Welcome back! I also posted under a different user name around 2001. When I recalled the user name, I contacted the mods to tell them to deactivate that account. It was better to let them know than to be discovered and having some ‘splainin to do.
Funny. When I saw the “668” part I immediately thought SSN.
Probably from the association of the similar “688” with the long-running Los Angeles class. 668 was a Sturgeon class. But SSNs have been numbered in the 6 hundreds since pretty much the git go, and not many other kinds of US naval vessels have been.
But what is a “thumper” in the context of SSNs?
Well, that’s a bit of a NSFW story. Let’s just say that submariners will make a game out of just about anything, and I happened to win the game during a Med deployment in 1989.
Close enough. We won’t talk about my USAF nickname = “callsign” either. 
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Remember: The older we get, the better we were.
It’s been taken care of by a Mod.
Great new avatar BTW.
Thanks! It’s not really what I had in mind but it’s the best I was able to get out of an AI image generator.
FYI, although changing usernames is still frowned on, as discussed upthread and resolved, there’re no concerns about changing your avatar / icon.
Some folks do it seasonally, others now and again for the hell of it. We had a push awhile ago by one cheerleader for everyone who had cat(s) to make their avatar a pic of their cat. Which changed about 30 avatars overnight into dark gray blobs of dark gray to black fur. 
So if you’re not happy with that one, feel free to keep fiddling as the mood strikes.
I grew up too close to the Blue Ridge mountains to associate that with the navy. ROFL!
Welcome back.
I had no idea that rabbit was in the navy.
A great many years ago I photoshopped the actual Thumper onto a photo of the actual Spadefish. Alas, that image is long gone, but I just realized I have a Photoshop license through my work account so I’ll give it another go when I have some time to play. Meanwhile, I have long resisted using AI tools for anything and this was the first time I had a real reason to do so. I wasn’t impressed with how many times I had to reword the prompt, and even less impressed at how muddy the image generator was with the hull number. There were several better images generated, but all of them had either a number that was totally wrong or illegible. That seems to me to be the easiest part of the request.
Must be a 594 thing – all three of my boats were 688, and I never heard of it.
Could be that it’s limited to radio room/Spook stuff.
What boats were you on, and what rating? I was a CTI (Russian) and was a rider on Spadefish, Minneapolis-St. Paul (SSN-708) and John Marshall (SS(B)N-611). I got close to qualifying on MSP, but then Shield turned into Storm and I got crossdecked to a former boomer and had to start all over again.
Olympia (SSN 717), Jacksonville (SSN 699) and Providence (SSN 719).
RM.
Hmm, ok maybe it was specifically a Spook thing.