QotD: Also Known As
What's in a screen/user name? Tell us how you found yours.
Submitted by Bill.
Never done one of these before, but I've been beckoned forth (Is there supposed to be some way to automatically/template post these? Everyone does them so perfectly uniform, it seems suspicious!)
Anyway, there've only really been two I've used beside for the occasional specialty.
Piscis -- This one stems back to the mid '90s and crazy linguistics classes where everyone picked alternate names. I settled on the Latin word for fish, "Piscis". Why fish? It resembled the symbol which I had come to use to represent myself (contrary to various assumptions, completely unrelated to the Christian Ichthys, vesica piscis, or zodiac pisces (the plural of "piscis", for the curious)). The meaning of the symbol is another story, altogether! The "Icon" which occassionally prefixes it is just a titular emphasis of its symbolic nature, and in the sense of a username, typically appended when "Piscis" has already been taken.
Dificindian -- The impossible-to-pronounce name of the first real character I ever created, nearly twenty years ago, back in the days of "let's pretend". The craziness of the name comes from giving it to him at the age of five or so (DIE-fih-KIND-ee-ən). When I was first exposed to the online world in the early '90s (back when there was a huge perceived difference between AOL! and The Internet!) there weren't nearly as many things for which to need accounts and usernames (and not a whole lot going on, in general). But when I did need a handle, "Dificindian" was distinct, personal, and of course, always available. My dad gave me my first e-mail address at the time (something like awalton@micron.net), but I wasn't terribly interested in e-mail (not many even had it then) until I finally gave into peer pressure later on when Juno came out and singed up for dificindian@juno.com, and I used it for a good ten years before finally formally switching to my G-Mail account (though I still use the old one for signing up to various sites and whatnot). "Dificindian" was never really meant to represent me in the way "Piscis" does, though; it's just a unique name to use when I need/want one.
(I am somewhat bemused that "Piscis" shows up as wrong under the spell-check, but "Dificindian" is passed over as a perfectly normal word...)
Anyway, there you have it; the ever-constant comforting staticity that is me.
Comments
I guess it's expected that I ask what the meaning of the symbol is? I'd be very interested in seeing a Vox post on that as well!
(As for the Question of the Day, you can get the uniform formatting by answering it from the Vox homepage. At least, that's how I always do it!)
Hehe. Yeah, I suppose it's just one of those things we don't think to elaborate on without being asked directly! Glad to finally enlighten you, though.
I might have to do another post sometime about the meaning of the Icon. A bit more complicated than a name, though, as might be expected!
And thanks for the QotD tip! Ah, now I see how they're answered! I thought it was kind of strange going through the effort to format them as such manually, and wouldn't expect everyone to always consistently do so were that the case.