How did you get your handle?

[Gollgagh]

I like the taste of Calpis drinks and I love the underlying meaning of "sperm".

gay

unless you're a girl in which case, hawt

[Brushfire]

Honestly I think my handle stems from the fact that my Pokemon TCG deck was a variant of the theme deck "Brushfire." Unfortunalty when I joined most any site I always could never get just Brushfire. So I tacked on my graduation year and my handle was born. Since the beggining of last year however I have been using the handle "RecentElectronics" on sites like EpicGaming.us and a few others.

[anthonium]

My name is Antonio, some call me Anthony, I majored in Biochemistry, thought of element names...and so anthonium was born. The End.

[The Damned]

Short story: it was high school and I needed a cool, intimidating name for networks games of Descent.

Long story: during lunch and after school in the computer lab in high school, there were the usual group of twenty or so people that would hang out and play network games. Now, this is 1995, before Windows 95 and all its "improvements", so when we set up a nework game, we actually set them up. Manual loading and initializing programs and protocols. DOS was our war zone, and our battlefields were whatever could run safely on 486 66Mhz processors and 8 megs of RAM.

Any way, Descent was a big favorite back then. Terminal Velocity, Doom 2, Warcraft 2, even once we got Quake on the newer, better computers next door, it didn't matter; Descent was first and foremost the game we played. Even after weeks of playing it and then going onto something else for a change, Descent was always sitting there, ready to be played again.

Oh, and how we played. Winter was great, because it was too cold to go anywhere outside and there were times when they actually told us not to leave the building during lunch. The summer was wonderful because our favorite teacher (one of two, I suppose, but for different reasons; the first, our computer teacher, was nice enough to let us use the computer lab for games. The second, because he was a surly old bastard that liked to give us fun assignments like "make paper cut-out puppets and put on a show discussing historical events for class". He also told the principal to fuck off in front of our class and we loved him for it. He also gave us options and opportunities to escape the dreaded "pep rallies" that plagued us every semester. Fuck that shit, we ran every chance we had) he would let us "help upgrade" the computers and we could spend our summers playing more games all the time. He let us order pizzas and drinks, so long as we didn't eat or drink at the computers.

Any way, we played Descent. I believe I mentioned this a bit by now. And after seeing how everyone else had cool names (Psychofish, Gridlock, Doomguy, etc...), I was determined to have one for myself. I tried a few, but they were either derivative, or boring.

I spent a few nights looking things up in whatever books I had access to at home (this was before internet access was common. In fact, most of the schools in region didn't have dial-up. We barely even had a working ISDN for a few years). I poured over pages and pages, checked out the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the medical books (ick... too many pictures. I stopped after the first chapter on skin conditions. Good thing too. Otherwise I'd be known here as The Seborrheic Keratosis. Not exactly the image I wanted to convey in the heat of missile fights.

There came a point where I just wanted something that wounded cool, awesome, dark and mysterious. Something that would send a chill down the spines of my opponents. Like... BATMAN! But that was taken. Not only by the comic book character, but also by one of the younger kids that sneaked in from time to time. We shot him many times. With Mega Missiles. If he was up against someone that was far better than him, which was pretty much everyone there, we'd just shoot flares at him. Flares cost one energy point and did one point of shield damage. A freshly spawned player had 100 points of shields. It was the Descent equivalent of a taunt, or insult. It made an annoying crash sound on anyone that had a sound card, and it stuck on your screen for five or so seconds and obscured your view. There was no real limit to how many you could shot into someone's face; there were times when all a player could see was flares sticking out of their canopy.

Sorry, getting off topic a bit. The point was that we shot him with flares a lot, and there were time when he was so besieged by us, that someone got a lucky flare in at the right time and killed him. It was cause for many room-wide cheers and laughs.

I eventually decided on the handle "Aurora". Then someone pointed out to me that was a rather girly name. Fuck this, I thought. I'll go with... Damn it. Damn. Damn something something. The Damn something. The Damned. Yeah, that's sooooo cool.

