Mine came from about 1996 (my parents never trusted me to use modems until I bought my own) when I was using a Sega Saturn and a Netlink cartridge to get online. At the same time I also messed around on AOL at a friends house for the first time.
AOL was full of screen names like JoeCOOL56, SexayLaday69, etc and that irritated me. I wanted something original so I thought about obscure (in pop culture anyway) video games.. Zork instantly came to mind, so I decided to be a wizard named "something BOZ". A rapper called "The GZA" aka The Genius recently came out with a CD a lot of my friends were listening to. The problem was I hated the "G" spelling and that wasn't very original.
So after thinking about 5 minutes and turned to the buddy with AOL I said "Okay, JIZABOZ all in caps. That's my account." He couldn't stop laughing so I figured it was a good one and used it ever since. Though I have since laid off the caps.
Posted: Sun Jun 30, 2013 6:49 am
by AArdvark
Addendum:
there were also outside influences from the local paper...
Posted: Sun Jun 30, 2013 6:59 am
by RealNC
Mine came from high school, where there was a dude in my class who had the same name (both first and last name) as me. To make matters worse, his father also had the same name as my father.
From my point of view, I was the real NC (my initials), he was just a fake one :-|
Posted: Sun Jul 21, 2013 10:08 am
by Garth's Equipment Shop
Loved this thread. Wish there were lots more names explained. Mine is pretty obvious to anyone who grew up in the 80s and played alot of desktop adventure and crpg games.
Origin of name: For those who somehow missed it Garth's Equipment Shop was a frequent stop in the one town (Scara Brae) fantasy world of classic Interplay game Bard's Tale distributed by Electronic Arts in 1985.
Why that name: Roody pretty much summed up my reasoning when he said...
Roody_Yogurt wrote:Just kind of makes sense to have a different persona for the different hats you wear.
So when I first joined Jolt Country to get in on creating and sharing Adventure Construction Set/Ultima/Wasteland style adventures made with Chris Hopkin's Adventure Creation Kit I wanted to think up an appropriate handle for what I was doing here.
My mind immediately went to work reviewing the various personas and locations in my favorite retro crpg games in search of one that signified someone who crafts, refurbishes or collects things and then shares them with others. I thought Garth fit that description pretty well. I liked that his job was keeping adventurers equiped with the tools they needed to complete their adventures. Thats what I enjoy doing here. Equiping adventure creators with the tools they need to complete their adventures. ;)
I never really stuck to any single handle since the old BBS days and I don't even remember any I used back then. Though I do remember the name of my own WWIV bbs, Lunatic Fringe. Named after the song ofcourse. Goot times :D
Posted: Sun Jul 21, 2013 12:16 pm
by lethargic
Lethargic was the name of my band that we started in high school. When I got online the main point was to do band related stuff so I used that name for everything. After the band was gone I had become known as Lethargic online so I kept using it.
We got the name from our report cards. They had switched to these computer print out report cards that had a comment section. Apparently the teachers didn't actually write the comments themselves, they just had a list of pre-written comments to choose. During one report card, all three members of the band's report cards had this comment:
Student is lethargic in class.
We had no idea what that meant so we looked it up and said, holy crap, that's us. These assholes just gave us our band name!
Posted: Sun Jul 21, 2013 5:10 pm
by AArdvark
That's dot matrix GOLD right there!
THE
GENERATED REPORT
CARDS SAY THE
FUNNIEST THINGS
AARDVARK
Posted: Tue Jul 23, 2013 9:36 am
by Garth's Equipment Shop
AArdvark wrote:AARDVARK
[youtube][/youtube]
Posted: Tue Jul 23, 2013 3:05 pm
by Garth's Equipment Shop
pinback wrote:[youtube][/youtube]
[youtube][/youtube]
Posted: Tue Jul 23, 2013 3:14 pm
by pinback
Don't do that again.
Posted: Tue Jul 23, 2013 5:58 pm
by AArdvark
Feel free to post more AArdy the Aardvark long play videos tho.
THE
ENGROSSING GAME PLAY
AARDVARK
Posted: Tue Jul 23, 2013 6:30 pm
by Knuckles the CLown
The word Knuckles always made me giggle. I really despised a lot of people here and thought the best was was to make up an Alias where I could be a real prick. Oh I knew the too cool for school crowd wouldnt bite (Walrushitty) the Lysanders would panic about the state of the website and others would indulge it...
But somehow Knuckles the Clown was just.. perfect. It is now my handle everywhere on the internet and my XBL gamer tag.
Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2013 9:08 am
by pinback
Do you maintain the capital-L on the other sites? For me that's what really makes it.
