as trivial as what actually happened.
For people who like movies, watch Cronenberg's Videodrome or Existenz. That's what 'reality' has become.
I chose my name as a shortened version of the name I generally use on social media platforms. It's just this one is easier to type and since the account didn't exist I took advantage of being able to use the shorthand.
I was a big weeb, and my original name was Nekomaru. As I "grew out" of it, I translated the name back into English, and realized I actually liked it better.
The name is a bit of a long story using text to speech in Sea of Thieves to annoy another crew. Tried getting to to speak in an irish accent and misspelled "charms" and the way the TTS said "chamrs" was just hilarious. So there we go.
Its the same username I had at the other place that shall not be named, until I got permabanned for reasons still unclear to me.
I originally joined via the swimming sub there, looking for recommendations on waterproof music players to use while swimming so I can listen to AC/DC and Motohead etc while swimming laps. I'm a bogan (Australian and New Zealand slang for a person whose speech, clothing, attitude and behaviour are considered unrefined or unsophisticated) and I swim laps every day. Therefore..... waterbogan
A real life nickname I've had since I was 7. I've just stuck with it for the past 26 years. It actually originated from the Beanie Baby Lizzy. And Izzy is just Lizzy the Lizard without Legs. 🐍
The first time I tried karaoke, I was a bit intoxicated and worried that, having a common name, another Nick would get confused. My parents worked by full name incorrectly, so, I figured that that would be a great way to differentiate it, not realizing at the time that the name "Nick" itself normally has a "k" in it, making "Nick w/ a K" arguably more confusing. After sobering up, I found the whole concept wonderfully silly and decided to switch to it as my main screen name.
Out of habit. It was my reddit username for almost a decade and the first thing that came to mind when I made a lemmy account.
Why I originally chose "justlookingfordragon" on reddit: I was looking for fellow Pokémon X/Y players with dragon-type safaris willing to share their codes, but the simplest usernames like "dragon" and "safari" were already taken, and "Imjustlookingforadragontypesafarikthxbai" didn't fit the character limit. I originally didn't even plan to keep the account, so I didn't care that the username was silly and awkward.
To paraphrase a longer explanation, I’m a Nintendo fan, I like Mario games, I love the Bowser fights. I wanted some alliteration on that and Bashing came to mind. Played with that and ended with BowserBasher
I chose mine because one day I had nothing to do and was super bored, so I just stared at ceiling and blackedout. And mind you I wasn't tired or anything neither did I sleep, I just lost consciousness because I was bored.
song by a band that fitted with my habit of nuking my PC every couple of weeks, either because I wanted to try a different Linux distro or because I got some kind of Limewire chlamydia
Well. I am a wench. And quite jaded. I wanted to make something I had not really used before, back when I joined the place that shall not be named, and it sort of stuck. I also really love the color green. If it makes you feel any better I am a much happier person today than I was then. Still a wench though. 😈
I came up with it when I created my second acc on Reddit; I didn't want to spend time thinking of a username so I just thought of the first two words that described my mood at the time and went with it. It means "melancholic potato", I like how dumb it sounds
There was a now deleted YouTube video by OneMinuteGalactica called "Apollo launches his viper funny" where Apollo from the original BSG tries to take off, but the launch tube just goes for miles and miles while the bridge crew and other pilots scramble to figure out what's going on. I thought the reference to it was funny and sounded cool when I was 15ish and it's pretty much stuck
I used to always play Pyro in Team Fortress Classic and would just run around setting people on fire and then running away. It was my only strategy and so I adopted the name.
Discord nickname that originated from OneShot (the game my icon is from). I chose it like 4 or 5 years ago and it stuck on Discord so I just adopted it to here
Tanith was one of the goa'uld from Stargate SG-1 which I was a huge fan of as a kid. Back then I was not so good at spelling so I sounded it out and kept adding letters until I found a username that wasn't taken
It's a futurama reference. Meant to be anonymous but ended up getting lucky with a lightsaber gig and am now stuck with the name lol. Only unfortunate part is I wish I'd known which account was going to get lucky lol
TK is a journalism joke. In that field, placeholder headlines used to commonly be written in as "Headline TK" or "TKTKTK" etc. It comes from back when newspapers were typeset physically before set in lead to be sent to the printer. It is short for To Come. Many editing marks are misspelled on purpose to make them stand out from the final text. "TK" is an unusual pairing of letters, so it stands out.
