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Journal Pinball Wizard's Journal: Whats in a name? 11

Journal by Pinball Wizard
Something I've wanted to know for a while about you guys and gals that read and/or post in journals. Why did you pick your nickname?

I'll go first. I picked the nickname 'Pinball Wizard' for two reasons. Firstly, CmdrTaco is a big Who fan, as am I. Secondly, 'Pinball Wizard' is highly symbolic of the geek type - someone who is really good at what he/she does, but generally doesn't fit into 'normal' society. In his case, he's the deaf, dumb and blind kid who plays a mean pinball.

In my case, well I try to fit into normal society as much as I can, but there is a twist: I have some very oddball friends. In HS there were certain stuck up types that had problems with me because of who I associated with. Well, I associated with everyone, except the stuck up types. I've made friends with everyone from the very wealthy down to the homeless, from the brightest people to people who walk the streets mumbling incoherently. Some people think you are known by whom you associate with, but I disagree. I'm interested in all sorts of different people.

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Whats in a name? More

Whats in a name?

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  • I can't remember all of the stupid nicks. So I picked something I have a chance at remembering. But my handle 'back in the day' was Mr. Vogon. Why? Because Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was too darned long to fit most of the programs at the time (still is:)

    • Same here. It was easy to remember at the time and when I signed up for an account at 4AM, I didn't have any creative juices. Since then, I've opened up some other accounts and used the handle /dev/null (because it seems like all the crap comes my way), but never bothered to change the /. account.
  • A couple of reasons:

    1. Because I am a woman. And not a woman you know specifically, just a random person in a crowd. Just some woman hanging around in the middle of slashdot.

    2. Because I wanted to feel comfortable using the word "woman" to describe myself. It's more difficult than it might seem to transition from the word "girl" to the word "woman." Male people at least have the intermediate term "guy." One way to achieve this was to force myself to refer to myself as a woman.

    In retrospect, I wouldn't have used a space.
  • I originally wanted to use "DougAlexander", which is, naturally, my name, but it wasn't available. Some of my friend call me "dougie fresh" and this is what sprang to mind. I've never been all that pleased with it, but I'm learning to not care. C'est la vie.
  • It's just the name that I use when gaming. I used to have different nicks for everything, but then I would forget what my name was on which server, so now I just have the one name. Plus, it is also almost never taken if I try to make a new account somewhere. I like a little bit of originality, so I really hate it when 39 people took my name before I got there.
  • I had always used the handle "Zhentil" (which was actually given to me by glh waaay back when we used to play RPG's). But when I played the online game 'tribes' (the first game that FORCED you to play in teams with strategy), I played defense, in the largest suit. And I was really good at it. I used to play in high level competitions, and my tribe defense (which I was the leader) had a streak of 12 games without anyone TAKING our flag (let alone capturing it), and one person commented that I played defense like FortKnox, and the name stuck.

    I wish there was a cooler way I got that name, but thats the true story :-)
  • I wanted to use my name, "Eugene", but as always, it's taken. Even "EugeneWong" is surprisingly popluar in some circumstances. So, when I started a GeoCities account, I used "eugenetswong". Everywhere I went, the name would likely not be taken.

    "TS" stand for my middle name which is Chinese. It is spelt in English, "Tsung Syan". I don't use this as my password, but if I did, I know that it would be secure, because Chinese people never even heard of it or have seen the Chinese characters, let alone the English spelling. Well, now that I told you guys, it's definitely not secure, but it was up till now.
  • Ahh, I really need to just save this as a text file and shove it on a floppy, I must have typed some form or another of this explanation up at least two or even three dozen times, LOL! (seriously!)

    I always have been a bit of a literalist, so when presented with my first BBS new user sign up "what do you want your alias to be?" prompt, my brain's gears started cranking and this is pretty much the process that they followed (after some miserably first try "no no no that won't work" attempts of course);

    Well, lets see, my modem is on COM port 2 (I had figured out how to setup the AT strings myself, and I had been diddling around with IRQs and such for a few years before that), so thus, COM2, now then, being at the age of 11 or so at the time, well, Kid came naturally.

    THus, Com2Kid. :-D

    Communications Port 2 Kid. I have had a few people get it without any sort of an explanation, but generally as those who even remember what the old DOS COM ports are fade out of existence, the odds of me meeting a random person in cyberspace who recognizes the joke diminishes with every passing year.

    Actually the 2 came later on, originally it was just ComKid, but there are like a gazzilion of those on the Internet (or at least one very active one someplace in Korea) so thus I added the 2 in there as the next logical progression of the name. Before it was just Communications Kid (me at the time being a kid on bulletin boards who was, err, communicating. :-D ^_^ )

    I have been Com2Kid on the Internet since 1995 now, (though the old 1995 page cache on Google expired earlier this year) and currently net 208 hits on Google (up from 148 or so around this time last year), with 100% of those being me (there used to two non-relevant links, but I think that they are off of the search results now, but I really do not want to go through and check, hehe. :-D )

    My real life name? 0 Google hits. :-D (that took some work, as I had to go around e-mailing sites to get me off of their pages, heh. )
  • At the time I got this nick I had just gotten my first sun computer up and running at home. I had had it about a year at the time but the verbal instruction about L-1-A didn't make any sense. I later found L1 was a single word representing a single key... doh, I should have looked at the sides of the key apparently. Anyway, I was realy high on sun stuff at the time (as I am now, even having been a solaris admin between these two points in time) and so I picked a word I knew and liked describing a person who feels that the sun is the absolute center of the uninverse.

    I met one sun dood who liked it, but then again his real name was Adam Sandler so I'm not sure if he was just joking or not. However people do get a kick out the SN I use under solaris: luvmysparc

  • Well... (Score:2)

    by red5 ( 51324 )
    If I have to explain mine to you, then you're not a true geek.

    I chouse it when I got my first job working for a.com doing HTML/perl, Random tech support, and getting coffie. I was the youngest one in office building(16). I felt a little like luke must have suiting up at Yavin. Hence the nic.
  • Way back in the day of BBSs, I was WolfMan. I have always had a fascination with wolves and my home and cubicle are heavily decorated with wolf things. I also liked the movie Top Gun, and there was a pilot who's alias was WolfMan. When on local BBSs that wasn't really a problem, but then the internet found me, and Wolfman was not as unique as I had hoped, so I changed to cyberwolf. Then everyone started prefixing cyber to their names, and there came to be a multitude of cyberwolfs. So I changed to cyberwulf, but intentionally misspelling a word goes against my grain, not to mention the headaches it gave the spell check programs. So I was watching the movie Hackers (which apparently I'm the only person on /. who liked it) and I see a sign in the phone booth when they are at Grand Central Station that says "Trust Your Technolust." Now to me, that meant the strong desire to have the newest/fastest/best technology. I do trust that TechnoLust, and so I started using that on the net, and in videogames. Now the poster has new meaning. Trust your TechnoLust, means trust me. :-) I'm a pretty trustworthy guy, so I liked it. All my friends thought it fit, and some of my friends still call me that offline. I've been using it since the movie came out in 1995. I'm only now starting to see others use it, and it ticks me off. I don't want to change, but I want to be unique, so if it gets too bad, I guess I will change.

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