Life In 19x19

Why is your name what it is? Mic asked me this question in another thread, and suggested we start a thread for discussion. I'm always curious about why people pick the handles they do, so here goes.

My handle is kind of silly. A friend and I were going to play a videogame together, and we needed a full name for a character (It might have been a Front Mission game?). Do you remember the scene at the beginning of Jurassic Park where they're unloading a raptor in the rain, and the raptor keeps trying to break out? The warden guy keeps yelling 'Shoot her! Shoooot her!' and for some reason that was all I could think of. That cracked me up for no reason at all, so we went with it. Chew worked on KGS, but it was taken on GD (seriously?) so I had to use Terr.


Ah ha, here's the scene. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PChWWkRS ... re=related

A Chew by any other name wouldn't sound like a sneeze.

Anyone who is familiar with the Battletech universe should know where mine comes from. I was a fan of the character when I first got online, and the nick stuck.

On the internet, no one knows you are a dog.

I was immediately attracted to the amorphous nature of internet existence. So, on IGS I became "hlime" for Harry Lime the nonexistant "Third Man" of the film of the same name - shortened to make it easier for opponents to type.

I came to KGS a little late, and hlime was taken, so I came up with "geocaplan" short for George Caplan, the made up government agent of Hitchcock's "North by Northwest"

I added a second account "HKA" since that is my instantly recognizable go title. There is a story there, which I will share, since sharing is what this thread is about.

HKA or how I made James Kerwin laugh.

Early in the history of the Congress, I became a dan level player, and rather quickly I began winning the Kyu Killer prize at the Congress. Over and over. The prize went to the dan player who beat the most kyu players in the week long self-paired handicap tournament. Soon, some more funny than bright Congress director called the Kyu Killer prize the "Keith Arnold" prize in the Congress program since I was the only one that won it. The name stuck and I kept winning it.

At the Seattle 11th Congress I emceed the banquet. I paused when it came time to announce the Keith Arnold prize winner. I explained that since I had now won the prize 5 years running, in the Japanese tradition, I now expected to be called "Keith Arnold, Honorary Keith Arnold".

James Kerwin fell out of his chair laughing.

"HKA" for short.

Kirby is my last name.

My name also has a story behind it. Basically, some of my friends have nicknames and they wanted to give me one, too. So they brainstormed and came up with Suji. I'm good at math, and Suji means number or figure in Japanese so it fit. Unbeknownst to me, the first time I wrote it down I spelled it the way that I spelled it for here, and I spelled it wrong. It's actually spelled Suuji, with two U's. My spelling stuck, and now I'm known by Suji in that group of friends.

It wasn't until I got into Go, that I realized that Go terms are named after me.

Actually, they were most likely named first.

My name is my initials.

These days when I create an account, I usually add a few more letters, "wmshub" or "wmshubert" or "wshubert." But "wms" is what I was on IGS, so I still use that for go-related accounts.

People sometimes think I go by "William" if they know me from online, but no, in real life I'm always "Bill." From an early age I got into the habit of using "W" in my initials. I'll leave it to the reader to figure out why.

The name of one of the corners of the old Rouen-les-Essarts racing circuit.

(disclaimer: I do not like real motor racing one bit, but I did like playing Grand Prix Legends years ago.)

The sn I used to go by on GD, sol.ch, were just the first letters of my full name (Solomon Choe).
Araban -> from the S.Korean movie "Arahan", but replacing the h with a /b/ for reasons no one will understand.

Nickname started in high school shortly after Baghwan Shree Rajshneesh (sp?) had his run at fame and fortune in the Pacific northwest. I was getting into philosophy and eastern things at the time and my birthplace was close to where Rajneeshpuram was set up in OR. So I was called 'Baghwan' and then decided to add on the B to distinguish myself from all the other Baghwans out there.

Bruce "Nickelodeon" Young

Some time ago, I digged into bits of japanese and found an article about a japanese-professor, who was - in his early years with that language - once invited to a japanese family, where he experienced that he didn't understand a word of what they were saying.
So, everytime when he felt, that there was a question to be answered or generally a response required, he nodded with a smile and said: So desu ne.
Apparently he came through the evening with just that.


I liked that. A simple phrase, which can mean anything affirming, thus positive.

I use Beatrix Potter characters as my computer naming scheme as a result of being known as flopsie in a student/computery context. (My current machine is Pigling, as in Bland; my DSLR is TomTwo, as in Kitten, but the second iteration; my PDA is PeterTwo, as in Rabbit and ditto; my original desktop was Cottontail, my I-really-will-repair-it-one-day Windows box is Nutkin. And so on and so forth.) But I usually just use JennyRad as my nick in most places - this being my name slightly shrunk.

But one day I got tired of teenage boy opponents on KGS saying "oooh, you're a girl! Are you hot?" and even more tired of saying "No, I'm quite cold really, I'm just going to shut the window", and I decided to make an anonymous nick.

Simpkin - the Tailor of Gloucester's cat - was an obvious choice. These days, I'm not anonymous about it, and having got a bit stronger, there seem to be fewer idiot opponents wanting to be slimy. But the nick has stuck.

Happened when I first tried to register an account on Yahoo! some time before 2000. Eventually this what I came out with:

unknown + x + year of birth

Then I cut off a few characters from that overly long username. I have since revealed my true identity, but this username stuck.

Just some letters from my real name. The rest is silence.

Chris

As explained over here(link). I was all of... nine or ten years old when I picked the name?

When I signed up at GD I had a typo in my email address, so the id that I had intended to use was lost and I had to come up with something else quickly. At that time I was creating a list of Armenian cities with their current and historical names, one of it being "Karaklis" (the current name is "Vanadzor"), and since I liked that name, I used it as replacement for the originally intended one.