Why Did You Pick Your Name?
Onder Skall (me) chills at a Twitter Geek Meet with Tateru Nino, another person with a curious name.
Myg recently asked the question: why did you pick your name? I thought it an excellent question for… well… almost everybody I know really. SL names especially tend to be out of the clear blue. Why did Nick choose “57 Miles” again? He told me once but I can’t remember… and why “Urizenus Sklar”? Or “HeadBurro Antfarm”? Why no caps to “dandellion Kimban”? I could go on and on… so I thought I’d better ask the question to my social circle too. Why did you pick your name?
My story, the story of “Onder Skall”, is rather pathetic I’m afraid.
I want to tell you that it’s oh-so meaningful. I want to say that it was something logical. Maybe I was referring to something all dark and evil and “Onder” is German for “Under” so maybe… maybe there was a layer of meaning in there. Maybe it was something sappy like “the sense of wOnder that I have for virtual worlds”, or maybe it was obsessive fandom like “it was an homage to Alice’s brilliant wOnderland blog“. Yeah, even obsessive fandom would be cooler than the truth.
The truth is that I’d just read the sci-fi classic Ender’s Game before establishing the account, and couldn’t think of any name other than “Ender”. I popped an “O” in there instead of the “E” so that at least I wasn’t totally copying, and I picked “Skall” for the last name because it sounded like “Skull” which would have been cooler but… wasn’t… ya.
>> Onder Skall loses 23 creativity points.
So, why did you chose your name? Guaranteed your story will be way cooler than mine!
August 15th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Subghoul - an old name from BBS days, as in 1991. Sub from Subgenius which seemed very funny back then, and Ghoul from HP Lovecraft stories. Sometimes I wish I’d picked something different, but then I can’t imagine what that name would be.
August 15th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
My father-in-law’s patronymic was Prokofyevich. There’s a minor character in Tolstoy named Prokofy. Prokofy is just one of those funny old-fashioned Russian names that are fun to say.
Neva was the only Russian-sounding name in the list, or at least, one that I could stand, and of course relates to the Neva River, I used to live on the bank of the river looking across to the Hermitage in Leningrad/St. Petersburg when I went to university.
Urizenus named himself for Blake’s Urizenus I believe.
August 15th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Hey, as far as I’m concerned, coming up with a good handle doesn’t have to be sexy. I just appreciate names that roll from the tongue inside your brain. And I’d say Onder Skall does just that, while Prokofy does that little hop in the head, which I also appreciate. And Subghoul is just cool sounding.
August 16th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Well… since you asked
Burro: I’ve always loved the word (just makes me smile, especially said in a faux spanish/Mexican accent) and it’s sort of a net nickname now.
Head: This comes from Head Gardener in another internet life.
Antfarm: Simply because I love ants… not in an inappropriate way, you understand.
There ya go
Actually, I do have another Av that I created just for RPing (after several tries, I ended up at, and stayed in, The Wastelands) whose name I chose deliberatly to sound cool & PI-like (well, in my head anyhoo), Ryne Beck.
August 16th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Hmmm… I was about to skip this one but you called my name…. and you pulled some memories and dates back from the folders zipped long ago….. *sgihs* ok, here we go…
It was a week less than thirteen years ago, when RL me finaly got a haircut after long long while. And released of its own weight, the hair popped up in little springs in all directions from the scull. It wouldn’t have any consequences that it wasn’t She that started laughing, with scissors still in her hands, saying the name of that plant. And yes, mirror witnessed it was quite like dandelion’s head, only difference I was black instead of white.
Soon enough, serbian maslačak (pronaunced something like maslachack) turned to french dandelion (it iriginate from dent-de-lion dent) and got its additional l. Double l is sexy :p And, as it will show up in the following years, it is good thing to e,liminate most of the nutrition and botany sites when doing an ego-surf. And it really looks good in my hand-writing.
Yes, I did some of my signatures with that name. And as soon as internet came, it was an username to use. All the way to coming to second life. Those freaks asked for my last name! And I didn’t have one. So I just picked from the list (ok, it was not “just picked”, it took me more time than going through Orientation Island, checking many of them, writing them, pronouncing to feel the sound of it. The same sort of lunnacy Mygdala describes on her blog.) But Kimban now it is. It goes fine.
And non-capitalized d? Well, I must admit I was surprised when I saw capitalized names in SL. Usernames was always low-case. So I sticked to that. Recently I found that first lowercase first name was feniks Stone (registered 11/25/2002). Hardly that I thought about that in the moment of registration but lowercase goes more immersionistic. Or is it just another of my trippin’s?