I was hoping to be generic. Also, to add to articles and photos on lemmy, I wanted random photos from users. I don't even care what they are. So far I've seen a beautiful landscape.
My username originally was Emerald_Earth, because I saw the old Lemmy.world logo with the Earth (that had green on it, like am emerald). I switched to Emerald when I realized it was available. Short and sweet.
After 10+ years on Reddit with the same username, I signed up for Lemmy without the underscore back in June. Then I stopped using all social media until Sync came out and now my password/email recovery don't work. So I effectively locked myself out of my real username and back into the same shittier one that I had to use on Reddit :'(
I combined my dog's names (Kona and Loki) but fucked it up the first time I ever used it as a username. It was supposed to be "Kolonaki" taking the first two letters of Kona and the first two of Loki then alternating in the second half of both. KoLoNaKi. But I accidentally entered "KolAnaki" and just ran with it.
I liked it so much, I made it my fursona's name since before that name was just "Raccoon."
Because it's a pejorative term for a loud-mouthed know-it-all bloviating idiot and I like to keep myself humble and try not to take myself too seriously.
It's been my internet identity / haxxorz handle since the 1990s, and the story is about as benign as Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner and his black-and-yellow striped sweater.
It started off on Discord as a joke I no longer remember the context of, and was originally just "PopeJoeI (as in Pope Joe the First)" , and then spread to other areas, like the site formerly known as Twitter.
Then Discord added the crowns to admins and it then became "PopeKingJoe" and that's that.
I used the same moronic username I got from a name generator for 20 years before Reddit was trashed. I took the opportunity to reinvent myself. I'm a techie with a beard....
Years ago, when I was around 13-14, I wanted a "cool" sounding username, since I was also sick of coming up with usernames for websites. I did some thinking, and came up with "Mr.Champion". Used it ever since.
Nakari has "existed" since I was a teenager. Started off as a character I used in writing as an outlet, but slowly the name also became a handle for me. Hell, I guess an entire "presence" since it's my go-to for most sites.
Lexfortaine came around because I wanted something vaguely "proper" sounded in a D&D game, and I never actually got around to giving the character Nakari a "canon" last name. It worked well enough for an asspull, and has just been tracked on ever since. Grown to like it, actually. Feels more like a proper name.
My friends name is Nick and was thinking about him when I came up with this name. Also wanted a cool unique name like my brothers came up with for their gamer tags.
Math was my favorite subject in school, and I think that adding the phrase "after dark" to something made it sound cooler. So I combined the two to create my username.
EDIT: my display name (not username) is the exact opposite of the display name I used on aliensite
A weird set of events. First I just wanted to sign up on SDF Public access UNIX system but I didn't want to waste my username for testing it out in case I did something wrong. So I went with user224. However a good user named xiled verified that account for me so I stuck with that username.
Later SDF posted on Twitter about running their own Lemmy instance, and since I didn't yet know what Lemmy was, I used the same username. Slowly I made comments and posts locking myself into the stupid "user224" username. And I can't change it.
Because Ganondorf should have been a clone of Samus in Smash Bros Melee, not Captain Falcon. At the time, his one appearance (Ocarina of Time) had him using a projectile-focused moveset. This would have inevitably given him morph ball motions (down-B and roll), which would have ultimately been swapped out, but it's a fun thought that it would have been like that during part of development.
It's a long convoluted story but when I was a teen (I'm 46 now) I created a series of designs I called "earthbound angel" over the years it morphed to whoisearth.
I thought my name in English meant "John Savior", so I just decided to make my online alias "JohnSavour", but for some reason I elongated it to "JohnSaveourSocks".
(Turns out it actually means John Servant, so "JohnServesYou" would've been more accurate.)
Someone on reddit a long time ago said, look at the item to your right, that's your new username, what is it?
It was before I had ever made an account so I took that as time to make one. I was at work so a bag of plasma was there. Done deal.
I don't really remember, but it's short - 4 letters, 2 syllables and it's a real name. It's not my real name though and yes, people love referring to that n-word when they see my username. I have it for years and I don't regret it.
I'm not creative so I've been using a name generator site for a few years that works well for me. When I want to mix it up and get a new username I set the name length to 9 chars max, select a base word I like and let the generator do its thing. I make sure the name is available on the handful of sites I use and we're good to go.