53 thoughts on “Weekend Question Thread”

  1. Simply put, I like Ghostbusters. Always have. I was obsessed with the movie as a kid when it first debuted.

  2. I work at a greenhouse taking care of plants and such… my email addy is very different. Did you get my email, A? re:salazar and wolves? Disheartening to say the least.

  3. I was signing up for some website a LONG time ago and they asked for a name and “Joe” was too short to be accepted. I was always forgetting internet IDs with versions of my name with numbers like my birthday attached (Joe421, Joseph1969, etc.) so I tried ‘joejoe’ and that was too short. So I tried ‘joejoejoe’ and that worked and that’s what I’ve used ever since.

  5. My dad was Lt Junior Grade J. G. Chase in the Navy — “Lt jg-squared Chase”.
    I got a PhD, and you have to guess my first two initials.

  6. No story whatsoever. Just a product of my disturbed brain.
    But is was fun for the several years I was asked what the “incident” was and replying “It’s too painful to talk about.”
    .

  7. I have no imagination.
    At least when it comes to user names, etc. My only goal is to have something that mazimizes the chances I’ll be able to remember it…
    I take absolutely no satisfaction or even interest in my own screen name.

  9. Boring geek story. Assigned login from one of the companies I work with. Initials plus last 4 digits of phone number.
    Of course that isn’t my phone # any more, and the company now has a totally different login policy – but it has outlasted 2 marriages,5 cats and all of my immediate family – so it stays.

  11. Initially it was just Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird. But I was concerned there was another Scout and so in the comments over at Eschaton, it was the wonderful Watertiger of Dependable Renegade who said we’ll call you Scout Prime.

  13. Back in the dark ages, when email took off, I was still in art school and learning the basics of glassblowing. When registering for my first-ever email account, I was racking my brains a little looking for a cool username, and I found it:
    http://museumofglass.org/education/virtual-hot-shop/sbf/video/11_lip_wrap.html
    All I did was remove the “w”.
    It’s been with me ever since, even though I don’t work in glass anymore. However, any glassworkers who come across me recognize the handle right off as being of their world and compliment me on it.

  14. From Watership Down…One of the best books evah! When the rabbits get really scared, in the book and paralyzed with fear they stand totally still. In the book it is called going Tharn…After Bush was put in office and my outrage meter went to 11 I felt like I had gone Tharn…Hence the name.

  15. It’s beer. Nothing interesting or smart or geek credit worthy. Used to live in ND/MN, and Leinenkugels beer was my fav – especially their Bock. Oh, how I loved their Bock. Now that I’m in Boise, I can’t get any Leinies. When I finally decided to stop lurking and start posting on a blog – and I don’t remember which one it was, but it might have been Smirking Chimp, I needed something, and it popped into my head as being pretty anonymous and yet easy to remember.
    Here’s hoping that A had some Leinenkugels at the hockey game and enjoyed them.

  16. “Black No 1” is a song by Type O Negative. I needed an AOL account name and I figured that sounded menacing enough, however AOL wouldn’t accept it so I dropped the c in black and it worked. There you have it.

  18. Frank Zappa’s song came to mind when I chose my dancinfool moniker. I danced for many years – first in a ballet company then a modern dance company. I didn’t really stop dancing even after I retired. I still dance around the house with my mp3 player and earplugs!
    Frank Zappa’s song came to mind when I chose my dancinfool moniker.

  19. My youngest son looked like Chucky from Child’s Play but just try to get that as a user name. So, like joejoe I doubled up…

  20. Before the Federal Flood of New Orleans I used my name for all postings and logins. Since much of my work was in the Trans community most folk knew who Morwen (Dark Maiden) was.
    After the Flood I started a blog called “Thoughts of the Dark Rose” (Dark Rose- name of my Flood destroyed graphics effort) My login was GentillyGirl.
    Alan at Think New Orleans offered to host my Blog there and when he set the first page up he had Gentilly Girl as the title. Bingo! Worked for me since i was reaching for folks from Gentilly and NOLA.

  21. I joined Slashdot back in 1997, and I needed a handle that was sufficiently geeky to fit in there, that reflected my personality, and was gender-neutral (a big one for Slashdot). Since I’m a rhetoric nerd, the name of an obscurenonstandard punctuation mark was what I settled on, and I’ve had it ever since.

  23. My closest friend of the past twenty-odd years gave me the name ‘serge.’ She worked for me then, and I work for her now. She worked her way through college, then law school, and now she’s a successful real estate attorney here in Charleston, at the firm where she began as a runner.
    I used to help her with her French homework, and we’d get to those ‘Serge et Therese’ exercises…you know, “Therese, ou est la bibliotheque?” I have been serge ever since.

  24. our household is francophone: “punaise” has a triple meaning in French:
    1. pushpin or thumbtack
    2. an inoffensive slang exclamation that replaces “putain!” in polite company (the latter literally means whore but its use as an exclamation is closer to our “dayaaaam!” or “oh, crap!” or “oh, sh*t!”, depending on the context and the inflection.)
    3. bedbug
    my usage (FDL-centric) is bases on 1 and 2, with a hat-tip to my bad habit of puns. 3 is an unfortunate by-product.

