How did you choose your username?
Charlotte is the name a chose for myself when I was a teenager. I still haven’t legally changed it, but everyone calls me Charlotte nowadays. I was listening to a lot of The Cure, and they have this beautiful song called “Charlotte Sometimes”…Anyhow, I was also sorta punk so I chose CharlotteZero as my handle online and have just kept using it. I’ve also always had a desire to be humble (Catholic upbringing) and a fascination with nothingness…
The Cure is one of my favorite bands :) And this song is one of my fav of theirs, too.
One day I’m finally going to get around to reading the children’s book/series that the song is based on.
I have a different online name that I use elsewhere for other purposes. I wanted a name on Steepster that was different from that one so that I could keep those two things relatively separate. Generally it all comes down to ‘things RL friends and family may know about’ and ‘things which are none of their bee’s wax’
I don’t like using my real name online at all, and prefer those who knows what it is to keep that information to themselves, so that was right out. If people need to know my real name, I will tell them myself.
I most definitely did not want some sort of tea-pun either. For one thing I don’t find them particularly funny and for another thing I wanted it to be a name that I could use outside of Steepster as well. I don’t really like having different names on different sites. I identify fairly strongly with my chosen name. It still bothers me that I couldn’t get [email protected] largely due to my own stupidity when attempting to sign up for picasa webhosting as well at the time. I don’t really understand what I did wrong, but I had to choose a different email name. More on that later.
I’m Danish and I’ve always been quite taken with the Nordic mythology and more recently have become fairly interested in history in general, Danish history in particular. I wanted a name that reflected my roots. As I said, I identify strongly with my chosen name. It has to be me so I’ve put a lot of thought into it. It also couldn’t just be one of the major, well-known goddesses. Too common. Too pedestrian. And many of them are actually girl’s names in Scandinavia, so that would only add to the sense of common and pedestrian. I wanted something a little more unique.
I clicked about on a site about Nordic mythology, searching for inspiration and finally happened upon Angrboda.
She was a giantess and mistress of Loke. Mother of Fenrir (the Fenris Wolf) and Jörmungandr (the Midgard Serpent) and Hel (Queen of the Realm of Death). Her name means ‘bringer of sorrows’ or ‘offerer of grief’. It is believed that Angrboda is identical to Iarnvidia, which means ‘she of the Iron Forest’, which is handy to me, because I can use Iarnvidia as an alternative when I can’t get Angrboda. Like aforementioned email address for example. Of the two, I do prefer Angrboda.
Really, though, I ought to spell them ‘Angrboða’ and ‘Iárnvidia’ but that would probably more or less be asking for trouble.
There’s a wiki entry on the mythological figure of Angrboda here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angrbo%C3%B0a
As you can see, I have also picked a user icon that matches the name. This is a detail of a replica of a viking age stave church at a local museum. My husband took the photo for me. Look how blue the sky was that day! It was an excellent outing. We brought a picnic and went for a long walk in the surrounding woods after visiting the museum.
I have been reading Norse mythology lately and have found Loki and Angrboda both very interesting as well as Sigyn.
My favourite Norse deity is Sif, who sadly isn’t largely known. She’s Thor’s wife though and has a pretty neat creation story, and also a myth that ties into Loki as well. I did a clay face mask of her in highschool as part of a advanced art project.
She’s relatively well known in Scandinavia. Largely, I admit, probably due to Valhalla, some very popular comic books that re-tell the myths. The author, Peter Madsen, has taken a few liberties, but not hugely so. He’s Danish, but I’d be surprised if they hadn’t been translated for at the very least Norway and Sweden as well, given that these are roots that we share. (Anna?)
Yeah, the Valhalla series was hugely popular at the library (unsurprisingly, I LIVED at the library when I was a kid) but I always picked French/Belgian comics instead. Or Moomin. Never really liked Norse mythology, but of course we had to endlessly learn about it in school.
I thought so. I have the first three albums in a hardback book. They made these collector’s edition-y books, and it’s the first of five that I’ve got. The others are… ahem! on their way. :D (Bad dog!)
I can’t remember who it was that introduced the concept of ‘bad dog moments’ to me. It was someone on Steepster, definitely. It has been adopted in our household.
I chose mine after the “dream car” that I wanted as a teenager and as I finally got and restored one after the children were grown.
I tease my husband and tell him I want a “hog-wahr” and I imitate the hood ornament when I say it. LOL! But I am only kidding! My fondest memories are of my first car. It was old when I got it but I loved it. It was a 1968 Chevy Impala with a V8 327 engine. The boys in school were so jealous of my car and said it wasn’t right for a girl to have it. I checked the oil myself, and often had to raise the hood and out a stick in the butterfly valve to crank it before my Dad sold it and got me a Chevy Malibu in its place.
The experience paid off, too, some boys got stranded at my college and their college had a curfew. I heard them trying to start the car and thought it sounded like mine. They laughed in derision when I asked to have a look and told them to find a stick, but one of them told the others to chill out and do what I said. The car started, I got hugs from all, and they made it back without getting in trouble. LOL!
Umm… I’m a goof? Also, it’s different from the one I’ve used forever and I felt it was time for a change. :) I was getting frustrated with all the “already in use” names on one website, typed in “OMGsrsly” and ta daa! Kinda like a lot of my tea website logins are “HOW MUCH IS SHIPPING”.
