When I began to bop around the dial-up BBSes of the Greater Kansas City area as a pre-teen, I dubbed myself “Captain Dude,” pilot of good ship “Icewind Dale” in Trade Wars 2002.
My second handle was, of course, “Drizzt.”
First/Worst: Online Nickname?
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First & probably worst – ‘The Inca’ on Bay Area BBS New Dork Sublime. Worst because I don’t have a drop of Indian blood in me…
Thanks for reminding me of the $450 phone bill we generated in one month trying to beat some jerks in a door game on &TOTSE in neighboring-yet-toll-call 510 (we later learned they were using a money bug to cheat).
I’ve had some good handles — “The Man from Del Monte” and “Oh My Dear Sweet Buddha” being two of my favorites. These days, I’m “mouthbeef” in most places.
First an probably most unoriginal: Zero Cool
I miss trade wars. Rushing home everyday after school hoping you heard the screech of a modem connecting that was oddly comforting when compared to the busy signal of the one line Baja Tacos BBS all of my friends were also trying to connect to.
I am very unoriginal. My first pick is always cayton….because that’s my name.
@#3: A childhood friend, always trying to one-up everyone around, tried to convince me he had just made the acquaintance of a very elite hacker known as… “Zero Cool.”
Hackers really did come out in a weird marginal time when everybody knew about “hacking,” but nobody thought anyone else knew about it. At least if you were 14.
My first online handle was gubed, debug backwards. Then a coworker that started at the same time as I did gave me my oldest working nickname, bytehead. I own bytehead.org. I do NOT own bryanprice.com, which at least now doesn’t point to his myspace page. My stepchildren nicknamed me Buddha, but I don’t use that online.
Mine was The Overlord, of course! I miss bbs days, I ran a few Remote Access boards, and we used Fidonet Frontdoor for our own nefarious purposes.
Now just another anonymous bit on the vast intra-web sea of cheese, alas.
My first handle was Duane Divel, a intricate obfuscation of “the devil”, but another pretty bad handle i used to use in my bbs days was “Jack the Reaper”. Other examples of my bad handle-making skills in my early computer years are things like “The Enchanted Forest”, “You Find It Under A Rock” and recently i’ve been using “Flertallsformer”, wich roughly translates to “Plural Forms”
General Phreakenstein
I ran the Army BBS on an Apple ][+ back in the early 80′s. I’ll never forget when I came home from school early one day to discover 2 un-marked cars observing a telco lineman outside my house. I got in touch with a contact at the phone company and learned that they put a trace on all incoming calls. That was the end of my BBS.
Wow.. this brings tons of memories rushing back.. using my 300baud modem with my Vic-20, then I got my Commodore64 and I got a free Hayes 2400 baud modem (at the time having a 2400 baud modem was considered leet and super fast!) anyway I think I was 13 when I first started on BBSs and I went by ‘Special K’, where I got the name from I can’t recall, that was 20+ years ago… I’ve gone by ‘dracos’ for the last seven years, and I go by ‘dampeal’ as well, since the name dracos seems to have become very popular and taken by people now
[sheepishly] “Moonhawk.” First and only, abandoned some 13+ years ago, but still kind of embarrassing.
“Wild Moose”…it may not be the worst one out there, but it certainly isn’t good either.
Let me count the ways…
- Coolio, on some random Auckland BBS
- Superman, for my first forays into online gaming (CS beta 1.1 or something)
- recidivist, which I thought was cool for a while
- and finally “Saint Fu”, which is funny if you abbreviate saint.
Oh yeah, it was “The Dungeon” on my Atari 1200XL in the early 80′s. I was, of course, “Dungeon Lord.” I guess there was too much D&D in there somewhere. I have such fond memories of x-modem uploads to my BBS…
I was ‘Hedgehog’ back in the BBS days. Not very awesome, but it was my nickname because I used to wear my hair spiked straight up (hey, it was 6th grade).
