I garnered mine in undergrad. My English professor could never seem to remember my name, but always recalled my projects, the Darkkin Chronicles. He called me Darkkin Girl, my classmates shortened it to Darkkin. It has been my handle ever since, both in life and online.
I'm a virtual reality fanatic, and well... virtual reality is meant to be... virtually realistic. So, that's my name on multiple outlets.
Per Wikipedia (I'll let others decide where I fall in here ) - The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.
My first name is Steve and my initials (first and last) are s and h, so stevesh (yes, I am exactly that unimaginative, but it's generic enough that I can use it on several forums).
My first name is Steve and my initials (first and last) are s and h, so stevesh (yes, I am exactly that unimaginative, but it's generic enough that I can use it on several forums).
I wanted a simple name that I could remember, and my real name is Nicole. Of course, that was taken so I switched up the letters and voila! There are other places on the interwebs I have a very different username, but I wanted to keep my writing separate from that.
I used to use my real name as a username, and then decided I didn't wanna. As a teenager I visited various forums, usually only once or twice before I disappeared, but nonetheless I'd make one or two posts here and there, ask a question. Which of course meant I had to register. This resulted in the dilemma of creating a username I'm actually gonna remember later on should I wanna revisit said forum. I didn't want anything stupid that I'm gonna regret like Sparkly Pink Me but all I could come up with was cheesy stuff. So, I came up with Mckk the same way I came up with my email address. I figured if I just used a combination of random letters that rolls off the tongue, I could never outgrow it. People can never call it stupid. In the case of my email address, I now know it looks like spam mail lol and plenty of friends have expressed surprise when I tell them my email - they usually get it wrong too because there are consecutively repeated letters, meaning they miss out at least one of them lol. Anyway, one day I needed a random username for some forum or list I went on just the once, and Mckk came to mind. Random letters that rolled off the tongue. Saw no reason to change it since.
I've done this! Two nights ago I had to make a Microsoft account for my mother, and I had to make a gmail. I ended up just rhyming random things until I came up with something simple.
I've got that article's URL bookmarked someplace, but forgot what the effect is called. So your screen name serves an ongoing cautionary purpose? (Corollary to that, I've found, is that the unskilled will take the skilled at their word when it comes to the skilled's modest assessment of his or her ability. This unfortunately bolsters the unskilled's false sense of superiority, especially when the unskilled is in a position of power over the skilled.) My screen name is the same as my nom de plume, a Welshed version of my first and middle names. I'm with @Jack Asher on the recognition thing.
I created a Steam account back in 2006 and used "Komposten" as my user name. I can't remember my reasoning behind this choice, but my father did have an email address containing the word so I might have been influenced by that. At the time I used several other user names (Combine21, Plotas) as well but on Steam I was always Komposten. Eventually it became my go-to user name because I'd used it on Steam for so long and it's what my friends identified me with when we were playing together. Nowadays, though, I do have a few other names I employ in certain cases. These include, but are not limited to "Cmdr. Junk" and "Capt. Garbage".
I dont know that it is so much as cautionary as it is self awareness. And a bit of message board humor - kind of like if someone named themselves Troll King.
It was the first thing I came up with. I could have known other people have this name but didn't check google in time to see if it weren't an actual thing, no, but unfortunately I just did and saw it's the last name of some Nazi criminal nicknamed "the tiger of Auschwitz" *facepalm*
Eh, I've played a lot of different games over the last few years and Wyr or some combination thereof is almost always my character name. It dates back to the first "real" computer game I ever played (aside from solitaire or that sort of thing) called Fate. My first character there was Wyrian and it just sort of shortened over the years. It's been so long I don't remember exactly how I came up with it, but I'm pretty sure I just pulled it out of thin air and I liked the way the Wy looked together.
If it's of any comfort, I once game one of my main characters the last name of a well-known writer of erotica. While it's not as bad as having the last name of a Nazi war criminal, I didn't want my character to be raising eyebrows among potential readers.
