In celebration of the FFFF (that's 65536 in Decimal!)... a thread, started by me... and with absolutely no (or no more) numbers or equations. :)

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So, where did THAT come from? Tell us your stories about your usernames, title, sigs, or even IRL stuff that evoke that response from time to time...

Easily the most often inquiry posed to me is why orangesoda. (someone did ask once! ;) ) So here's what's with THAT... (and this will teach that someone for asking...)

I grew up thinking blue was a great color. Blue is for boys, Pink (or Red) for girls... the political correctness of a 5 year old. At one time my entire wardrobe (at least of things purchased by me, the others I never wore) was entirely blue, black, or gray.

That all changed with the internet, I was 21. Suddenly colors weren't just for looking at, but to make really annoyingly bright posts in chatrooms... flashing when enabled! I didn't actually have anything to say, but that's exactly what these rooms seemed created for. So I adopted the nick phaedo (phaedrus was taken) and became a regular at Chat! Now, spending nights, and days...well all the time, chatting about absolutely nothing. I had easily the most boring internet personality imaginable. 15 wpm typing skills, and not enough words to put it to use. I needed a gimic.

So it was DL time! (no! not here ;) ) phaedo is a pretty nice name, but really comes too late in the user list of chat rooms. Half the time I couldn't see my name to make sure I was there. I needed an 'A' name, and one short enough I could remember how to spell it. Keeping with the Greek theme, aeson was the perfect choice.

Quickly it became apparent that aeson was no more a conversationalist that phaedo, except when talking to phaedo... which often caused him to fall asleep. :( I tried adding more DL's, but even 23 of us couldn't keep a decent conversation going. #24 may have been the answer, but every time I opened up another browser for him my system would crash.

I came to the conclusion it was the room I was chatting in, cause damn it... I'm funny! (or so I told myself). The 'classical' room had nice people, but they just couldn't appreciate my comedic genius... so while phaedo slept to the melodious tones of Bach and Beethoven, aeson would go and terrorize guests in the main lobby, throwing crayons () )) CRAYOLA )) > (at least the ones that weren't eaten first) at them, and making sure to say hi to every last one of them. If I had any technical skills at the time, I could have easily written a BOT to do the exact same thing, only at faster than 15 wpm.

There were a few regulars in the main lobby, and I quickly became known as someone with very little sanity left, and so was accepted into the group.

About this time I ran into HTML. Up till then I had thought web designers were some sort of genius magicians (some are!), but quickly became disenchanted once I learned that my keyboard also has < and > keys. I put up the required personal webpage, the Phunny Pharm, which consisted of 3 pages with the title image, all linking to each other. I was now a webmaster!

Chat! Now had some funky ASCII symbol color tag, and a wide array of 6 colors to choose from. Only the l33t haX0r types knew the secret alt-255;[20m format, and I quickly joined their ranks. Then after learning the format, I quickly left their ranks. :lol: From then on, everything I posted was in... 2 1/2 bit color! From ugly dull red, to ugly dull yellow, black, and best of all, white, my hello's to all the guests were as colorful (and sometimes as invisible) as any.

The regulars were somewhat of a problem though. Chat 'people' seem to like the /hug emote, and well, I need my personal space. To rectify the situation (meaning, not get any more hugs, virtual or otherwise) I decided to start a /hop emote craze. I started hopping everywhere, around everything, and almost constantly. (sometimes stopping to type /hop when passing by my keyboard... no... really!) It sure beat my chair spinning contests, even though my record was up to 22 revolutions in one spin. :crazyeye:

Sadly, about this time Chat! Now decided that there really wasn't a purpose for it's website, and shut down. It's 'sister' site, Open24 was a quite little place that everyone promptly invaded. All except Phaedo (and my 22 other DL's), as they were all still sleeping in the Classical room no doubt when it was bulldozed. Open24 had innovative features like a BOT that played Blanks (named Blanks even!) in the "Blanks" room. Basically it was like hangman, except you get as many guesses as you want.

Open24 had a beautiful newline character too, and so I promptly began impersonating Blanks, only using various colors of names (Red was default) to further confuse the participants. It finally dawned on me that I was impersonating a BOT (capitalization for acronym and effect), and even though my games often turned out more popular than the BOT's, it did seem rather demoralizing. So I went back to my old games in the main lobby.

