aankh started me off on this so I’ve decided to feed his curiosity and help my own curious cat in the meantime.
We all have really good screennames (Duh! That’s why we chose them). Some names are obvious but for the rest of you I’m giving you the chance to let everyone know why the hell you are called, well, whatever you’re called.
I’ll go first. But that’s only if Tentacle Monster promises that he won’t tell me his reasoning. They say truth is stranger than fiction and my fiction is damn strange.
I got my name from some random website when I was registering… honest. In fact I think it was a Microsoft website. I couldn’t get the name I wanted and it was a recommended alternative. That’s it. But of course I am nocturnal by nature and I stand up now for all things tick-ish. But really my name was a fluke.
Ever since I started using local BBSs in the late 80’s, my handle was Sir Blah (which is another story altogether). The connection between that and my current name isn’t difficult.
P.S. One of these days I may get around to asking a mod to change my name. I wanted to use it here, but apparently I already signed up years ago with that name and I can’t get it back now. But now Hal B. has grown on me, so we’ll have to see…
OK, I got my name from the name of my band, “$50 Flander”. The name of the band originated from one of the former members (Jason). He used to work as a chef at a fancy restaurant, and as the new guy on the staff, the elders would play pranks on him. One day, Jason was preparing some meals and another cook pulls out some kind of filleted meat. So he askes, “Hey, what’s that you got there?” The co-worker takes this oppertunity to pull a prank; “It’s ‘Flander’, a rare delicacy we serve here. It’s $50 per plate”. “Well what exactly is it,” Jason asked…
“It’s a wolve pussy filet.” :eek:
Needless to say, $50 Flander was now the name of our band, and I’ve become used to using Flander as my name around the web.
I don’t want to completely reveal the origin of my SN…I’d like to keep people guessing. I will say it comes from a really bad horror movie. If you know the movie - congratulations, you watch bad movies.
Don’t bother googling the name - it isn’t the name of a character, so it probably won’t show up.
Ever since I read a copy of Art Moger’s The complete Pun book I have been adicted to seeing things in exactly the wrong way from that in which they were intended. It has grown into an obsession with twisting the meanings of things into almost the opposite of their original meaning. That is Perverting them.
This happens all the time, in fact the first time someone pointed it out to me (I hadn’t noticed that it could be broken up that way) was in a chat room and I thought they were just being rude and telling me to leave - all of their efforts to explain the misunderstanding just made me even more angry and aggressive, then the penny dropped…
I hadn’t had a username on a message board before. On the day when I signed up, I had just been listening to a record by Canadian comedy duo Bowser & Blue, which went:
I’m in like with a dyke named Spike / Who needs me like a pike needs a bike…
That’s a variation on the saying “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, so that was the first thing I thought of when I was prompted to create a username. Stupid, isn’t it!
I was bitten by one. Really. My job was weighing owls at the animal clinic, and one decided it just was not going to cooperate. My exact words were SCREECH! OW! (little bugger wouldn’t let go).
Now, like Spider-Man, I have some of the powers of another species: I am small, compact, and always have a truly annoyed look on my face. However, for the life of me, I cannot blend against tree bark no matter how hard I try.
I first started using it ten years ago or so, when I first started on the Internet. I picked it and keep using it because (other than really liking the band) it’s rarely used by others. I usually don’t have to tack a number onto the end of it when I sign up for some site.
[rant] Finally, I get a chance to explain this horrible moniker I’m (semi)stuck with.
So, it’s a nice sunny day, and I’m feeling pretty good. I decide to join up the good ol’ sdmb. I’m wanting a positive, happy screen name, something along the lines of “Sunshine” or “Taste the Sunshine.” To this day it is not clear exactly why I couldn’t just use my common handle, SharkyXC , but I didn’t.
Now, I’ve got S&S.
Despite what you may think, I am a straight male. Odd, huh? Maybe I’ll get around to changing the name, to the aforementioned, but, for now, I’m Sunshine… and Smiles. Long and Obtrusive. [/rant]
Jim Socks was in a Goosebumps book I read as a kid (because, you know, now that I’m graduating high school, I’m all grown up now), and then I added my number from all my sports to it. I’ve never just had it JimSox except in one e-mail address; I don’t remember why I felt the need to add the number to it.
Mine is from my old habit of using a male-sounding name when on line, plus the fact that I usually have my pet conure (a small overly-excitable parrot) with me when I go online. The bird thinks he can type and frequently smacks his face on the keyboard while I type. It is sort of like Archy the roach from the poems. It has an unfortunate effect on my already-marginal typing skills, but it makes the conure REALLY HAPPY. Mabey he thinks he is an editor. Since the bird has cancer, I spoil him.
Oh, Screech Owl, you can totally do the bark thing. The secret is not to try too hard. Just act really casual. I have actually seen the conure blend into house plants, and he is neon green with red splotches.
Funny, I always saw **Mangetout ** as mange tout, until I saw someone else refer to him as Man Get Out and then I thought… Damn! Here I had it wrong the whole time. Now I see I was right… Sigh.
Mine comes from a chat room that I belonged to - the whole reason I had signed up to the room was so that I could clear up a question I had (and wanted people to tell me that I wasn’t crazy after all). Thinking it was going to be a oneshot deal, I signed up as tellmeimnotcrazy. Had I known what it would turn into, I would have picked something shorter. At any rate, it stuck, to the degree that about 50% of the phone calls I get are asking for “Telly”. Now I can’t watch Sesame Street without thinking someone’s calling me
Incidentally, Hal, I almost used my old BBS name, which was Verlace Ahvere, but I figured it would have been too much trouble to explain it. Damn I miss those BBS days.
Mine was a football nickname. I’m a big lug, and I always played line. One game, when I was playing defensive tackle, I kept shooting the center/guard gap and nailing the quarterback. He got angry at the linemen, grabbed the center by the facemask, and yelled, “Keep that ogre off me!”
His bad luck that he yelled it within earshot of me and my D line, because that really got me psyched, and the name stuck.
I’m really not a mean guy, and I like to think I’m not really ogrish at all (and in fact, I hadn’t used it in years before signing up for SDMB.)