At this moment, I'd like to point out that this was 1995, and there were no goths in high school. Not like the ones we have now. No, the few goths we did have just dressed up that way because they liked it. They didn't listen to shitty music, there was no emo scene back then. No emo style, no emo music, nothing. If it existed then it didn't reach our part of the world yet. And it wouldn't for a good ten years or so. Any way, I was not part of the "goth" group, and while I did know a few of them and we did talk and hang out sometimes, I was not part of their click or whatever the word is. So,no, I was not a goth. I am not a goth. Never have I been, nor do I plan to be, a goth.

So, the fateful day when I would use my new name to terrify my opponents and see them flee before me had come. It was lunch time. The network had been secured and readied by those who could get there faster. Seats were saved and games had been started, only waiting for people to sit down and join.

I saw the game list, and looked at the names of those who had already started the fray. I selected the one with seven other people (Descent only let eight players total at a time, which was actually a rather big number back then). I quickly went to create a new account and typed in my awesome new name!

Being the DOS ear, files (like, say... Descent player profiles) were limited to eight characters and a three letter file type. So for Descent, a player's profile would be named "player01.pfl" or whatever the file type was. And the profile file was named after the player's name. So "Gridlock" was "gridlock.pfl", and Steve would be "steve.pfl".

"The Damned" is 1, 2, 3, 4... 10 letters, counting the space.

Fuck.

Even if I take the space out, I still have one too many. How can I fix this. I like this name. It's an awesome name! It's the name that will destroy my enemies without even firing a single shot! I must USE IT!

"thedamnd" was what I eventually got. It was clear enough to understand, and it kept the cool mysterious evil thing. Oh yeah, now it's time. Yes, yes indeed! I clicked on create, joined the game, and waited for the reaction.

A few seconds passed. Surely they were in awe of this new player name. Then, from the other side of the room, I heard one fateful voice.

"Who the hell is 'theada-munned'?"

There was no fear in his voice. No recoil of terror. Not even a slight bit of curiosity or even a sliver of a hint of anything I wanted people to have, to feel when they saw my name. Instead, he had this sort of "what kind of name is this, and why is it so hard to read?" quality.

I casually raised my hand and said "It's 'The Damned'". At which point someone shot me with a charged up Fusion cannon blast and my screen switched to a Pyro GX with my colors on it exploding.

"Oh. Yeah, I can see it now. Only 8 letters sucks, huh?"

I respawned into the level, and reply "Yeah. It does."

Since then, I have used the name for everything game and internet related. It's an old name (not like the ancient evils of the netherworld that it was supposed to be drawn from, of course), and while it's been showing signs of age and overuse by other things (some vampire movie based on a vampire book came out, there was this shitty metal band, and then someone even went so far as to go back in time and make a movie about a whole village filled with psychic children and named it after me... bastards), it's not time to retire it. No, this is my name. I had it back when most of the internet wasn't even conceived of yet. Most of the games I used it on are now free-ware or abandon-ware. Hell, some of the companies that made those games don't exist anymore. This name has outlived a lot of things, and will continue to do so for quite some time.

After all, it's super cool awesome!

/tl;dr

[Arek the Absolute]

Lufia 2

The character that has the shortest presence in the game *he is only in the intro video and no he doesnt die*, yet is the most important character *way more so than maxim*.

[TheSnowStorm]

My handle is a pun towards my last name, which is "Snow."

[Sam Ascher-Weiss]

I just used my middle name

[Faustt]

Well, I like the folk tale of Faustt. A guy who basically sells his soul to the devil for power, but just as his life gets good, the devil rips him into hell.

I was making a character in Everquest 1. Faust was taken, so I added the extra T at the end. Thus, Faustt was born.

[Hausdog]

I just used my middle name

That's quite a middle name.

One of my friends gave this name to me. I sort of like it. So I decided to register as it.

[sephfire]

I stumbled across a jpeg with "sephfire" as the file name, and I thought: "that's awesome." Looking back, I wish I hadn't picked something that appears so fanboyish, but it's pretty much my established handle here now.

[Lanodantheon]

I use soma because it's the name of a Strokes song and they are my favorite band. A lot of people think it's from Castlevania, or I'm like a huge dope addict (soma is also a drug) . Also some people think it's from soma apparel which apparently makes bras and lingerie and stuff.

