At first I lurked on my boyfriend's account. We had both left Reddit during the API debacle, but I wasn't ready to rejoin social media yet, so he hopped on Lemmy first.
But as he shared links and news and memes with me, and I scrolled the comments, I started wanting to participate. The first few times I felt drawn to comment (but didn't yet), I wanted to ask people what the reasoning was behind their thoughts. That stuff is interesting to me.
So when I finally sat down and made an account for myself, it was the first thought in my head. I haven't found myself asking anybody about their reasoning since then, but I still like the name.
Used to live in Norway when I joined reddit, and the whole Norse lore resonated with me. Back then I had a number attached, that wasn't needed on Lemmy anymore.
I was in jazz band in high school. We were doing a joint thing with the choir, so everyone was running around moving stuff to make space. My parents had bought me a nice music bag with my initials on a plate on the front of it. Someone held up my music bag asking who owned it. I figured they just wanted to let the owner know where it was being moved to, so I spoke up... "Hah, your initials are BJ!"
Hence, my name became blowjob. The completionists called me Blowjob Betty (I'm male) to get that last initial in, too. At the time, I was quite quiet and took myself maybe a little too seriously. This ended that.
One day, I was at my buddy's place, and he called me "Beege," saying he didn't want to say "Bee and Jay," as it was too long. At that point, I said fuck it. My name is Beege. Let's go.
Over time, my friends added an article because why the fuck not.
Over 20 years later, and it's still my name. It actually taught me to not take myself so seriously. Although, one interviewer at a job had a really hard time keeping it together when HR told her my nickname without catching the meaning. She and I are good friends now.
In any case, I always get a slight chuckle inside when people hesitate slightly after introducing myself. I'm great at keeping a deadpan face about it now, too
A few years after high school I joined the stage crew for a musical theatre group some friends started. At a performance after party, I was looking after some of the younger cast who had a few too many: one of them decided I was like Bosley to their Charlie's angels; the other felt I was looking after them in a fatherly way - so they combined it, and that became their nickname for me.
Also, the nickname my siblings had given me, NoPatchGlandBoySleepyTheIronDeficientBrother was just too long.
My name is Helen. I hated that there were no good nicknames for it (ugh, Helly...) but I love my name. Mentioned this to a friend who was like "you could use other parts of the name for a nickname..." and suggested Lenny. As a woman on the internet, having a gender ambiguous username is very beneficial, so I adopted it, and I absolutely love it. I added extra ns because then it'd look like bad kerning Lemmy.
I love the phrase “your average Joe”, but it doesn’t translate very well, or I couldn’t think of a translation quickly enough (English isn’t my first language), so when I was talking with my friends one day, I translated it as “your average mortal”, and I liked it
My username is literal. I'm literally a wood scientist. Or more specifically, I'm a current PhD student in civil engineering and wood science. Identifying Wood by Hoadley was actually a textbook in one of the courses I took.
Mine stands for "Divided by Zer0", based on the programming error "division by zero". Amusingly, people keep assuming it stands for "database zero" or "dragonball zero".
It was sometime in the year 2000 when I had already been DJing at small parties for a while, playing house, drum’n’bass, big beats, and electro. When people asked who the DJ was, everyone just said, "That’s Richard." Naturally, that didn’t sound very cool for an alternative DJ. Then my cousin, who was also a DJ but played the more mainstream style of techno, chose the name DJ Alec-tron, which put some pressure on me. Since we often DJed together, and I didn’t want to go down in history as "DJ Richard," I needed a proper DJ name.
So I started looking for a suitable artist name for myself as a disc jockey. One day, we took the train to the Love Parade in Berlin. We stocked up on canned beer the day before and opened the first can as early as 3:00 AM (in the middle of the night). The fun and drinking continued merrily. I occasionally glanced out the window, hoping to find inspiration from some distant land (aka eastern Germany).
And then it appeared—like the Holy Grail once revealed itself to King Arthur and his knights—from out of nowhere: the station sign "Jena Paradies." I instantly knew that this would be my new artist name. It was as if the hand of God had guided me along the tracks to Jena Paradies station and bestowed this name upon me.
A month after the Love Parade, I had my first gig as DJ Jena Paradies. There’s even photographic evidence from that time:
But over time, I didn’t want to be named after a station in eastern Germany anymore, so I started thinking of a new, better version of the name. I realized that if I added an "e," the name would be pronounced like Gina Wild’s first name. That sounded much cooler to me, so it became my stage name to this day.