  25. i picked pansypo as my ebay name eons ago. it was near the early years of my new cat pair. cosmo & pansy. pansy soon showed she had a farting issue. EWWWW pansy! POO! and pansy bame pansypoo and then keep it simple stupid. i am pansypoo.

  26. I used to use “slim” – that was the nickname given me by the kids in the projects when I used to be a crime reporter in Rome GA. I couldn’t think of anything else.
    “Missy,” believe it or not, is my real name.

  27. mdh is shortened from mdhatter
    Back in 1991 I wore a top hat and got my first e-mail address. (comes in handy when I meet someone from my huge Uni, “you remember that guy in the top hat”)
    so mdhatter is 8 letters, which was a limitation of the early net.
    I swapped last from mdhatter to mdh because 1991 was a long time ago, and a glaxy far far away.

  28. Initials weirdly coincide with my Zodiac sign. Not that I believe in horoscopes. Exactly…

  29. Way back in the ’80’s I was Cyber Scribe on the BBS’s around Wichita. In 1991 I shortened it to CybScryb and have used the handle ever since.

  30. Twilight Zone had an episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.”
    Basic idea is that given a chance, we’ll destroy ourselves much more readily than an invading alien army could destroy us.
    I picked it up during the Bush II years.

  31. Way back when, in the early days of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, my friend and I used Buffy and Willow as handles. But thing was, I could never type the damned name right, so it kept coming out Buggy.
    Later on, I add the Q to distinguish me from a lot of other Buggys (guess I’m not the only errant typist or fan of horse-drawn carriages–take your pick).
    And Maple Street, I’d wondered if that was the source of your name–it’s one of my favorite Twilight Zones. I think that wins my vote for coolest allusion in a handle!

  32. Athenae, I know you don’t know me from Adam (or Eve) but I just sent you an e-mail about an opportunity with a company called Newmediahub.com. I realized too late that the subject line sounded too much like one of those scams from Nigerian princes.
    My name is a pun: Southern Belle + Howard Beale = Southern Beale. Means I’m a pissed off liberal woman in the South.

  34. My last name is Sanders; practically my first day as a freshman at University of Missouri, I was dubbed “Sandman” by the upperclassmen in my residence hall. Thus it has been since 1986.

  35. Henry Holland is the meek bank clerk, played by the awesome Alec Guinness, who robs millions in gold from the Bank of England in the wonderful movieThe Lavender Hill Mob, one of my very favorite movies.

  36. Admiration for a writer named A.J. Liebling. The “J” was for Joseph, and people called him Joe.

  37. I’m a liberal, and as shitty that label has been portrayed, I WILL NEVER FUCKING DENY IT.
    Actually, I’m pretty much socialist, or even a bit left of that.
    But I won’t deny that either.
    Eat the rich. Robin Hood had the right idea.
    But he didn’t eat them. Big time fuck up.
    The greedy cancerous cyst now known as the Rushpublibot party infesting WE the fucking people needs to be sterilized…and eliminated once and for all.
    And then we can start working on the way too far to the right Dems.
    Liberalism is a good thing for those of us that actually WORK for a living, for WE are the ones who are generating the wealth.
    Sadly, we only receive a pittance of that wealth.
    And some wonder why the economy is sucking ass right now. Too much money in the hands of too few.
    Now why is that so hard to figure out?
    Liberalism is a good thing for those of us that actually WORK for a living, for WE are the ones who are generating the wealth.
    And THAT is why I choose to be known as the Undeniable Liberal.

  38. One more thing…while I’m in a rare rambling rant mode, being the total radical left wing asshole fuck that I am, I SOOOOO fuck with the groveling consevative salesmen at work that are ready to suck dick to sell anything, although that wouldn’t help. Nude pics of their wives, maybe.
    They all have the same talking points. TAXES!!
    I point to my employees and say, how does a tax cut on YOU make THEM any better off? Just how in the fuck does cutting taxes on born into privelege motherfuckers help somebody who HAS to work 60 hours a week just to survive help THEM?
    One salesman is actually telling me not to hold his Rushtardery against him when it comes time to decide if we will use his product. How tempted I am. If the shoe was on the other foot, ie, if I needed him for something, how would he respond?
    We know.
    I think the most of the fucktards are finally start to realize that the world doesn’t revolve around bullshit.
    Being a liberal rocks, and I won’t deny it.

  39. Many years ago, I found myself attached to a wistful group of ecletic pagans. They all had cool names like Feodor Dragonkeeper and Rhiannon Starwalker but I couldn’t bring myself to savage my burgeoning faith with a stupid Tolkienesque rip-off like that.
    David is my given name, it holds great power in many religions. Aquarius is of course, the starsign I was born under. I became David Aquarius in 1981, simple and profound without rolling a 12 sided die. For my Hotmail account(pre-Microsoft), it was an easy pick.
    Once I became an elder in our clan, I was gifted the title ‘Shaman’. When I tried to get an AOL account Shaman Aquarius was too long; it cut me off at Shamanaqua. Thus my site’s name was born. I kinda like the way it sounds.
    I guess its better than calling it Phil.

