Just out of curiosity...

[conuly]

How did you pick your username? Full story, please!

My story

This starts a long, long time ago in a game far, far away....

I believe it was... okay, I don't really remember, but I couldn't get Connie or Tansy as a name. So I eventually just typed random letters and came up with Ulyyf. I didn't expecially like Ulyyf as a name, but it had the advantage of looking like a guy name, which was the person I wanted in this vaguely medieval game I was playing whose name I cannot recall.

So when I got to Dragon Court, Ulyyf was the natural option for me. I still didn't especially like it, and was starting to get irked at always getting confused for a guy, but I was used to it and I knew nobody else would have it. Incidentally, I was addicted to Dragon Court for a good year before I found...

Neopets. Where I took the name Ulyyf without even seriously considering anything else. After a few months on Neo, I ventured to the I&S board, and became quite popular. I&S means, of course, Insane and Strange, so nobody minded my weird fondness for instituting strange rules like "all nicknames must end in a Y (for example, mine, Uly)". In fact, I tried my darnedest to make everyone get a Y nickname except for my friend Nig. Now, Nig is sort for Enigma, as in the_true_enigma or i_am_enigma, but I do not think I am the only one who realized it almost sounds like a profoundly inappropriate racial epithet. And Niggy was completely out of the question, of course. So, as a joke, I decided to call her "the". That had long since ceased to be her username, which made the joke all the funnier mihi. In retaliation, she called me conuly, which is a pity, as I actually liked the name and am willing to use it.

As for why Xiggy made this account for me using Conuly instead of Ulyyf, I can only imagine, but that's why the name Conuly exists.

Your turn!

Comments

[strangelette.livejournal.com]

About...ooh... two to two and a half years ago my parents had me cancel AOL which meant my previous IMer screenname was more or less toast. I'd been online for years but always with an alias from a book or (more often) a TV show and I was getting a little sick of that. So, like any good classics nerd I ran to my Latin dictionary and started paging through.

Now -trix is one of my favorite endings but most words are either too common (and thus taken), have connotations I would rather avoid, or both. So, after some searching I found 'nemoricultrix' meaning 'denizen of the forest'. It's always available, has a nice ring to it, and (as I realized later) works because I come from a rather forested place.

Here and there I still show up as 'divia79' because I was and always will be a Forever Knight fangirl :) In hindsight, though, picking a character that wasn't crazy (and not in the endearing way) might have been a good idea :)

[mhari.livejournal.com]

I've been going by Manon for ages now, ever since I named a character that. It's kind of a convoluted story.

Anyway, Manon is a French variant of Mary, but when I got to LJ it was taken. So I made it Mhari, which is also a variant of Mary, from the Darkover series. I think it's quasi-Gaelic or something. So. That's why. :)

[black-rat.livejournal.com]

Then I take it your name is Mary. I would have choosen Maria as a veriant. I'm such a sucker for WSS. However, odd veriants are great.

[mhari.livejournal.com]

Actually, my name is Abby. I'm just random. ;)

[neutralface.livejournal.com]

Neutrality is always safe. Take a look at happy and sad faces.

: ) that is demented.

: ( as is this.

If people were either of them constantly I would definatly keep my distance. I find manic people just as insain as depressed people. While I am not saying people should never be happy or sad...they should not be happy or sad all the time. So between those moments...what face should they have.

: | the neutralface.

Plus...being a psych BA...I am supposed to have some degree of impartiality or neutrality.

BTW...who are you? How did you find me? Why did you add me?

...neutralface...

[conuly]

You're a few posts too late... scroll down to the one where I said "I'm adding friends, mostly by searching random interests".

So I either 1. searched LJMAPS for users in my area and found you (are you in New York?) or 2. searched communities of which I am a member and added people with interesting journals.

It really is completely random, don't worry about it. If it does worry you, I'll take you off my list and forget about it, though.

[zarriq.livejournal.com]

Do you know how foreign language instructors often ask their students to pick out a new name for themselves belonging to that language/culture? Well, I'm studying ancient Sumerian. My name is recorded in a pretty mundane tablet regarding the allotment of barley. It comes from an Akkadian adjective, zarriqu, which means "with speckled eyes."