Pork Musket is far better and far worse at the same time.
“The Wizard”. I think I was 13 or 14 years old. Apparently there was an accomplished phreak that went by that name as well. One afternoon I got a phone call by a bunch of phreaks on a conference call asking me if I was The Wizard who hacked such-and-such and would I like to write a text file for them on it. I told them I wasn’t that person, but they still invited me to stay on the call. I stayed on and listened for hours and hours as they talked about trunks and switching systems, blue boxing, and all kinds of amazing stuff.
I declared myself Baron Harkonnen back in 1984/85. Later, I switched to Bevatron Repairman which — as you can see — has made a comeback.
One of my dearest friends was “Copy Cat” which was pretty bitchin’
When I first logged onto a BBS in 1990 I had to come up with a name: vampyr. Once I realized I wasn’t all that original, I segued into ‘the smiling mortician’, which while not my own phrase (thanks Ferlinghetti) was much less common. I also ran a WWIV board called “terminal illness” for a year or so.
Oh the memories…screaming upstairs because someone always seemed to pick up the phone when I was at a critical point in the forest. Actual comment from my yearbook (not giving the year!): “Have fun calling BBS’s with your 14.4!”
First name: Cherry
Worst name: Wilderness Angel (the inspiration? a book of Jim Morrison’s poetry. Oh noetry!)
I think I finally let go when the guy I’d been chatting with online in one of the games turned out to be a boy in my neighbourhood that I had a total reciprocal hate-on for. I do miss that satisfying successful connection sound every time I logged on though.
Oh man, I forgot Trade Wars! And the elaborately marked-up maps I drew on fanfold to keep track of the good routes.
I was mostly a Citadel chat-board user, though. And [I post anonymously because of the terrible name] started out in the late 80s as Omega Frog, probably for reasons which didn’t make sense even at the time.
I have always and will continue to use either:
ogvor – Totally made up name that is garenteed not to be taken as a user name, so I don’t have to worry about changeing it for each and every website I register for.
Rax Dakkar – Used for anything video game related (like my xbox live Gamer Tag). I got the name from a random name generator in the game Star Wars: Nights of the Old Republic. I’ve used it in every video game since.
First online handle(s): When I started using BBSes in the DC area in 1992 or ’93 I was simultaneously Rusty Bukitz and Houdini (inspired less by the actual man than by his character as portrayed in a Batman graphic novel). The first two girls I dated were both met off BBSes, the first with the handle Asparagus and the second was Zute (a misspelling of the character from Monty Python & The Search for the Holy Grail).
Worst handle: For both the unintended connotations and the experiences that went along with it, Krapfruit was regrettable. I still have an email account by that name to this day, though I use it primarily for mailing lists and similar spambait.
My first and probably worst username ever was Doo Doo, a family nickname. We don’t refer to feces as doodoo in Australia so at 12 I thought nothing of it.
Nowadays I go by Daniel San, danielamos, nomoremaybes or sometimes in games as Doobat. I’m not that imaginative.
I used to be “Onan” when I was trawling through MUDs.
As in:
But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he lay with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the LORD’s sight; so he put him to death also.
Being a 15-year-old girl, I thought this was hilarious.
I came up with devojane about 13 years ago while choosing a profile name on my mom’s aol account. (I’m so cool.) It was a combo of my favorite band & my girlfriend(now wife)’s favorite band. We shared that profile across three or four ISPs; she eventually got her own handle(s) but I have no imagination. I’ve only modified it slightly since. I still use devojane in many places. Apparently, it means something in an eastern European language, but I dunno which one or what.
Hmm, Phillip, the easter European devojaneoid word has to be spelled differently … all that Google returns is related to your user accounts on various sites
Easily googleable nickname … gift or curse?
Heh. Way back in the “Prodigy” days I just used my username “NNDD40B”, and then decided to try “-=CyberFreak=-” as something nicely inconspicuous.