I now use it almost everywhere related to me as an "artist"—very often online, with my band, and for photography, which I want to do more of in the future.
I got onto Reddit back in the day for the electronic music production subreddits. There was an old Daft Punk interview during the big Ultra Music festival days where they made a joke that all EDM music was made by just one guy, Eric David Morris.
As a bookish child, I made weekly trips to the library. To get to the kids section I had to pass the large print shelf, and there was one book that was always there: The Spitting Image. The gargoyle on the cover scared me! But when I finally looked him straight in the eye I found that he was trying to look furious, but came across as a little goofy. That's the way I imagine myself, too.
Remember that mobile game that was popular a while ago, Neko Atsume? It's that, but with Etna from Disgaea, because at the time I first made this username (years ago) Neko Atsume was taken and I was playing through Disgaea D2.
My nickname was originally "Stoy On" but over time it got shortend to "Stoy".
"Stoy On" comes from a small Swedish comedy film by "Galenskaparna och After Shave", a fantastic group of theatre actors who has had a very long and successfull carreer of comedy theatre, television and film. They specialized in musicals, with plenty of amazing wordplay and some fantastic songs.
Anyway, the film I am talking about this time is the TV film "The Castle Tour", the summary of it is that a group of Swedish tourists are going on a tour of a castle in Sweden, the guide has them confused with an English tour, and the joke is that the guide just speaks a nonsense language.
Now, one of the nonsense pharses the guide used was "Stoy on!", which is meant to mean "Se upp!" in Swedish, and that experssion has two meanings in Sweden, the normal one "Look out!", and the litteral one "Look up!"
At the same time I was getting annoyed at not having a standard nickname online and when gaming.
And since I thought it was fun to have a nickname that meant "Look out!" in some ways, and I liked the sound of it, I adopted "Stoy On" as my standard nickname, and since it got shortend I mainly go by "Stoy" online, or, if it is taken, "Stoy On".
I made this account shortly after watching Jackass 4. One of the new guys brings his dad on, this guy served time and did not look like he was one to fuck with. They put his head in a fishbowl with a tarantula and he instantly went into full bitch mode. That man's name was Dark Shark.
It popped into my head while I was thinking of one, felt kind of clowny, then I searched for it online and didn't find any results. I was shocked that, apparently, nobody else is using this, so I've decided to.
"Corno" is just a username I made up in my head since I like how it sounds and I was weirdly craving some cornflakes while signing up. As for my display name, that's...well, my name! 😃
Display Name is because the Earth part of a Universe Simulator program run on a windows 11 machine and the Earth.exe process crashed, which is why we have assassination attempts, felon president, CEO getting shot, random coup attempt in South Korea. The Simulation program just spews random plotlines without the Earth.exe process to fine-tune it. Its basically telling AI to draw human hands, it keeps making no sense.
I am kind of introverted, am I actually introvert or socially awkward or whatever doesn't matter, but for the simplicity I'm introvert and I like cats.
Star Wars Galaxies
I was on a red wine kick at the time and had found Ecco Domani to be a good low priced red. I meeded a character name for SWG so I looked up "to seize" in Italian to make "seize tomorrow".
It's actually "squeeze tomorrow" or "tighten tomorrow" and should have been "cogliere il domani" which is cooler. But c'est la vie, or questa è la vita.
It's from my favourite Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing.
Beatrice (on the subject of getting married):
Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster’d with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?
It doesn't make that much sense as a username for me, because the piece of valiant dust would be the husband and I'm a woman. But I thought it sounded nice.
The "conventionally attractive" Marx brother, who usually played the straight man. Still better known than Gummo, if I were to guess.
We're personally fans of Harpo, mainly because of the metaphorical whiplash that comes from watching his scenes. One minute you're laughing at the comical clown or admiring his musical skill, and the next you realize that he's actually a dangerous maniac. (Run, children!!!! He is not safe!!)
When I was younger, I was crazy about Idaho and wanted to move there. One of my old nicknames was Lil Miss Potatoes. Now I'm a grown ass woman, so I'm Lady Taters. People tend to think it's a nickname related to my chest though.
I used to be just "Cyborg" in IRC, forums and online games back in the late 90's because I found them cool. That was always my online nickname.
But it was already taken on Reddit when I joined so so many years ago. Cyborg is short for Cybernetic Organism. So I just used organism in the name instead. It was unique enough that no one else used it.