By this time the social hierarchy had changed dramatically. I found myself almost at newbie status, after falling from my high perch as the resident assylum escapee. Hopping just wasn't cutting it anymore, and Open24 didn't allow guests. I now had to talk to people. :eek: (that's what they seemed to like to do for some reason?)

About this time I had an IRL epiphany (I wish I'd had one on how to spell that...), I was going to change my favorite color. Why you may ask? I asked the same thing, but no one answered. I figured if I was going to change, I'd go for broke, and choose my least favorite color... Orange! I went to Mervyns to buy some Orange clothes, but they didn't have any. Software Ect. had some games though... If all clothing stores were next to software stores... I'd be naked 24/7... (in 'chat' there is only one type of punctuation... ... ...sorry for digressing)

I didn't have any Orange clothes, but the games I bought really sucked, and so I went back to chatting ASAP. I was at a loss about how to use my newfound favorite color, as the closest thing was a dirty yellow (6 color selection still)... so I turned to Nickelodeon for help.

Keenan and Kel is a great show (as is... er, was... All That), and Kel's character is obsessed with Orange Soda. To remind myself of my new favorite color, everytime I didn't have something to say in chat (which was almost all the time) I'd /think orangesoda. I went even further with the orange theme, and made it known that my hopping wasn't like that of a bunny, but rather like Tigger (who bounces... but I don't have a tail!). Tigger is Orange too!

It really was just a joke I was playing (on myself I guess), but eventually (took a year or so) I was startled to find out that I now loved the color Orange! I was quite proud of my accomplishment, as changing my favorite color ranked even higher than impersonating Blanks on the altime aeson achievement list.

Ever since then, orangesoda has been something I've put on/in anything I hope to accomplish/achieve. Sorta a "you changed your favorite color, what can't you do?" (insert 'witty' comeback about getting out of bed at a decent hour response by that bastard phaedo voice...)

Whow - that's a thorough explanation.
Mine is more obvious : I wanted a name that connected me to where I live (Belgium - Ghent). Ambiorix was the leader of a Belgian tribe who defeated one of Caesar's legions - seemed appropriate enough.
BUT : there is a deeper level : Ambiorix only occurs in Caesar's own writings ('The Gallic Wars'), and no evidence was ever found that he really existed. A lot of information you find on the net (e.g. here (http://www.livius.org/am-ao/ambiorix/ambiorix.html)) just takes Caesar's writings for truth, but Caesar wrote his works for political motives, not for historic or cultural correctness.
When Belgium became independent in 1830, the nation needed national hero's, and people started digging into history for 'famous Belgians'. that's when the whole Ambiorix myth took shape.
So this seems to make the name even more appropriate for an online character - somebody you've never seen or met, but just believe to be real. ;)

:jump:
My gosh, that's a beautiful story, Aeson.
Sadly mine is nowhere near as complex...
While I have been a member of various online communities over the years, I've never felt very comfortable handing out any personal details... ...shy I guess! :blush:
So I tend to hide behind a name. I don't change my personality, just don't ever tell anybody who I am if I can avoid it :smoke:
Anyway, the name feght comes from a one liner in the hilariously apalling Van Damme film Double Impact. It started off as a variant spelling of a variant pronounciation of an insult that shouldn't be used in civilized company, but quickly degenerated into a simple expression of disgust (since neither I nor any of my group of RL accquaintences had the prejudices or bigotry required to want to use it as was intended), and now is pronounced more like an airy grunt. I liked the word so much, however, I bought the domain name... of course, I invented the spelling myself, and of course it's not an expression of disgust anymore!
As a pronounciation guide... start with a dismissive ff, then you need to get a piece of phlegm stuck in your throat as you push through the e sound in a french-belgian accent with a growl in your voice, and top it off by almost not saying "kitty".
Anyway, since I had the domain name, I figured it was a good nick to hide behind where I needed to provide an email address...
I have searched for other instances of the word, and I have found a couple: one, a Scandanavian surname (it was on a Dentist's website), and two, an old english variant spelling of "fight".
Which is maybe fitting, since my real name is a regional variation of a name meaning "warrior" ;