[xiggaroo.livejournal.com]

My first screenname on neopets was xgelert_grrrrlx. Why, I dunno. I suppose I liked gelerts. AND being the dork I am, it's got the same amount of letters on each end of the _, which is why there are so damn many r's. As for xiggy. Well you should know this one, Phibbs also. That one chat room, on I&S, you and Phibby decided that I needed a nickname, because referring to me as gelert was... stupid. So someone (Phy I think) suggested Xgy, because Con, you'd said that all nicknames must have a y at the end. But I decided that it was too close to ms. Angel's nickname at the time - Xby, so Phy stuck in a few letters, and... Xiggy. Voila.

[conuly]

She did? Huh. I thought I was the one who started calling you Xiggy... Well, I guess it doesn't matter, I *know* I'm the one who started calling her Phy!

[xiggaroo.livejournal.com]

You both agreed/decided upon it. It was so fucking cool when I was visiting - everyone called me Xiggy. doesn't seem odd, but imagine MY family calling YOU uly. ;)

hey, wanna know how I got the name Katy irl? It's a conception story... *blerg*

[xiggaroo.livejournal.com]

lol, that night I also got your xmas pressie. It was like OCTOBER but I wanted to... I got you this book and spent literally all of my np (18K at the time :P) on it. I was soooo excited to give you it. arrr what I a dorkwad I am.

[goddess588.livejournal.com]

Mine goes back to the first time ever that I was online and creating an excite e-mail address. I've always regarded women as Goddesses - all women, something that was reinforced by the female driven spirituality in Jean Auel's Earth's Children series (Clan of the Cave Bear etc). It's ancient stuff.

Anyway, I wanted goddess but that was already taken. So was samthegoddess and sam_the_goddess. And bitch_goddess. I needed something that I'd remember and all I could think of was a number - so I picked 588 which is our house number - and we'd just bought the house.

I moved from excite to yahoo mail, to yahoo clubs and e-groups and then yahoo groups (I do Pernese interactive RP) to neopets and finally to LJ, and I kept the same username and password everywhere, apart from AIM because some other goddess588 had nicked it first (everything's gone on AIM).

Frankly I'm sick of it, but it's too much hassle to change. Everyone knows me as goddess588. I have a few alternatives (te_tuatahi - my dog's name - it's Maori for 'the first', and some others that I've picked up and use as aliases) but not everyone knows all of them.

Thanks for asking such an interesting question - I very much enjoyed reading everyone else's responses!

[xiggaroo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for asking such an interesting question - I very much enjoyed reading everyone else's responses!

I'll second that. :)

[conuly]

*grins and blushes*

It's always something I wonder, and it gave me a chance to give the whole backstory on my own.

*hugs* Sorry you're sick of your name, Goddess... pity this is LJ or you could just switch it gradually... first be goddesssomethingelse, then be somethingelsegoddess, then just be somethingelse. Oh well.

[joeymew.livejournal.com]

Hey kool! Another person who remembers Yahoo Clubs!

[goddess588.livejournal.com]

And bloody shocking most of them were - LOL.

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

I had a few nicknames when I first started using the internet. The two main ones were Sonny's Raider and Kestrel. One night in a chat room, I ran into a guy from high school who was really crass and freaked me out, so I changed my name to Kestrel. I found out quickly that Kestrel was already taken in almost every major website where I might have wanted to register, and someone else decided to harass me because her nickname was "Kes" and thought mine was too similar.

I got tired of it and in 1996 I decided to figure out a nickname NOBODY else would have. I decided to take a horsey theme and fell back on an idea of my Idyll Valley character, Rana, a Fjord/Arab mix. (see my other semi-used old journal fjorab, the journal is backdated for actual journal dates...it's an idea I started in 8th grade) That started the "Fjorab" part. To make it even more unmistakable, I added another favorite breed into the mix, the Akhal-Teké, and thus got the second piece. Where it's doable, I prefer using the "é" instead of just a plain "e" but either works fine. Some places I have registered with both names.

[conuly]

someone else decided to harass me because her nickname was "Kes" and thought mine was too similar.

God, that's pathetic. It's one thing to have no life, but why admit it like that, in such a taunt-rife way?

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

*shrugs* It was just added incentive to find something of my own. I didn't know kestrels would be such a common bird of inspiration (one of my good friends has a LJ friend called "kestrelcall"), and that one girl, she was just a nuisance.

I've grown some...nowadays if someone online harasses me, I just block them out and move on instead of taking it personally.

