how did you come up with your online alias?

[alienhospital]

For a very long time I used my real life (first, chosen) name. Yikes! I have several internet handles now.I chose alienhospital because.... it sounded cool and I love aliens. My other internet aliases, Toothpaste[insertfooditemhere], which I use on Dreamwidth and archival sites, was largely a joke at first, because of my newfound fascination with dentistry, but it stuck! Annddd my internet pseuodym, Agnes, was chosen after a musical character I love. :)

[snow_44]

I'm indirectly named after my childhood cat!

I came up with the username "Snowpaw" as a child because I was very into Warrior Cats at the time and used my (entirely white) cat as inspiration for my own kitty (which was, of course, essential to badly roleplaying).
My profile picture is actually them lovingly drawn in MSPaint like I used to as a kid haha 
 
Then I had to name it and well, what's white? Snow ;P It had the suffix "paw" because I thought I still had a lot to learn at the time and the apprentices in the books are always called "-paw". I thought I'd change it into something else when I'd improved my skills enough. Little nerd.
Over time my friends have dropped the "paw" part... only using it when they're very annoyed with me! haha

And 44 is just a beautiful number! It's two fours! And guess what? Snow has four letters as well!! I like the number four a lot  

I think when choosing a name to be called online you should consider how often you'll hear it used out in the wild and how often you'll have to turn around to see someone just talking about the weather...

[Marcellus]

Mine technically comes from the Pulp Fiction character Marsellus Wallace, my dad used to nickname me Marsellus as it kinda resembles my real name, and I started using Marcellus way before I knew it was supposed to be spelled Marsellus. I even had issues buying a domain name with that nick because some town in France somehow has the same name, and that makes it reserved to french authorities even though the town doesn't even use it

[candycanearter07]

I know for a fact I put this on the forum somewhere else, but since I didn't reply to this thread..

My original username was/is candycaneannihalator, as a vauge reference to TF2, since the Candy Cane is a weapon that makes you extremely vulnerable to explosives, "annihalating" them. And since I mained Soldier/Demo at the time, I nicknamed myself the "candy cane (scout) annihalator"


later on i started using candycanearter since I was so used to being called candy and the name was too long for some services :P

[starbreaker]

I stole mine from an old Judas Priest song from their 1977 album Sin After Sin.

If you've ever heard Judas Priest on classic rock radio, the Priest you hear there with songs like "Heading Out to the Highway" isn't the same as most 1980s Priest, and 80s Priest is not at all like they were in the 1970s. In the 70s their songwriting was often more varied and elaborate. They weren't quite progressive rock, but many of their songs had elements that suggested they were closer to prog than they wanted to admit.

[nihil0]

partly due to a playthrough of one of my favorite games, i called my little group of buddies 'the branch of nihil' and it's the name of one of my favorite minecraft mods, so it just stuck with me at one point

though i am thinking of rebranding in a sense, nothing major but it's since stopped sticking with me

[Celeastral]

So mine is a portmanteau of celestial and astral, and I only really started using this name in like 2016. It's also an indirect reference to Tenshi Hinanawi of Touhou Project, but I've drifted away from being a fan of her overall, even though I like her character design and even a bit of her self-righteous personality. I do also love learning about constellations, celestial objects, and space in general, and I've spent a good amount of time on the old version of SpaceEngine. Still, I'm on the search for a new name that fits.

[demiurgeQuantified]

my username on here, demiurgeQuantified, is the username the character Albion Shukra uses in Vast Error on the in-universe messaging program Skorpe. I picked it because i like Albion a lot as a character.
Another username i often use, fake-item-box, comes from the fake item box item you can use in some games in the mario kart series!
my website name, plotpoint/the plot point, comes from homestuck: beyond canon. in that comic, The Plot Point is the singularity of a black hole that Vriska enters. She becomes a better person while inside of it.

[egbert]

my aliases, like my filenames, are made up on the spot. if im thinking of song lyrics or having an echoalia 'attack', thats my username. i'll tell you about them but i'd rather keep my digital footprint small, so i'll be redacting some characters so you can't google or search for my tumblrs on the wayback machine, ok? nyaaa

back on tumblr, my sideblog's name was dear*m*su because at the time, i was thinking of this anime i used to watch as a kid, where the protagonist, upon announcing the title of the episode, would finish his sentence with "De Ar*m*su!"
so yeah. that's one.

then there was my main blog. it was called e*erett because like, there's this song produced for an anime called Space Dandy, and the ending song was called Welcome to the X Dimension, which referenced this scientific dude called Hugh Everett, along with his theories.
I had the song stuck in my head, so when it came to making an username, i thought of "Hey, Everett / In your world, just what has become of me?" and bam. E*erett.

Then there's my website aka lopster.neocities.org. this one's simple. there's a tumblr post out there that goes like
"(V)\_(-_-)_/(V) <- lopster"

and i had that on the mind so i've just. been stuck with it for 3 years.

my username on here? ugh. homestuck. i had homestuck on the mind and i never even gkt far into reading it. moving on.

my roblox username is brony*o because i was a 10 year old girl who called herself a brony. so i went for bronylol but went "dude. if i stop liking my little pony this username is gonna be so bad so, to envoke plausible deniability, i went for brony*o. bronylol was taken anyway.

ok last one. wait nevermind no it's not. anyways. i used to go by hooves in the 2010's. it was a very arbritary choice. i just picked a word and went with it. and so, for 8 years, people called me hooves.

ok last one. so there's this game franchise called pop'n music. rhythm game bla bla. different characters bla bla. there's this girl called root who works at a company called chodooken. and i like root and i like the sound of chodooken so it's my go-to username nowadays when i don't feel like coming up with something. not telling you where i use this name. ever. for reference it's not discord. that'd be weird.

in summary my usernames are made up on the spot and i have to stick with them

[konamiesque]

I don't remember the exact details of when or why I came up with it, but I was huge into the Castlevania games for a few years, so I decided to take the name of the company who developed them, Konami, and mash it into a portmanteau with "Kafkaesque." No real reason why I chose that word in particular, I just like the sound of it lol.

It ended up sticking as an alias just because after going through a series of Fake Internet Names that didn't really gel with me, I decided that it was easier to go by my username instead.

[wraith]

for a long time i was really struggling to come up with a new thing to "re-brand" to (im not a brand but idk what else to call it) because i had been the same thing online for over ten years, but i wanted to stop being that. i came up with wraith a long time ago but i wasnt sure what else to do with it, and then i came up with castle because it sounds like cassandra, from the myth.. and also castles are cool architectural things. i combined them and liked the idea of this castle that has the mythology of having a bunch of scary ghosts in it and then you show up and it's just a bunch of memories of what the castle has been via art/sad blog posts/memes/whatever