...but I really wanted to say "It Came From Outer Space"

-feght

Lol.
I got my nick from bowling with my friends. I've always sucked badly at bowling (at some point I think I averaged around 70 per round). I finally got to 96 and a mate of mine had an unexpected slump of form which landed him just below me (94 if I remember correctly). This guy is about as competative as I am, and of course I had to rub my 'victory' in (even though prob 5 other ppl beat me). Next round I made up my nick to humiliate him further and I've used it around the internet since. Some people think it's silly, other think it's entertaining. I've found that I like the people who think it's fun and I don't get all that well along with people who cannot appreciate the irony of such a title/name. It's a good party sorter for me on the internet :)

Btw: I change my location every month because I only get to play gotms anyway. I'm from Norway really.

I liked Aeson better when he just stuck to numbers.

:(

Ummm....................



Ted

Back when I was in high-school 9 years ago, I bought these nice leather boots (Native American style). Can’t recall where I found them but nobody had ever seen something like that and everybody talked about my nice boots. In the same time my hairs was long so people started calling me Indianu’ the Indian. That was rather long so with time they cut it to Indy. But then everybody was calling me Indiana Jones, which I really didn’t like. So I changed the spelling of my nick to Yndy.

All my close friends know me by this name (including family and my in-laws) but in college and at work, nicknames were not that popular. So nowadays there aren’t as many people that call me like that.

Google searches revealed that Yndy as a dog name :ack:, a family name, and the nickname of some guy from Hungary that I talked with when I forgot my yahoo account and sent myself a mail to yndy@yahoo.com only to receive a response! Imagine the thrill. This explains my sig. Whenever, I get to some place before the other guy, which also seems to surf a lot, I say I’m the only Yndy around.

I have some back-up nicks that I use on Romanian forums, where people might just know me.

I chose my nick because I'm interested in space and sf since early childhood and I don't seem to fit any stereotype... :)

edit: For those that are not into sf, it is also a slight variation on the title of a famous sf-book.

Straitforward initials of my name.

Some of my friends used to (and still do) have LAN parties, playing from Doom, right the way through Duke, Quake, UT etc. And we formed a Clan. Before any of us had nicks we used to make new ones up every week. One particular week we had a break for a curry and when I went back to my computer someone had changed my player name to mad-bax, which is an obvious play on my RL name and the film title. It stuck.

We then chose each others nicks. My favourite was my friend Phils, who we now call Dave (from "Only Fools and Horses") closeley followed by Richard Morgans nick which was "Itchy Organ". He refused to adopt his though for some reason.

Back then when I was young(ish) it was funny. Now that I am older I find it embarrasing, but I just don't have the heart to change it, any more than I would change my RL name.

Originally posted by Aeson
In celebration of the FFFF (that's 65536 in Decimal!)...

Actually FFFF in base-16 (hex) is 65535 in base-10 (decimal) ;)

10000 in hex is 65536 in decimal.

My name has the silliest reason every behind it:

I could never think of a good screen name for websites, IRC, etc, so I would generally just use my real name, David, perhaps followed by an initial or random number or something.

Anyhow, I decided that that was rather bland and unoriginal, and that I should come up with something different. But I couldn't think of anything. I really didn't want a name that sounded like I thought I was some kind of "1337 h4X0rz" like "king of the dead", "avenger", "shroud", etc, but something better just wouldn't come. Anyhow, one day I just sat down to log onto IRC, and I typed some random letters on the keyboard. It came up as 'Sirp'. I've used it ever since.

I guess alot of people think it's meant to be "Sir P" where the P stands for something, but it's not like that at all. Just Sirp, and probably pronounced 'Surp".

-Sirp.

I'm obviously just supremely unimaginative, maybe. When I've played MP games , others players have handles straight out of Topgun. Iceman, Maverick. etc. Mine was something of a reaction against all that stuff. I dont want to hide behind a name. I'm just me.

I get called col by everyone round here where I work. Besides anyone in computing couldnt possibly type more than 3 letters for something important.