Around the time I first started using this username about 7 or so years ago, I was playing through the Megaman Zero games, that take place approximately 100 years after the events of Megaman X, which take place during "year 21xx". So 'Zero22xx' specifically references the version of Zero from the Megaman Zero games.
On top of that, I also just thought it was a cool mix of letters and numbers that can look pretty random if you don't know the games, or if I'm not using a profile pic.
The only annoying thing is that at some point around the time I created this username, I started seeing an anime character called 'ZeroTwo' around. So I guess it could be mistaken that I'm referencing that too.
Performed a lot of Demonstration jumps into everything from airports, race tracks, professional sports stadiums, high school sports stadiums, golf courses, and a few other places that required skill and knowledge to land in safely.
Also, spent a lot of time teaching canopy skills to up and coming jumpers.
When Counterstrike first came out a quarter century ago one friend had a PC and we would take turns playing it and wanted to compare stats on some 3rd party stat tracking site so we could talk shit on each other. Finding a unique name was a pain, but I got lucky with this one, which is probably based on something Jay from Clerks said.
I've been lucky that it isn't taken when signing up for stuff so I keep using it. A happy little accident.
But really, I browsed through my music collection by alphabetical order and it sounded cool. Blue Öyster Cult always delivers, even with the title of their songs.
It’s like 15 years old from back when I used to PVP in EVE online. Vaguely weird to pronounce and towards the middle of the alphabet so I don’t get primaried
I have my email service generate an alias and I use that as my username. I delete my account every few months and make a new one on a different instance.
I read an article, that the executioner who operated the electric chair was sometimes called the state electrician. I liked that, as I like many little known words and phrases. It has nothing to do with his job, the euphemism just tickled my fancy.
Clipper Defiance was a Boeing 707 operated by Pan Am. Its main claim to fame was when on February 7th, 1964 it brought The Beatles to America for the first time.
I once created a character in a story when I was a child about a Jack Green from the planet Æarth, and named an account on a popular site accordingly as a similarly young person, as I lacked nominative creativity, evidently. People kept getting confused between Æarth and Earth so I just changed it to Earth for future accounts.
I can remember the Ace part of AceFuzzLord very well. Comes from me always using Ace whenever a game requires a profile name or a 3 letter initial.
The Fuzz Lord part I don't remember really at all, but I assume the Lord part comes from the fact I think pretty highly of myself despite the fact I'm a nobody.
Oh, and do y'all see AceFuzzLord or do y'all see Dizzy Devil Ducky? I have no idea who sees either. I see Ace and I've had other people see DDD. Either way, DDD comes from the fact that he's my favorite Tiny Toons character.
I misspelt it back in yahoo chat days (yea, that was a while ago) and stuck with it because it is unique enough that no one else would accidentally grab it.
It's norwegian shorthand/slang for "No you" (nei du), in the context of for example "Oh no you don't!". A friend of mine had (for unknown reasons) that as his MSN-status for years before his accidental death, and it kind of stuck in the back of my mind. It popped up when I was registering a lemmy account.
This is my 3rd account:
I forgot the password of neidu. Plus it was on .ml before I learned the implications of .ml so no real loss.
neidu2 was on a good instance. The only downside was that people kept assuming I was dutch. Not too bad, as I've been called worse things, but it is more useful for me to mod from sh.itjust.works instead.
For the record: only the accounts mentioned here are mine. Any other variations that may or may not fit my schema are to be treated as someone else. The ones I interact with regularly know this and have other methods for verifying my identity, so don't bother trying to become a mod through setting up neidu4+.
mine is just my normal name given to me in usual earth custom with my parental units assigning me one and another indicating my placement in a lineage. So boring and typical of the species. I mean our species.
I just wanted something short and reasonably pronounceable, as that's easier to remember.
In the past, I've used a FIPS-181 pronounceable password generator to generate pronounceable usernames that don't collide with existing usernames. But since the Threadiverse is still young, plus each new instance has its own username space, it's practical to have a very short username.
My username is a reference to the Wug test, specifically this question: "This is a man who knows how to gling. Yesterday he glanged. Tomorrow he will _____."
My irl nickname is Lizard. This is the story:
I was at what was supposed to be FNM, but none of us were feeling Magic that day so we decided to play Secret Hitler, mostly because it was my fiancée's best friend's sister's birthday so she ended up picking the game.