[gingembre.livejournal.com]

Well, you know this one already, but here it is for everyone else:

When I was born, Jennifer was just on the verge of becoming a popular name. Little did my parents realize that every third girl born in the next 5 years would share their daughter's name... By the time I was running around on the playground, it got to be too much - my mother would call out "Jennifer" and get 5 girls turning around. So they decided a nickname was in order. At the time, I couldn't pronounce Jennifer, the closest I got was Juhjuh. Which was mutated into Ginger and so I was called for the first 10 or so years of my life. By the time we moved up to New York and I was in school here, I got teased over the "Ginger" thing quite a bit. So at the ripe old age of 10 I told my parents that I was Ginger no more, Jennifer was my name and that's what they should call me, at least in public. And so the change was made. Now at home, and to a very few friends, I was still known as Ginger. My mom decided to play around with that and would call my "Gingembre", which is French for Ginger (my mom is part Belgian.) So when I went online around '95 and signed up for a Yahoo e-mail, gingembre it was. Much later I had to re-sign up as I hadn't checked my mail in a long time and couldn't remember the password, so I set it up as gingembre79 (my birth year) which is my other incarnation online. Everything I've signed up for online has been on of those two, usually gingembre if it's not taken (which it usually isn't). So there's a gingembre user in Yahoo, AIM, neopets, NYTimes, BalletAlert and so on. In fact, when Connie signed up for a LJ account, I checked and realized I had signed up for one oh-so-long ago, and was able to remeber the password. So here I am :-)

[parashiggy.livejournal.com]

Shiggy...

I *have* no idea why I chose this name. It was the nickname of one of my close friends, which I haven't seen in ages...

My name is a memorial to this person...

[ril-chan.livejournal.com]

Well, my name is April.

A long time ago, one of my friends decided that she could TOO shorten it into a nickname: Ril.

Then, when we were both in our DBZ phase and liked to use what random Japanese words/suffixes were common in the fandom, it became Ril-chan.

I used it as a default for almost everything I sign up for, despite that no one calls me Ril-chan (except when they're saying ril_chan) anymore and I'm hardly ever called Ril. So it's my lj name and my Neopets name by default, though for some reason I chose something else for my email (and my AIM, but I've had that since well before I was Ril-chan, so).

[conuly]

Well, my name is April.

A long time ago, one of my friends decided that she could TOO shorten it into a nickname: Ril.

And if she'd been a little crueler, we'd be calling you Ape!

[meteorie.livejournal.com]

Whoa, 40 comments? o.o;

My livejournal username was suppose to be meteoric, after a character in a Slayers manga. She was a thief, and she was only in one episode, but I liked her, only the username was taken, so I changed it.

Actually, meteorie is my fourth livejournal username..

Chocokitty13 (neopets) came about when I first started the internet. It's my oldest username. I made it up because I bought this little notebook made by Sanrio (you know, Hello Kitty) that has a picture of one of Hello Kitty's friends on it, Chococat. I liked Chococat, so when it came time to pick an e-mail name, I changed "cat" to "kitty" and added "13" because I happened to be 13 at the time.

My current e-mail address, whatarandomusername@yahoo.com, has several reasons behind it. When I was changing my AIM name(from reeshamay, the name of my faerie gelert, to noonesnoonenever, something I thought up randomly), I told a friend what the new name was and she said "Aimee! How random!" So, I decided to keep up my tradition of completely random usernames. Also, I've found I tire less quickly of weird names like 'goronsarestupid' than names like 'princessruto2000.' And, what could be a more random username than 'whatarandomusername'?

So there you have it. My whole life story. :P

[rachelkachel]

Rachelkachel is a nickname my dad used to use. Because my name is Rachel. (I only picked it because oogabooga was taken). I don't know why my name is Rachel, except it sounds pretty, I guess, and my parents like names from the Bible. He also used to call me Rachel-bean but somehow I don't like it as much...

I don't know exactly where oogabooga came from. I may have made it up one day, as a random sound, before I even discovered the internet. Maybe some Ewok on Star Wars said it. My siblings and I used to say it to each other, or jump out and yell it instead of Boo, until one day I got so sick of hearing it I declared that it meant "I want to be tickled" and immediately started tickling them whenever they said it. So they stopped. But I've actually always liked it, and used it as a password occasionally, and finally signed up on Neopets with it (with added numbers - 264 - which I've also adopted as my personal numbers when necessary, like on my hotmail account).