Before I started using the Internet a lot (this year actually), I had thought of what my pseudo could be. And I came up with my real name written in East-European style, because that makes me laugh and it confuses so many people in chats... :D I'm happy because I don't have to use a different pseudo for each place I go to (and therefore I don't have to think of one that is related to the place, ie. sthg about Civ at CFC...). The fact that it has 10 letters like my real name, that it starts with a "K" makes it kool ! Or crap, whatever... And I stole the letters in the middle from Polish cities that have the same letters : "...szcz..." :D :D :D

I'm currently researching Philosophy... nice, I thought.

As for my sig : these are 2 personal quotes. I found the 1st one last year and the 2nd one a few days ago. There are not meant to be understood litterally, though I really believe in the sense.

Aeson, great story!!! People are looking at me as I sit here LOL at my desk. :lol:

The name Creepster comes from an old Navy nickname that was derived as a wordplay on my name. My last name is Carey and I happened to be from the state of Maine at the time. There is a famous author who also resides in Maine and wrote a book called "Carrie". In that book/movie is a scene where all of the kids chant "Creepy Carrie, Creepy Carrie". Creepy was later merged into Creepster. I have kind of grown attached to name over the years. My avatar is a symbol of the ship I served on. I spent 6 years aboard a fast attack submarine silently patrolling the world's oceans.

i heard somewhere that Takeo means 'Great Warrior' in
japanese, but im not sure about that. maybe someone who
speaks japanese could confirm that.
whenever i play a computer game that requires a username
or a name for your main 'character', then i usually will use the
name Takeo.

Aeson, I always intuitively associate you with Thomas Pynchon. Couldn't you have found some room in that post to explain where "Aeson' comes from, and why you chose it?

That's the Basque flag on the left, and "Txurce" is my name in Basque. Both sides of my family came from there two generations ago, and given that they hadn't budged from there since the very onset of European history, I "relate." In fact, since Civ2 had the option of renaming a civ, I renamed mine "The Basques," and had a 50-city list loaded in. (These names just came in handy with the "Ciudad de la Luna" blip.) I'll stop here, rather than express the outrage I feel at the travesty of the Basques being excluded from all versions of Civ, including the upcoming Conquests.

Well, as I was contemplating my choice of username I though of my location (Texas) and something in the news associated with Texas - the filming of that new disney movie about a prominent Texas landmark.

Turns out alamo wasn't taken, and it is handy enough to add numbers to it so alamo16 turned out to be my Diablo2 handle.

Now, my avatar is another story. Being a brainy (and humble) guy I wanted something meaningful in a cool way. So I surfed around on the science pages and found a picture of the big bang. With some shrinkage and color reversal it seemed good enough to go.

Why Hotrod??

Way back when I first played Wing Commander you needed Call sign like a Maverick etc. Hotrod (as in cars) sound fast and cool.

Every time I need a personal call sign wether it be early IRC or MP games online I used Hotrod. The 0823 is my anniversary.

Moonsinger is well known in the Moonshae Trilogy of the Forgotten Realms. Since I love everything that is magical and celestial and if I live in the another world or another timeline, I may have been a great druid too. So naturally, I am Moonsinger, the one and only who doesn't have any real magical ability.:cry:

Just the boring first name (Deny) + initial of last name (D)

The postscript is from the Muppet Movie and is generally my attitude toward life...you control your own destiny, so if you're not happy, make changes until you are happy!!

I needed a username for hotmail (6 years ago!) and at the time I had a hamster called Mabel... it was cute so used to get it's name lengthened to mabellino... so there you go.
Turns out there was already a mabellino registered at yahoo.co.uk and I didn't fancy being mabellino"insert random number here". I have also gone under the guise of peroxide (being blonde and a chemist it's kind of amusing) and MadScientist but that one is waaay too common.

Don't recall when I first started using Smirk, its no doubt quake2 or IRC. When boards support it I usually use Sm!rk, which was definately something that started with quake since it supported all the symbols long before webboards did. And IRC still doesn't.

Of course I am a smartass and a devil's advocate so it should be obvious why I actually use this name. ;) My alternate name would have been HAPPY FUN BUNNY SMILE, for a little gamer-japanese-translation humor, which is pretty subtle, I'm no comedian.