  40. …my handle/user name comes from a long-ago strange reference by Lisa English at Ruminate This to one of my post comments where she referred to me as “Jack” rather that using my real first name, which was as usual tagged to the comment. That’s what made me Jack K.

  41. My name’s Tom, and I’m a “filker”, which means I perform music at science fiction and fantasy conventions. It started out decades ago as mostly folk songs that had been rewritten to reflect science fiction and fantasy themes, but there’s a lot more rock, alternative, jazz, blues, and other styles nowadays.

  42. When I started commenting on blogs, I just used my initials but they have a common sexual connotation that was occasionally distracting, esp. when I referred to my lovely wife.
    So I adopted the name of the fifth Marx Brother for no particular reason. It was only later that I learned that there was a cult film with the name “Gummo” which I, to this day, have never seen.

  43. Some fairly significant life events put me on the wrong side of polite society pretty much permanently. Didn’t feel great but I’ve learned to live with it, accept it and acknowledge it as part of who I am.
    In deciding that a jezebel is what I am, for better or worse, I did some thinking about the history of the name, and that just made me all the more at home with my handle.
    Biblical Jezebel is a much maligned, largely misunderstood, fascinating person. She’s generally thought of as a harlot and a witch, but that’s because victors write the history books. She was the daughter of a priest and priestess of Ba’al. When the followers of Jehovah (a patriarchal war god-following clan) came to cast down Ba’al and conquer her followers, they killed Jezebel’s parents. She fought back, defending her people and her religion. She ultimately lost, and was fed to the dogs. Her reputation was deliberately and relentlessly torn down after that, to the point where history associates her name with whores and dishonor.
    And then I saw Bette Davis in the movie “Jezebel,” and she was all kinds of awesome in a not-unrelated vein. For having the temerity to push back against traditional mores (and daring to suggest that being beaten by one’s fiance with a cane might be somewhat objectionable), she was reviled and cast out. She found her own way to grace in the end.
    So. I am jezebel. Whether that’s something to be proud of, ashamed of, both or neither may be in the eye of the beholder. I know where I come down on that, and I’m good with it.
    [Disclaimer: I have no affiliation whatsoever with jezebel.com. I just learned of that website fairly recently, love it, but have been jezebel for far too long to want to change my handle now to avoid confusion.]

  45. i had never heard of a.j. liebling and, always curious about writers, i looked him up. he sounds a very cool dude, indeed.
    these are some notablelielbling quotes which i thought quite apropos:
    * “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
    * “People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”
    ghost of joe liebling’s dog — thanks!

  46. Well like a billion years ago I was spock on the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) which is kind of amazing that I got it, but again, it was a long long time ago. Then when I tried to use it as a handle on another service it was taken so I used spocko from the episode called “A Piece of the Action” where Kirk called Spock, “Spocko” to make him sound more gangster like. (That is the episode where they are on a planet that is run like a gangster operation from Chicago’s Al Capone days. Kirk plays Royal Fizzbin in this one.
    My blog name Spocko’s Brain comes from the combination of that episode and the classic Spock’s Brain where they Took Spock’s Brain!
    The combination of the two is about how I feel that my thoughts live on in boxes all over the world. Hence how I sometimes say, “I’m a brain in a box”
    I also like hats.

  47. I picked my name after finding political blogs and wanted to make clear I was in Washington state, not DC. That wasn’t a good idea, since as a newcomer to WA, didn’t know that many people here refer to DC as the “other Washington.” *sigh*
    By then I’d become a registered user as TheOtherWA or TOW on so many sites it seems a bit daunting to change it all now. I am still considering changing it, and as soon as I come up with another one, will.

  48. It’s a pun on my (real) first name. I had to come up with it in a hurry, but it’s grown on me over the years.

  49. It’s a real enough sounding name that I used for a character in an unpublished short story twentyish years ago.
    filkertom, I didn’t realize who you were until I saw your linked site — been listening to your stuff off and on for about 15 years, but I haven’t been an active convention-goer for a while. I can still sing most of “Fenton, the Death Sheep from Hell” from memory, though.
    D

  50. daryljfontaine — kewl, and thanks for the kind words. And, if you want, you can download the recent studio version of “Fenton” for freehere.

  51. Hmm.
    Hotmail account.
    When I created it, I was asked for a first/last name. I didn’t care to publicize my last name, but I had to enter something, so I started to enter “Tommy” for my last name as well as my first, but the GUI didn’t like that. I backspaced over all the letters in the last name but the first, and became “Tommy T”.
    On such happenstance, worlds are born.
    Or ferrets.

  53. @ karen marie
    You’re most welcome. I miss Liebling more than probably anyone else I never met, if that makes sense, and more than a few people I did meet and was close to.
    With kind regards,
    Dog, etc.
    searching for home

Comments are closed.