I use Tragick on most other forums and videogames if Soma is taken. Used to be tragicked. The idea came from final fantasy XI believe it or not. One of the items you need to collect at level 18 to get your sub job is called "magicked skull" and i came up with "tragicked" but later dropped the ed to avoid mispronunciations and to keep it simple for xbox live.

Believe it or not, Soma is also the name of a MegaCrop in my Senior Thesis Screenplay (They make Cybernetics).

I first heard the name in Argentosoma, an anime,. According to Takuto Kaneshiro/Ryu Soma, the Main Character, "It means 'Body' in Greek. It's also an old alchemist's term for a substance that makes you immortal." I looked it up, he was right.

My Own Handle has an origin in gaming, aptly appropriate because as I write this, I remember the now late Gary Gygax's impact on the industry and subsequently, us...

Back in the days of BBS' (I think it was back then) or 1998 to be more accurate, I had discovered 2 games at the time, Metal Gear Solid and Mega Man Legends. So, decided to combine my 2 passions into a screen name, Juno Snake. The Juno part of the equation came from the last boss of MML, Mega Man Juno. Of course I didn't know MMJ's gender at the time or that Juno was the name of a greek GODDESS. So there's a period of several years where I posted under what was for all intents and purposes a girl's name. But, I was 14, I thought like that. ..

When I found out this fact, I was also going through a personal reinvention and was having a falling out with friends, so I tried thinking of a new name for a new E-Mail addy. The first name that came to mind was my brother's first D&D character. My brother introduced me to D&D and has played many characters since then, but that character keeps coming back to me for some reason.

The character was an Elf who was devoutly racist against Non-elves not because of blind prejudice, but because they couldn't pronounce his name, Lanialdanthial Thul correctly. Neither could my brother, since I'm sure the pronounciation changed every session just to screw with people. When I made my Hotmail account, it came out Lanodantheon Thul and it stuck for a while. A few years later I started using it on forums.

I thought about changing it again last year, but then my question got read on Session 31 of the Kojima Production Report:

"This is from Cheney, Washington." "How do you say this?" "Maybe they do this on purpose?" "Lano...dantheon..."

Now, that quote is not that long and the KPR only has a few thousand listeners and it will never be the most famous episode of one of many little podcasts on the net. But, when you add up the facts that I was a huge fan of the podcast at the time (Listened religiously), was going through a family move so I was a little depressed (Some would say Emo), and so on and so forth...it felt like winning the lottery. My heart stopped cold for a minute when I heard it, then it went a million miles an hour after I rewound the clip to hear it again. Then I made it my sig on several boards for a while until I realized, nobody cared. I believe my grades went up after that for a while and rightly so...

But, that's just a small moment in time. That clip will dissolve into the vast and infinite memory of the net and be forgotten eventually. That is, of course unless my master plan for world domination completes its cycle and I end up successful. Then that session will end up stickied...

But, that's just my handle's story. If that's not a good reason to keep a screen name that is hard to say, hard to copy down and hard for most to remember, then I don't know a good reason.

[Eten]

Took a stab at a more interesting route on my way back, ended up going through the town named Bettendorf, enjoyed the sound of it. Shortly afterwards I was asked for an Alias, shortened to 8 letters became Etendorf. 4 letter variant dropped to just Eten.

[Shining Mirage]

My co-worker from Boston was cracking jokes on me while I was spacing out one morning. I was staring at one of my Yu-gi-oh decks (Angel / Majestic Mechs or whatever they're called) while I had The Northern Exposure Vol. 3 album blaring in my ears.

Then she just blurted out, "Well, I guess the 'Angelic Sound Factory' is doing well this morning? How's the hangover?"

That name was originally supposed to be for my music project that I was working on, but that has to be put on hold until further notice. With both school and work, I don't have time for much. Hell, it's been 2 weeks since I've seen my PSP. I know that I didn't lose it, it's just I forgot where in the house it is. Bleh.

I just recently got around to changing my OCR handle to what everything I own has on it.

*shrugs*

[Strati]

lol pokemon

No, seriously, it was an original character in a story I never wrote. So yeah, lol pokemon.

[Cecilff2]

No one ever takes this handle, ever. US version just not cool enough for them. I, however, must stick with it to teach a lesson to every single spoony bard. I bet Cecilff4 gets plenty of use though.

[Leon K.]