Originally posted by Takeo
i heard somewhere that Takeo means 'Great Warrior' in
japanese

Closest thing I know of is taisho which translates to general (this is using the Hepburn system to translate to our alphabet). There are other systems that have been used and I suspect the spelling of your name is coming from another one of them.

Aeson: great story, and I'm glad you came to grips with your long-hidden love of the color orange- otherwise you might have serious problems with all your multiple personalities! ;)

Very sorry, there are definitely areas in which I have absolutely no imagination, and this is one. I've liked all the civ games and my name is steve, so civ_steve.

Rabies: Long ago, back in my college days, I discovered text-based muds. I had no idea what I was getting into. The first thing this mud made you do was create a character. Well, part of the character creation process was to create a description of what this character looked like. So...in some pitiful attempt to be original, I decided to describe my character as a 4-foot tall, frothing duck-billed platypus. It/his name was then dubbed 'rabies'.

..it stuck.

...now that I am older..I find it hard to shake - even though it isn't the prettiest of names. One thing that is nice is that the word is hardly used. I guess most people don't like to be associated with things like rabies. :(

Mine is pretty simple. The combination of two nicknames I had in my life.
Bam in high school (loosely based on my initials).

And speedy later in life when I had the handle 'Speed Racer' on the CB radio. I picked Speed Racer because at around the time I got onto the CB I was always getting pulled over by the cops for speeding. Luckily, everytime I got pulled over it was by a different cop, or law enforcement agency, so I kept getting verbal or written warnings, or just a $10 seatbelt ticket. Got 22 warnings before I finally got my first real ticket that took a big chunk of money out of my pocket. Got 3 or 4 tickets before I finally matured and slowed down, and I haven't gotten a speeding ticket in the last 5 years or so. There was a group of 4 State Patrol officers who would come into the place where I worked and have coffee. One day, they all realized that each one of them had pulled me over at one time or another, so they got a chuckle out of that and called me 'speedy'.

And around that time there was the ESPN commercials for Nascar where they used the cartoon character 'speed racer'. So one of my friends said "they should start calling you speed racer" and then he chanted the "go, go speed racer, go, go" phrase from those commercials. Most people just started calling me Speedy instead of Speed Racer, so that nickname sort of stuck. (I still know people who I see all the time and they don't know my real name, they just know me as Speedy).

So then I got a computer and internet access, and I didn't realize that I needed an account name right then, so I only had a few minutes to think of a name. Bam, Speedy, and SpeedRacer were already taken, so I just combined the two to Bamspeedy. So then when going to chatrooms and stuff I just used the same name.

I was looking for a name that hadn't been used on an e-mail account

I figured no one would ever want "CruddyLeper" so I stuck with that.

I tend to forget creative names I came up with once, so I try to stick with one I don't forget which is my first name: Ronald

Whenever it is already used in one forum I use Dlanor (Ronald reversed) so I only have to remember two names ;)

Originally posted by Aeson
In celebration of the FFFF (that's 65536 in Decimal

I hate to be the one to correct the legendary Aeson... but that's 65535 in decimal.

Zagnut is a candy bar that was distributed until sometime in the 1970's. When I was a pilot in the Navy I used the name as an alias. As Creepster posted on page 1, everyone in the Navy seems to have a nickname. I just liked the sound of Zagnut.

I hated the candy. It is coconut and peanuts, neither of which I like. However, for those of you who have a hankering for such stuff, it is still possible to buy Zagnut bars. I got some last month from www.groovycandies.com They sell all kinds of "disappeared" candies. Zagnut bars are still made by Hershey but are apparently only sold in the specialty market, by the box.

By the way, Zagnut is my last name. My first is Rip and my wife is Ruby.

I made my name from what I like to be, Fast. The Warrior part was just for CFC. But like my e-mail addy is fastpep. pep being my initials I use OneFastPep on yahoo. I like fast things and I also work fast play fast and live fast:)

Well, the 'Berger' part comes from a nickname I've had all through highschool. It's a play on my last name, Sonnenberg. People just shortened it to 'berg' and then later added an 'er'.

The Kaiser part is a combination of my love of the German language and my own male ego...so there you have it.

65536... 65535

Forgive me, I really wasn't paying much attention to what I wrote. I tend to count from 0 = 1.

