unforum

[Ozy_y2k]

But wait, what does the "steve" part mean?!?!?!?

[AnthraX101]

I started using this one in '95 (Thats right, before all the crazy stuff went down). I had a glancing familiarity with the band, but was really into "outbreak" style books at the the time. Ebola was too well known, this worked out better.

I gave this name up after Sept. 11th, but I was still receving a lot of flack from many sources from the few lingering instances of this name. Then, my post office tested positive for Anthrax, and I was wandering around NBC studios the week of their incident. So I decided to say screw what other people thought, and reclaimed my name.

There are a few places where I still use some other names.

AnthraX101

[dmax]

CAREFUL WITH THAT DAMN AX, EUGENE!

[Stevoid]

My name's Stevie. A friend of my brother's often called me Stevoid (guess he's jealous of my towering intellect and wanted to bring me down? ).

Well actually, I changed my name to Stevie about 15 years ago as my given name was Gaelic so everyone had problems remembering, pronouncing & spelling it...Stevie was a nickname from school which kind of stuck because I went to an all-girl private school and I found out that half the girls in my class would jump and blush if you shouted that name due to a rather cute guy they knew.

Well OK, if you want the story behind the story behind the story...the Gaelic name was Dheammmuagghs, pronounced (sort of) Sheemargs but people reading it tended to say DAMN AX...oh sorry, that wasn't me

[SarKenobi]

Lately, I've been asked about what the hell my username means. If you look at my avatar, it's pretty easy.

I created SarKenobi in 1997 when I first got internet. On a Mac that's much older.

Mind fart. Couldn't think of anything good. SarKenobi was the first thing I thought of, so I stuck with it all these years.

Sar is the first three letters of my first name and Kenobi is my favorite Star Wars character.

And Ozy... SarCalrissian was in close 2nd.

[monkeypants]

What's in a name?

[LazarusLong]

Many years ago (alright, so it wasn't that many years ago, but all the really good stories start out "Once upon a time", or "Many years ago", and I want this to be a really good story, so I'll start it out "Many years ago".), I was working for a computer company that shall remain nameless, but is based in Cupertino and named for a popular fruit.

Well, as things would have it, one of the developers released into the world an unofficial piece of software called "Rumor Monger". It was designed to demonstate proof of concept for a non-server based communications protocol. Think of it as a chat client for a local network. Since it was called "Rumor Monger", a lot of the traffic was just that, rumors, and since nobody wanted to be associated with a potential leak of sensitive information, we all used "handles", just like the nicks we all know and love.

As luck would have it, I was one of the older developers in the group (hell, my boss was three years younger than I), so I was always referred to as "the Old Man", or "hello, it's the '90s", or "when are you going to start using something other than punched cards". All good natured humor, I assure you, and I gave as good as I got.

When I needed to select a handle for Rumor Monger, I wanted something that my associates would immediately recognize, but which was obscure enough to afford me plausible deniability. So, I chose the oldest man I could think of, Lazarus Long, AKA Woodrow Wilson Smith, elder of the Howard Families, and certainly one of the most memorable characters ever penned by the late Robert Heinlein.

I've stuck but that monicker ever since, on various message boards and chat channels, and I use random Lazarus Long quotes for my sig. It amuses me to think that some of my old collegues will come across the name and wonder if it's still me (and if any of you are reading this, it is still me, just a little older).

Of course, there was that unfortunate incident in the debugging session with that damn axe, but hopefully they've all forgotten about that by now...

[fireball]

Well, pretty simple really.

So, it's my freshman (RAT) year at Tech, and my first week in the Tech band. I'm at a band party, and I'm telling one of the other trombones (Captain Mustang) about my last name - it's German for 'fire'. So he says, <Southern Drawl> "Fiiiirrre. That's a good name for a nick name. Fiiirrreballll." </hick>

So then he goes up to the Band Captain (Alpha), and introduces me as "Fireball". And it might have ended there, but then he goes and informs all of the other trombones. And that's all she wrote. I figure there could be much worse nicknames to have, so I continue perpetuating it. With the exception of work -- having a nickname of Fireball would NOT be a good thing to have at a chemical plant.

[jamesi]

Hey, I had forgotten about this thread. Good thing Flig submitted his or I would have never had the chance to say my piece.

There's no rhyme, reason or function to my nickname. Years ago, I used to use InSight, and was original_insight on the Cloudmakers/Jawbreakers Yahoo groups for the longest time. However, right about the time Plexata was ending, I chose jamesi as my nick on a whim. I liked how it sounded (JAY-meh-SEE) and I think I was listening to some old Smashing Pumpkins at the time, therefore more than likely subconsciously taking it from James Iha (one of the band members).

As uninteresting as that is, jamesi led to James Ingrahausen and Anatoli Jamesinokov personas, so it resulted in some good material for the past year.

