What is the origin of your username/nickname?

I like captain Picard.

Mine stands for "Divided by Zer0", based on the programming error "division by zero". Amusingly, people keep assuming it stands for "database zero" or "dragonball zero".

Birch, please.

I'm a squirrel.

My username is literal. I'm literally a wood scientist. Or more specifically, I'm a current PhD student in civil engineering and wood science. Identifying Wood by Hoadley was actually a textbook in one of the courses I took.

Take a guess 😅

Mine is my password I use for all my accounts. It is very convenient for the frequent times I forget it. I can just come here and there it is.

I got onto Reddit back in the day for the electronic music production subreddits. There was an old Daft Punk interview during the big Ultra Music festival days where they made a joke that all EDM music was made by just one guy, Eric David Morris.

Observing the internet from my toilet.

Nice try.

Resol - can mean a number of different things. It's the first 5 letters of the word "resolution". It's also the word "loser" spelled backwards. It's two notes on a keyboard (D and G in Anglo-Saxon music notation). And it just looks and sounds cool in my opinion.

van - the Dutch word meaning "of" or "from". Note that I am not referring to actual vans (the German equivalent being "von", which also appears in a lot of names). Also I prefer spelling that word completely in lowercase.

Lemmy - isn't it obvious? It's this wonderful website.

Put them together, and you get "Resol van Lemmy". It sounds pretty nice, don't you think? Especially since I really hate my real name.

/dev/urandom

My poochie was clinically depressed

I had a job doing QA where I had to create user accounts. Some Guy was one of the three that I created every day.

At first I lurked on my boyfriend's account. We had both left Reddit during the API debacle, but I wasn't ready to rejoin social media yet, so he hopped on Lemmy first.

But as he shared links and news and memes with me, and I scrolled the comments, I started wanting to participate. The first few times I felt drawn to comment (but didn't yet), I wanted to ask people what the reasoning was behind their thoughts. That stuff is interesting to me.

So when I finally sat down and made an account for myself, it was the first thought in my head. I haven't found myself asking anybody about their reasoning since then, but I still like the name.

CB radio user names are called handles. One of my nicknames is The Vandal. I think Subterranean Homesick Blues is one of Dylan's best. Violà.

I really liked Weird Al when I was like 12. Still do.

I opened a physical dictionary to a random page and pointed to a word without looking.

First attempt was diarrhea

"Corno" is just a username I made up in my head since I like how it sounds and I was weirdly craving some cornflakes while signing up. As for my display name, that's...well, my name! 😃

Switch "i" and "u".

It's classified

I am the shell script version of myself

Ehhh it is what it is.

I get dizzy during sex

It's from my favourite Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing.

Beatrice (on the subject of getting married):

Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster’d with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?

It doesn't make that much sense as a username for me, because the piece of valiant dust would be the husband and I'm a woman. But I thought it sounded nice.

This is a question I was asked all my life, so already in 2004 I wrote a blog post about it: https://paradies.jeena.net/weblog/2004/oct/jeena-paradies but it's in German so I'm posting the translation here:

It was sometime in the year 2000 when I had already been DJing at small parties for a while, playing house, drum’n’bass, big beats, and electro. When people asked who the DJ was, everyone just said, "That’s Richard." Naturally, that didn’t sound very cool for an alternative DJ. Then my cousin, who was also a DJ but played the more mainstream style of techno, chose the name DJ Alec-tron, which put some pressure on me. Since we often DJed together, and I didn’t want to go down in history as "DJ Richard," I needed a proper DJ name.

So I started looking for a suitable artist name for myself as a disc jockey. One day, we took the train to the Love Parade in Berlin. We stocked up on canned beer the day before and opened the first can as early as 3:00 AM (in the middle of the night). The fun and drinking continued merrily. I occasionally glanced out the window, hoping to find inspiration from some distant land (aka eastern Germany).

