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

[Misanthropic Monster™]

I chose Misanthropic Monster™ because I am very antisocial due to some terrible experiences in my past, and I feel like a monster.

[mahoroa]

Mahoroa is the japanese name of Magolor from the Kirby series. I like Kirby games and I like Magolor. Very simple

[McMagnetic]

This band I like, the aquabats, has a cadets program (we're superheroes!) aka the aquabat cadet fan club, flan club, fun clob, the aqua-cadets or just THE AQUACADETS!.
In this fan club, you choose a name alike the aquabats themselves. Some good cadet name examples are the ninjkabat, tynoceros, chatterbox and A.O.L.. It was hard for me to come up with my cadet name when I joined this club many years ago.
So i asked their guitarist who is a good friendly friend friend of mine. I showed him the name I was brainstorming: McMagnetic. (although the other names were bedhead, luke skawalker, and mighty magnetic)
He said it was rad, in fact he complimented it before i even asked his opinion.
So i decided to stick with it. and now its been many, many years. And most of the band and the other cadets know me as Cadet number 2000267, McMagnetic rather than my actual name ;)
Half of billy is a pretty good name though. I love it.

[lunarrose]

This name is hardly unique by any scale, but it's a username I used about two decades ago on a now-dead internet game, Rakion.
It was before it's time for sure, and I spent many many hours playing it. I had to be around 10 when I created this username.
I just brought it back for the ~vibes~

[Memory]

I used to go by --disfrog everywhere but I never really liked it all too well , I just stuck with it because I'd had for so long [I first came up with it while making a scratch profile when I was 11 but I deleted it]. I wanted something 'cooler' and I'd seen a user that was 'wormbutch' or something like that. I thought it was really cool so I just changed it up and thus butchbonez was born.

[WG2k]

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

I found myself making HTML games which are rarely referred to as webgames. I also wanted to have an aberration for my username and have an obsession with 2000s internet culture so I merged both of those and got my current username

[milo]

In high school (ages ago  ), I got introduced to a group of girls. I got real shy and quiet around them and when they asked my name they misheard me and heard "milo" which is not my name. But the misheard name kinda stuck and soon it's what I was known as to everyone for a long time.

After I graduated I stopped using the milo moniker, but recently kinda fell back into it. :)

[Seraphim]

In high school (ages ago  ), I got introduced to a group of girls. I got real shy and quiet around them and when they asked my name they misheard me and heard "milo" which is not my name. But they misheard name kinda stuck and soon it's what I was known as to everyone for a long time.

The name I go by now IRL is the result of something similar to this. Met a group of people, my friend introduced me, misspoke and said the last letter wrong, and my name was irrevocably changed to this day. One whole side of my life just know me as my mispronounced name.

As for Seraphim, it comes from a general love of seraphim themselves, and of the digimon Serpahimon! There's just something about heralds and armored angels that resonates with me.
And using Seraphim is also a step out for me! I have gone by another username online for years, but something about diving into this forum and web revival made me want to assume a slightly different persona. I'm sure there's something psychological going on there, but I'm happy with Seraphim, I just think it sounds neat.

[moonunions]

back in 2017 i got into the series called houseki no kuni, which is about anthropomorphic gems that are navigating through their very long lives. they were always under attack by the moon people, who i eventually became really obsessed with. there was an inside joke between me and my friends about them forming a union against their leader (or something like that, it's been a while) but the username "moonunion" on twitter was taken... thus i had to resort to putting an S at the end of it and it just kinda stuck with me

[acidicAlchemist]

i used to be a massive homestuckie, so i got mine from a pesterchum user generator 

i’m not as into homestuck as i used to be, but i keep the username because i still really like how it sounds 

[Memory]

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!

is that scratch?

[halcybutton]

i started going by both halcyon and buttons, and after such i figured putting the two together sounded kinda fun ^w^ my previous go to was just a name of a character with extra vowels in the middle

[litten]

the first pokemon game i actually played to completion was pokemon sun! my starter was a litten named jasper . i don't remember which website i first used litten as a username for but it's followed me all the way from 2016!

[Zombiethederg]

My name actually has had a tumultuous history. It first came from my first ever Minecraft account. I thought up a name on the fly, trying to call myself "Creeperman189" (I was 7), and then being told by the website that it wasn't available at the time. So, I swapped around the words a little bit, changing it into "Zombieman826". That name became synonymous with me for awhile, and sometimes I even use the 826 number in alternate usernames whenever my normal username is taken.

Zombiethederg came from.. well, to be honest, shame. When I used the Zombieman826 name, I made some REALLY cringy content on YouTube. Not as in the "oh im expressing myself way", but like, content that was cringy to me because it reminded me of my younger self. Its harmless stuff of just.. 1 hour of gameplay videos that I recorded without editing, but when I was 15 I hated the name I had, as it linked me back to the 14 year old version of me. 15 years old was a really formative time for me, haha.

So I thought "Ok. I like the Zombie part.. just not the last part." and on a whim, I went "Well. I like Dragons. But the full word of that doesn't work", and then realized its often shortened to Derg. So, since I liked dragons (and may or may  not have wanted / still want to rebrand to have a dragon persona but shh you didn't hear that from me) I decided to go with Zombiethederg. That name has stuck with me since, but has lead to the unfortunate side effect of people calling me "Derg", which I absolutely hate. So now I make the point of introducing myself as "Zombie, Zombiethederg". I still get called Derg every now and again, but what can you do

[HalfOfBilly]

is that scratch?

It is! That's where I first began animating- impressive job identifying it