LOL, I love ‘how much is shippng’, but your user name often catches me off guard and makes me smile. :)
I just love the idea of the confirmation post that starts Dear How Much is Shipping.
You’ll NEVER GUESS where mine came from. My name is Jen. And my last name starts with an M. Huzzah!
But actually, I didn’t “choose” this username. I signed up for Steepster using my twitter account, so I just assumed that my profile would be created with my Twitter “@ name” rather than the name I had entered into the box. Alas, I was mistaken. So hi. I’m Jen.
If my Steepster account had of used my Twitter handle, I would be known here as AwesomeBioTA. 1) because I’m awesome. 2) because I’m a biology teaching assistant. 3) because when it’s all lower-case it’s “awesome biota” and I like nature. Pretty soon I’m going to have to change my username to Dr. Jen M.
Mine is pretty boring. My husband’s name is Ashley, which used to be exclusively a boys’ name but now is so a common as a girls’ name that no one remembers it was for males until you mention Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind. His friends called him Ashman when he was growing up. My initials are RA, so when he made some email accounts and such for things we share, as opposed to his business email account and my personal email account, he put it all together and named it ashmanra.
It’s not boring at all, I think it’s a lovely explanation :-) The name sounds so feminine and exotic though, I never would have thought of deconstructing it with Ash and Man, lol!
I think that that’s sweet. It’s true that there are a lot of names that were once used for both sexes and are now used for only one is, Shelley, Myriam, Lindsey, etc. However there are new ones that are increasing being used by both sexes at the moment or used by a different sex with various spellings.
LOL! You know the story, K S! For the first time in ever, we got a mole in our yard. We pitched a tent and brought Sandy’s (yes, the Sandy on Steepster) dogs over to spend the night. By morning, Sasha had captured the mole. I took it from her and we brought the smelly little darling in. (The mole, not Sasha. Was smelly. It is now a family expression….“that smells like mole”.) We fed him some mole treats – worms that we bought a t the bait shop. Naturally, Sasha got treats for the capture. And as we do with most little critters we capture, we invited him to tea. He was adorable. We released him near my MIL’s house where there are woods and a lake and other moles! :) Other tea guests have been dogs and praying mantises!
Auuwwww. I want to cry now. Moleface! The MOLER. That’s the sweetest story ever. I seriously can’t take it.
I hadn’t heard the story before. Awesome! Sounds like something Ellie Mae Clampitt might have done. That’s a great thing in case you are wondering.
LOL! Thanks, guys! We have a soft spot for animals. And while they may smell exactly like the local spaghetti dinner hosted by the Greek Orthodox Church that is billed as " The World’s Largest Spaghetti Dinner", aka “more garlic than you imagined could go in a single dish” – moles are adorable.
Originally I was Rachel12610 which is my first name and a combination of numbers (corresponding to my address and age) I have been using since I turned 10 and made my first email account.
However, everyone had such fun names and I saw so many tea pun names that I thought “when in Rome…” and changed my name to “VariaTEA: the spice of life”. That was inspired by the fact that I started drinking tea to add variety to my monotonous diet. However, I realized that was too long and it got shortened to VariaTEA. Later I realized I misspelled my name but by then had already posted so much that I figured I might as well just leave it.
What a neat topic idea!
So, mine is now my go to internet handle/username, but the actual origin is from about six years ago when I used to be very big in online OC Roleplaying, and I was kind of involved in a horror/gore community for a while where I participated in a RP Contest similar to Hunger Games or Battle Royale in nature. Malcolm ‘Roswell’ Strange was the OC I had entered in the contest and I ended up using him in a variety of different contests/role play forums/discussions afterwards.
He had a very long and thorough backstory that was very poorly written, given that I would have been about thirteen and had no real knowledge/background on any of the crap I was writing about…
Thinking back on it, I’m actually fairly ashamed of the writing/gaps in plot and what not from it and inaccuracies with the content, but I don’t regret the actual theme of the content; I’m still very much into horror and do occasionally still RP that sort of stuff. I can link the profile in all its preteen-y, unedited horror if anyone’s interested; but I’m not joking when I say it was/is really bad and rather laughable.
Like, you know it’s bad when it starts off like this: “Warning, the following profile is graphic and disturbing as shit. It may not be suitable for some readers. ESPECIALLY younger readers or those who are easily disturbed, scared, spooked, or sickened. Please take caution when viewing some parts of this profile”.
Yours is one of the usernames I puzzled over most. I imagined someone saying, “That’s not just strange. That’s ROSWELL strange.” As in Roswell, New Mexico! So I thought maybe you were really into studying alien abduction stories or something! I thought of you immediately when I was up in my attic and found my father’s military honorable discharge papers, and discovered for the first time that he was stationed at Roswell about twenty years before I was born! Also, that was before the aliens got there. LOL!
@ashmanra I love that! Also, when I was coming up with his character background I was currently watching the TV show Roswell (which I adore), and I was trying to figure out something “mean” that could have become his nickname as a child when he started to demonstrate ‘odd’/psychopathic tendencies – and I thought it piggybacked nicely off his last name.
I was going in the same direction as _Morgana, thinking it was related to Roswell, NM. or X-Files related. ;) This thread is so interesting.
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