If you haven't played Secret Hitler, at the start of the game you get a little envelope secretly telling you whether you are a Liberal, Fascist, or Hitler. Liberals want to pass liberal policies to win the game, the fascists want to pass fascist policies that give players ability to shoot dissidents and eventually get Hitler to win. The relevant thing is that Hitler and the Fascists are lizards; apparently the Liberals are normal people, but I don't know for sure since I've never played as a liberal.
Just to be clear, it's almost statistically impossible for me to have never played as a liberal. In each game I've played in, there was a total of 3 Fascists (including Hitler) and usually about a dozen Liberals. I should have been a liberal at least once by now, considering I got my nickname 2 years ago.
On this particular night, we played about a half dozen games, in which I was Hitler twice. I kept suprising them by doing well! They all know I am autistic and can't lie to save my own skin, so as the games went on they got progressively more tilted each time I was revealed to be a lizard. I was also getting frustrated because I really do not like lying!
At the start of the last game, I opened my envelope, saw a lizard, and I was just so fucking done. I snapped at the shuffler, "Are you even shuffling these cards?" and threw my envelope at him. He responded "Well, now I need to reshuffle. And for that you shall die!" and started chasing me around with the Nerf gun we had been using to shoot dissidents. Eventually he cornered me with me cowering and covering my face with my hands, and with a shout of "Die, Lizard!" he shot the gun.
I somehow caught the bullet in between my hands with my eyes closed! And that's why my name is Lizard.
Wat Dabney is a minor character in Terry Gilliam's first non-Python movie, Jabberwocky.
The protagonist, Dennis (Michael Palin) goes to the city to make his fortune as a cooper. One of the first people he meets there is a legendary cooper named Wat Dabney ("the inventor of the inverted firkin") who's been reduced to begging because he's not a member of the guild that controls the trade.
I first adopted the name on IMDb, back in the late 90s, but retired it when IMDb shut down their general interest forums, and didn't use it on Reddit. I revived it for Lemmy.
Mine is related to my name but is not my name. I've been using it so long and in so many places that I decided I need a pronunciation and decided on "wudgerie," which is also not my name. Anyone who knows me IRL could figure out who I am without much trouble, and a dedicated investigator could probably dig it up (that's NOT a challenge, BTW 🤣) with a pretty high level of confidence without breaking a sweat, but (1) I allow for that in what I say online, and (2) I kind of like having an online persona that is mostly just the real me with a bit of anonymity. Keeps me grounded and reminds me that all you assholes are real people too (except you, @[email protected]... or you, Georgia Bulldog fans).
It's a new one I made up when I joined Lemmy. Not sure how I exactly ended up with this but it's the only one I made in over a decade. I like nicknames that sound like actual names but are still unique, and I wanted something that sounds nice and gender-neutral.
Anyway, my nicknames usually become part of my identity. So I'm as much Thelsim as I am <redacted> nowadays :)
I asked Dr GPT for a list of nouns and adjectives with a particular theme and picked some I liked and combined them. I do the same process for all my digital identities.
My cousin, brother and I used to get high and play MTG quite a bit back in the day. There's a card called "Reef Pirates" that we used to joke around and call them Reefer Pirates. When I was making an account on Diablo 2 some time around then it's what popped into my head and stuck.
My page name, ShinigamiOokamiRyuu, is an amalgamation of different anime characters from anime whose characters I have cosplayed as.
My nickname (the thing that says "Call me Lenny/Leni") is based on one of my nickname preferences. I have quite a few, my birth name being Valentina, which allows for a lot of nicknames (including Leni, which is one of the shorthands for Valentina, though Tina is the most popular) that get changed around depending on who I communicate with.
Actually, it depends, and the final form of my username on most social media platforms has a very long story.
It all began when I found this meme funny.
And my username became pippipthediddlydo.
But that honestly became quite a handful, so it got shortened to PipPipTDD. Then shortened even more to PipPip, as people honestly just called me Pip most of the time anyways.
During this period my friends and I had developed a tradition where on Halloween, just for the day, we would put "spooky" in front of our username. I don't remember how my username evolved in this timeframe, but at some point I decided (because I'm very funny /s) to take it a step further and in a very ironic fashion, add a "not" in front of that spooky, to then remove the "not" on Halloween. So the entire year I'm "not spooky" until the one day that I am. And a few adjustments here and there got me to my current username on most platforms (because pip gets taken literally everywhere): notspookypip.