How did you come up with your username? Why did you choose it?

[Klopnis]

"Klopnis" is a very loose translation of a part of my IRL name into a dead language. Now that's retro (if I do say so myself)!

Frills was one of my first characters on World of Warcraft. I named her Frills to rhyme with my then-boyfriend's character, Chills

Nice! Obviously I don't know what era you started playing, but "Chills" makes me think of the old WotLK days. My first WoW character was called Lykann, which is much cooler than I intended it to be—I was too young at the time to realise the werewolf connotations, and this was before the Worgen were introduced as a playable race!

[MHKN]

I go by many usernames and constantly change them due to my plurality and a never-ending journey of finding "the true self" of mine.

The current username, mahiwa (マヒワ), is a Japanese word for an Eurasian siskin.
You may now ask, why a siskin?

It's a reference to an inside joke between me and my friends on a Discord guild I run.
There's this Polish journalist who's now running the main news program on TV that I have a crush on, whose last name is the same as a Polish word for that bird. Mash this and the weebiness, and you got the mixture.

That's all that is to it. Plus it sounds cool 

[lycoseadae]

my name is emily and i was coming up with cat puns for my name and got emeowly. its taken on a lot of stuff but not on neocities or here!

[crow-queen]

Crow Queen was the name I gave to my mobile phone when I needed to pick a name for it, at the time I was collecting crow-themed items.
I also used it for my neocities website.

[Yukari]

Favorite Touhou character + this was the username I always registered with during the mid 2000's. Back then people called me a weaboo for picking this name but the heart wants what the heart wants

[alexela64]

I've gone by alex online for a long time now. it took me awhile to find a handle that i wanted to use for everything.

Alexela is just alex flipped around the x. People have pronounced it a-LEK-se-la but in my head it's always been A-lek-SEL-a. Not many people have ever figured out that it's just flipped.   

The 64 is just a fun little thing referring to n64 games. No particular reasoning there. When alexela is taken i tend to use alexela64, or just whatever im feeling.

[94673]

94673 spells out 'whore' on the number pad on my phone.

...yeah, that's all there is to it.

[MarcieBee]

Marcie is my name, and Bee is... another name I thought of using. It just stuck better than any of my other usernames I've had, and at this point I've used it in too many places to easily change it. Oh well!
 

[xero333]

Can't even remember if I commented on this one before, but basically xero was the first name of the band Linkin Park, before they were even called Hybrid Theory. The 333, I don't know. I used to have 300 at the end of an old username and guess that just came back to me when I signed up here, but I tweaked it slightly. Can't say there's any particular reason why I chose 333.

[schiavona]

I've always thought swords were really cool. Back in 2015 I was looking to reinvent myself since I didn't exactly click with my old online handle anymore, so I decided I wanted to be a sword. I was originally gonna go with Espada, but a friend talked me into Schiavona. Turns out that's a really *really* cool looking sword, so that's what I've been for the past uh... whoa, 9 years. I think I need a moment to process that!

[grubbyfox]

Iv been meaning to make a page on my site about this, but I'll draft here!

In 2007 when I was about 13 my mum took me to an arts-residency/holiday village by the cliffs in Kerry. Her partner at the time also had kids my age, and we were supposed to have a big summer holiday - but he had some sort of mental breakdown and they never showed up; so I was very much own my own for those two weeks.

I found a melon in the grocery shopping and as a protest I drew a face on it like Tom Hanks does in the movie Cast Away - then the joke sorta morphed into re-creating the gnome from Amelie; Id carry the melon around everywhere and photograph it in front of landmarks and nice views.

Most of the media from that era is lost; but I do have this picture of me with the melon.


That was also the same year my dad gave me a macbook for christmas/school - So there was this explosion of media I was creating; so I was making comics and best of all it had iSite which was a WYSIWIG site builder - I made a whole website about the melon and there was even a melon club you could sign upto by e-mail.. That site is LONG gone, but I vaguely remember what it looked like.. lots of curvy text :omg:k:

Naturally the site needed an author, and I wanted to pick a sorta generic web username.. so Melonking I tried to replace this username over the years a few times.. since I kinda feel like Iv grown out of it, but somehow it keeps sticking around!

this made me legit giggle. I LOVE this lore! I mean, it sounds kinda sad that her partner would ditch like that, but your idea of the melon with the face and all, it's just so funny and I love that unironically, lmao. And I love that it just kept sticking around! 

My username is a mix between something from the british show Mongrels (animal puppet show), where there's a fox who's like, trying to fit into society (human society sort of?) and he gets offended when called grubby, lol. And because my internet-sona is often a fox or coyote etc, and I am kinda grubby, lmao, so yeah.

[foxmosis]

Dang I love reading about people's username's lore.  The reasonings are so vast in range.

I've been using Foxmosis as my online handle since around 2017ish.  In an era where username were becoming more "regular" I wanted something that felt 00's.  And I was also a part of that "regular" problem, I went from having a cool internet username to having something with my name.  But I wanted to change that so I thought of my most notable online username which consisted of the word "Fox" and went from there.  In 2015 I changed it to "Foxllow" which was "Fox + Yellow = Foxllow" and it was all right but it was kinda clunky when telling people it and when typed into a search engine it would pull up this restaurant in the UK.

In 2017ish I changed it to "Fox + Osmosis" and got Foxmosis because in high school I always wanted to have a band called Osmosis.  So I changed it everywhere and for the most part there haven't been any issues.  Except this one guy on YouTube actually had the name Foxmosis before me, but the channel had no videos so I thought it was abandoned, and it wasn't in use any where else.  Last year that channel left a comment on my YouTube channel and we had a nice little conversation!  He was surprised that it was in use on Twitch and I was surprised he was still using his YouTube channel.  Life's kinda funny sometimes.

[NeonAce]

Boy... I think my user name goes all of the way back to 1995 or 1996. My parents had bought this IBM Aptiva PC, 200 MHz, 16MB of RAM at the time (I later brought it up to 48MB, got a Voodoo 2 card eventually). The computer came with a version of the Mechwarrior 2 video game and I loved it, played it all of the time. I even played it online a little bit, I think maybe using an old service called Kali? It ran pretty well for being on rural dial-up internet. Anyways, I had to have a handle for my mech pilot! At the time I chose "SavAce", and never really settled on what it meant. Savvy Ace? Savage Ace? Something like that, an Ace pilot of a big stompy mech. NeonAce is along the same lines, just putting Neon at the front, because who doesn't love shiny colors? Choosing handles in the early internet... so random.

[Paprika]

It's pretty old I had that name after seeing real Paprika for the first time but it stayed an idea in the back of my head for many many many years. When I actually made it real, someone published a comic-book called "Sweet Paprika" (By Mirka Andolfo, not for kids !) and I was a little bummed because I wasn't as original as I thought but I liked the combo of character idea I had + name so it stuck anyway...

[HalfOfBilly]

A social media site I use to frequently use had the ability to upload animated profile pictures, and would display a person's list of followers/following side-by-side on their page. I had seen people who would create alternate accounts, and put segments of a gif on each profile picture; this had the effect that if you were to follow these accounts in a specific order they would appear as one long, connected animation on your following page.

See below an example (not mine) of what this looks like. Although this one was done with project thumbnails and not account PFPs, and isn't animated, it has the same general gist:


After witnessing some of these I wanted to try it for myself. It never worked out properly for me (my animation and image editing skills were rather poor back then), but the animation in question I used featured a character named Billy.
When creating another account to set the animation up on, I chose the username "Half_of_Billy" since it was, in fact, half of a gif featuring Billy. At some point in the future the name just stuck, and I've used it for nearly everything since!