[catherwood]

When I was in eighth grade, we had the coolest English teacher. He was one of those hold-overs from the hippie years, wearing long hair and a beard, whose style of teaching was to treat the students like peers and be their friend. He turned us on to hip things like Firesign Theater comedy albums.

He also thought my name didn't suit me. My full legal first name is Kathy; it's on my birth certificate that way, not short for Kathleen or Catherine. My teacher claimed to have trouble saying it, as if his mouth couldn't come up short so soon after the Kath- syllable. He wanted to give me a new name, a nickname, a proper long name that I could pretend was merely abbreviated to 'kathy' and one which said more about my individuality.

Being an English teacher, he encouraged a lot of reading. Being a brainiac, I enjoyed reading a lot, especially mystery novels. Of course we all know that every classic mystery has a butler in it wielding a damn axe, just like in "Nick Danger, Third Eye" by Firesign Theater. That butler's name is Catherwood, and there my teacher found the inspiration for my nickname. (Heh, Nick name, get it?) My peers agreed to make the name stick.

So why do i always spell it in lowercase now? Back in eighth grade, I didn't have much use for it in written form, except as a pseudonym or pen name, and found it was faster to write in all uppercase. I used it when I signed cartoons and oil paintings (back in the days before computers when I actually had hobbies), and it was easier to brush stroke the block letters rather than do cursive with a paint brush. I just got used to seeing it in all caps.

The years passed, and Al Gore invented the internet. People posted messages to Usenet newsgroups with their real names (and fancy signatures with disclaimers about how their employers are not responsible for the opinions being expressed, yada yada). I did the same, having left behind my high school persona for the real world. Then I learned about chat rooms from AOL, and found out that people didn't use their real names in cyberspace. When I signed up for the email account, I wasn't thinking about it as an identity at the time, and chose to use my license plate JNSAISQ as my inbox. Later, when I needed a screen name to begin posting on a message board, the obvious choice was to resurrect CATHERWOOD, but boy it sure looked pretentious in all caps on a computer screen. I registered as 'catherwood' and began my new life as a puzzle slut, working with people online trying to solve a CD-rom computer game and contest called Treasure Quest.

Since then, I have become addicted to IRC and message boards and instant messaging, and I even made a career out of building web pages. People in chat very quickly decided it was too much to type a 10-letter nick, teaching me to answer to 'cath' and 'cat' instead. After all these years, I feel less like a 'Kathy' than ever. I tell my co-workers to call me Kat, and I have grown comfortable with that as my "day name", while I reserve 'catherwood' for my hobbies and my true self-identity.

As a postscript, I'll explain why you might also see it truncated to 'catwood'. When I first tried to register my Stone ID (www.thestone.com) I couldn't get it to take a 10-letter nick. Spur of the moment frustration had me take a damn axe to the length and 'catwood' was what i had in the box when I hit the submit button. It still looks better to me uncapitalized. And when I needed a nick for AIM, of course it asked me to make it unique and suggested trailing numbers; I chose catwood76 because I graduated high school with the Class of '76.

[aliendial]

In high school I was on stage crew, where I wielded a mean paint brush. Oh, I was also good with hammer, nails and glue. Anywhoo, a couple of my tech-oriented buddies were playing with a piece of electronica back stage one day (knowing them, having a contest to see how fast they could take it apart and then put it back together), and while studying it to learn all its functions one remarked to the other "that's an alien dial". That phrase is strikingly similar to my real name. The sound of it made them pause for a moment when the realized what they had done. Later that day, they gifted me with my nick. It first came in handy that year when I missed picture day for school activities, so I had to invent an actual alien dial that I drew in everyone's year books when I signed them (usually standing on someone's head). The next time it came in handy was many years later (don't ask how many) when I figured out after being on line for quite some time that something slightly more anonymous would be much more fun. It was a strange struggle to get it registered at Yahoo, which insisted on capitalizing it and kept telling me it was unavailable but then showed no others in their member lists. I plugged away until they gave in.

aliendial

[kimer]

Re: Name

[PaleFigure]

Short version: I am a white guy.

Not-really-long-but-longer-than-the-Short version: I once wrote an autobiographical (but heavily drenched in metaphor and symbolism to protect the innocent) short story featuring a "pale figure". While I'm not entirely still the person I was when I wrote that story, enough of that person remains that the name is still valid.

Of course, as you guys all know, I also respond to its natural abbreviations PF and pale.
footnote: It always gets interesting when FrankenPaula and I are involved in the same conversation, because people refer to us as FP and PF repsectively. There have been more than a few posts I've had to read twice because I thought I was being credited for something I didn't say and vice versa.
personal footnote: I have a head cold at the moment and my throat feels like Satan's anus. It's not relevant to anything, I just wanted to share.

[kimer]

Re: The long & The short of it

[Myssfitz]