And then it appeared—like the Holy Grail once revealed itself to King Arthur and his knights—from out of nowhere: the station sign "Jena Paradies." I instantly knew that this would be my new artist name. It was as if the hand of God had guided me along the tracks to Jena Paradies station and bestowed this name upon me.

A month after the Love Parade, I had my first gig as DJ Jena Paradies. There’s even photographic evidence from that time:

But over time, I didn’t want to be named after a station in eastern Germany anymore, so I started thinking of a new, better version of the name. I realized that if I added an "e," the name would be pronounced like Gina Wild’s first name. That sounded much cooler to me, so it became my stage name to this day.

I now use it almost everywhere related to me as an "artist"—very often online, with my band, and for photography, which I want to do more of in the future.

I was eating something when I made the account. Make a wild guess what it might have been.

The Old Man waiting for you at the end of time in Chrono Trigger is Gaspar, the Guru of Time. (At least in the US - in Japan he was called Hash)

I thought it was fitting since I ever so briefly ran my own instance (endofti.me) when I first jumped ship from Reddit.

Mine is a cheat code for Castlevania III on NES. Which is, I believe, the name of one of the developers of the game.

I like nicknames that are short and have no real meaning that just kind of sound like they could be a name.

I was promoted from the rank of Commander.

My husband’s nickname for me. I was born in the holler in Appalachia and am a woodsy pixie. It stuck and is now my trail name.

I mean….

Bitwarden username generator 👍

I used to be just "Cyborg" in IRC, forums and online games back in the late 90's because I found them cool. That was always my online nickname.

But it was already taken on Reddit when I joined so so many years ago. Cyborg is short for Cybernetic Organism. So I just used organism in the name instead. It was unique enough that no one else used it.

It sounds cute.

Way more years ago than I would like to admit, when I was in my teens, I learned to play a Fender Mexican Stratocaster. It became my name on my BBS, and has stuck ever since.

Most people think it has to do with FM radio.

Edit: Also, this question has managed to get replies from almost all of the prolific participators on Lemmy. Nice.

I dunno, but people sure love calling me it all the time.

When Counterstrike first came out a quarter century ago one friend had a PC and we would take turns playing it and wanted to compare stats on some 3rd party stat tracking site so we could talk shit on each other. Finding a unique name was a pain, but I got lucky with this one, which is probably based on something Jay from Clerks said.

I've been lucky that it isn't taken when signing up for stuff so I keep using it. A happy little accident.

Username should be pretty self explanatory. If you still don't get it you can either ask me or bravely run away.

Andrew t a

Andrew (teachers assistant)

Or depending on my mood

Andrew (total asshole)

I made an off hand joke about farts having accents once. It got some laughs and then I thought, "That would make a good username."

... aaand here we are today: You're welcome everybody!

I wanted a short username since I'm not usually able to get one and the idea of it being something common and impossible to search was fun.

I liked Legos and I liked Pikachu at the time(I was 11 or so? Trying to make a Minecraft account lol)

I don't think I'll be able to use this name for anything commercial if I wanted to do that...

I literally have a slur for a diagnosis.

I first used this name during the "lulz xD so rAnDum" era, and I like to draw. So, RandomStickman

Stole it from a user on a pirate bbs I was a member of in the early 90s, Digital Underground

It’s a reference to a more obscure Marx Brother, as in the 30s-40s comedy group. Does not have any special significance to me personally.

It came from long list of mispronounced words from a Ukrainian girl that came to our country when the war started.

The list is gold mine for usernames, I have to contact my friend who dates her to get it.

My name is Helen. I hated that there were no good nicknames for it (ugh, Helly...) but I love my name. Mentioned this to a friend who was like "you could use other parts of the name for a nickname..." and suggested Lenny. As a woman on the internet, having a gender ambiguous username is very beneficial, so I adopted it, and I absolutely love it. I added extra ns because then it'd look like bad kerning Lemmy.

Glitch from the original Pokemon Red/Blue.

Someone submitted a web form with this name.