Blind Zen Archer came from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, and after awhile I got tired of typing the whole thing out, I shortened it to “BZArcher” and that’s stuck for quite awhile.
Phred the terrorist. From doonesbury. If you’re old enough to remember when you could say terrorist without being invited for a ride in the NSA party van, you’re old enough to remember Phred.
My first (in the 80′s and into the 90′s) was Meglos (from the prickly Dr. Who villian) which I used until it collided on an IRC server. I immediately dropped it — I wanted unique, after all — for my current, now in it’s 15th year. If you google my current one, you get only me for pages until you find the Shadowrun dragon it’s taken from.
My very first was “kidspike” on compuserve in 1990 or so…but the one I lament most has to be “HALO@aol.com” back in 1996. Not because I used it in all it’s spec ops glory (High Altitude, Low Opening) but because I wish I had kept it and ebayed it to some crazed FPS fan year later.
Well, wurp. What kind of geek do you have to be to name yourself after a pre-made character in a 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons module?
I used to go by Mycroft, usually with a numeric value as evidently I am not the only person to read Heinlein.
Imagine that.
I would also get pinged by the mushroom hunters on AOL cause they are mycologists
Oh, I forgot about my favorite and worst name, came up in the spur of the moment:
phutterbutter
yep. That’s a good one.
Nowadays, I stick with the boring ‘dculberson’ which has an unbelievable number of matches on Google, all of which appear to be me. I need to take a break.
Mine’s been my current one or variations thereof (I’m Jack O’Lantern on City of Heroes).
Skwid was my first handle. In places where it’s insufficiently unique (or the atmosphere just seems to demand it), it expands to “Great Gray Skwid.” It’s lasted almost 13 years, and I don’t expect it to change any time soon.
“Smartaxe” was my first, and probably the worst I’ve stuck with for any length of time on any place I care about. Especially with the “100″ suffix which I added for no reason really other than numbers in screennames = awesome.
Now I’m A New Challenger pretty much everywhere. In college I played a crapload of Capcom fighting games with friends, so I found it appropriate, especially since I was almost always the new challenger and not the champion.
LaserXcaliber. Because really, what could be cooler than an undefeatable mideival sword + the infinite power of lasers?
Perhaps that led to my current one.
I believe my first, and probably worst, online name was Monsieurbatar, an extremely clever play on masturbator. Of course, being 12 at the time, I thought this was hilarious. This name was used only for a short period on a High Elf Paladin in Everquest.
I then went on to the Everquest random name generator which spat out Lonin, which I still use to this day. I also use Woad (inspired by the woad raiders in Age of Empires), also born from my Everquest playing days, and SmileZ, first appearing in Counter-Strike, coming from a real life nickname and the use of my initials.
I can’t remember my actual first name (I was bbsing before i was 9), but the first one I used with any regularity I believe was ‘Swordsman’. Which wasn’t so bad, but I understand a lot of innuendo went right over my head.
Later I was Lord Soth.
I used to call myself TVtheFleshtone based on an old middle school inside joke that, oddly enough, did not involve porn. When I was a sophomore in high school I realized that it sounded pretty stupid. So, I changed it to TVarmy, mainly because I was into Advanced Wars at the time, and it was back when the Iraq War was just starting and it was getting a lot of coverage. My name’s not meant to be anything, it’s just a quick change to a name that sounded immature.
Commander in Queef…I’m sorry Portland Indymedia.
Back when I first discovered anime I went by SAILOR_MOON#6##
HA!That took me back
oddly that the same year I discovered Hentai…
Just kidding.(…)
I remember hopping around in Counterstrike for a while in local cybercafes as “nazigunboy”, which for whatever reason sounded inexplicably okay at the time.
I just used “Sleepless Blue”.
The first was the worst, too. Kombatter. I did like Mortal Kombat a lot back then.
The nicks I liked the most were The_Nomad, DemonKing and this one I’m using.
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So help me for download this great program for free! Thanks!