I used to play Alien vs Predator 2 pretty competitively, and eventually I got recruited for a pretty good clan called [s.T.A.R.S.], and they consisted of characters from STARS from RE1, All the names were picked, so I just nabbed Leon Kennedy from the just released RE2, even though I didn't like him that much. The name stuck through several games, and well, I ended up here.

Thank God Leon Kennedy was such a badass in RE4, made years of using Leon K. worth it.

[TSori]

Took a stab at a more interesting route on my way back, ended up going through the town named Bettendorf, enjoyed the sound of it. Shortly afterwards I was asked for an Alias, shortened to 8 letters became Etendorf. 4 letter variant dropped to just Eten.

Interesting. I actually lived in Bettendorf, IA for about 7 years.

mine's pretty self explanatory, or at least what I was going for with it. NintendoAce was a screen name I made back in 8th grade. Ended up using it in a few places. It has an underscore here because I originally registered as nintendoace and for whatever reason was never able to access my account, so the underscore got added when I signed up again.

Junior year of high school though I decided I wanted one without an obvious meaning and I've been using that new one for everything since then (about 5 years).

[BlueMage]

Mate of mine was running a modified D20 tabletop, using classes adapted from Final Fantasy (or more specifically, 8-bit Theatre) but they already had a BlackMage. Cue the BlueMage, able to learn any magic used on him and hurl it back at his foes. And in keeping, such a character would be called BlueMage.

It turns out that a dual-wielding half-dragon with an acid wit can do more damage by taunting than by actually hurling spells. Even moreso when you successfully taunt the DM. And of course, critically failing to teach another party member a spell when they critically succeeded to learn it - it's quite amusing to see a 2nd level spell backfire such that the DM just tosses all his dice to determine damage.

Anyways, it didn't last, but the handle did - I was BlueMage ever since.

[JCvgluvr]

JCvgluvr is a combination of single-letter symbols and "Lover" shortened.

The capitals JC stand for Jesus Christ. Being a born-again Christian, I wanted to display that in my username. I put it in caps since God, Jesus, the Bible (etc) are always in caps. Besides, I wanted to show Him honor and respect. That's also why it comes first.

The lowercase "vg" stands for VideoGames, if you didn't already guess. I've loved games since I was in diapers, and I'm posting in a website related to videogames, right? The reason its lowercase and comes after JC indicates their lower priority in my life. God's got to come first, you know?

And then comes "luvr". I made the name up myself when I was creating my original Xbox gamertag. I've used it for every forum and gamertag since. People just call me JC for short.

[BipolarMoon]

I got my screen name idea, from a story idea I came up with, while listening to "Change of Seasons", by Dream Theater, on my IPOD. I decided to break the story up into four sections, with each season in the section name. (Ex: Summer Daze, Fall of Sanity). The story is going to start and end in the summer. (An idea I got from listening to Octavarium, too much). My story is still in the early character ideas stage.

I also realized, in a very deep sleep, that you can take a full moon (or circle), and seperate it into four quadrants. This symbolizes that every person, has their out of character moments, and we kind of have to coexist, or we will continue to make the same foolish mistakes over and over again. I guess you can say, that I have some really weird and vivid dreams.

[Diabloshadow]

When the original Diablo came out I played that non stop and made so many characters I was running out of names. So I came up with this, I have used it everywhere since then. Plus believe it or not its never taken anywhere I use it. Since most people name themselves something "evil/cool/dark/etc" I find it hard that this is never taken.

[captainocd]

I have OCD (I currently type to you through a pair of paper towels) and my friends like to take jabs at me because of it. I don't mind, as one of my ways of dealing with it is to embrace it.

One night, I was showing my friend a computer game when the phone rang. It was for him and when he finished using the phone, he put the reciever on my computer desk instead of the table it came from. This bugged the shit out of me so I reached over and moved it back to it's proper place. That's when he commented in a sarcastic tone "Okay, Captain OCD!" I loved the name so much that I made it my handle.

[Red Shadow]

[Jaybell]

A mutation of my initials (JBEL).

[Irregular]

Rogue robots in the Mega Man X series are called Mavericks. But Maverick was taken, and I remembered reading that the alternate translation that word was irregular.So I became Irregular. Boring, isn't it?