Originally posted by Aeson


Forgive me, I really wasn't paying much attention to what I wrote. I tend to count from 0 = 1.

You are counting like a computer or a programmer. If you set your display to 16-bit colors, you have 65536 choices ranging from 0 to 65535 or 0x0000 to 0xFFFF.

My username is quite a recent phenomenon. I found (I've mentioned this a few times recently!) GOTM 2 or 3 days before the GOTM17 submission deadline. I rushed it through to completion (about 20 hours I think), then had the final headache that I had to think up a user name before I could submit. As Carthage was my 1st attempt I tried to find a good Carthaginian name from history, but all the good ones seemed to be taken.

It was then I decided to go with the colour theme. All my life I've had a close association to that girly pink colour, it's my surname! I looked it up in a theasauras and came across Dianthus. From dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Dianthus) :

A plant of the genus Dianthus, which includes carnations and pinks.

It also has the distinction of sounding like some flash general's name, it just isn't :).

Taliesin is the name of the wizard in the King Arthur story (Merlin is his title). I first came across it in Marion Zimmer Bradley's "The Mists of Avalon", and since I enjoyed the book and also the name, I just typed it in at the register screen (simple enough, but I wanted Excelsior first... it was taken). The sig is in a Gaelic language... I won't give the meaning for fear of diminishing its mystique. It's actually rather mundane, but sums up a lot very simply and meaningfully.

My user name comes from the area where I was born, Dover Kent England and is steeped in history. A Man of Kent comes from the east side of the River Medway, which runs through the heart of the county whilst a Kentish Man comes from the west side of the river. According to history Men of Kent resisted William the Conqueror more 'stoutly' then the Kentish Men who weakly surrendered. Afterwards a keen rivalry developed as the bravery of the Men of Kent made them proud while Kentish Men were believed to be weak-minded.

ltcoljt = Lieutenant Colonel jt

Some people here see the small l as an I =Itcoljt. Thats wrong I just used no capital when I signed up. LtColjt would be clearer I admit.

jt is short for jimmytrick, a nickname which came from James Patrick, my son's name. I got the LtCol bit from an old SMAC team competition. Everyone wanted to be General this or General that so I just settled for a lower rank.

Since I was a vocal critic of Firaxis when Civ3 came out my jimmytrick handle got hung with a pretty negative reputation, mostly at Poly. So I decided to go with ltcoljt to better fit in with the community here. The only other names I've used online were Frodo, which I quit using when the first movie came out and spawned three billion alternates of Frodo. I did use Frodo W. Baggins for a spell just to tease my liberal friends online. (George W. Bush - get it?)

I also used HannibalBarca for a bit in reference to the great Carthagian general but I tired of that because everyone thought it was a reference to Lector.

Originally posted by ltcoljt
... jt is short for jimmytrick ...I'm still a bit of a child (at heart), and couldn't help sniggering at this, trying to imagine what this trick could possibly be. Jimmy has rather an interesting meaning in cockney rhyming slang :).

For those who share my childish sense of humour, but don't know what I'm talking about :

Jimmy Riddle = Piddle (or urinate)

:)

My user name was invented by myself and my daughter when we started playing Ultima III whenever that was. I'm of Norwegian decent and wanted something that sounded Viking but totally fictious. I liked the name so well I have been using it ever since as a user name on all kinds of forums and have never been denied access to it.

We not only do not understand what you are talking about, we don't really care. :D

I mean what could anyone named after a carnation really have of substance to say?

jt
(rushes outside to piss on the azaleas)

Originally posted by ltcoljt
I mean what could anyone named after a carnation really have of substance to say?
I'm probably not helping my image here, but Dianthus also includes pinks (see my post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?postid=1046330#post1046330) in this thread)

Originally posted by ltcoljt
(rushes outside to piss on the azaleas) [/B]
He he :)

Greebley was a Rune Quest Character that I enjoyed playing (rune quest is a role playing game similar to D&D). He was a jack-of-all-trades character with a love of the absurd and a desire to talk to everything he met.

The term Greebley originally came from my childhood as a word/name I liked the sound of. It came from a poem on a childrens program. I am not sure if it was original to that or not.