Ok, so as some of you have noticed already (at least, those who have been in the chats this last week) I've been amongst the FR groupies in the Chat Shack. Given the atmosphere of rampant murder that typically abounds when fans of cape-clad heroes get together, I've once or twice used something of a running gag between me and some of my other online buds. I get a laugh out of it even if no one else does, but it has a significance beyond a joke that has spawned my most common username, nickname, and occasionally (for useless information I don't care about people hacking, like my upteenth yahoo account) a password: Tomato.
Now I figure I'm not the only one with such a tale, so I thought I'd open up this thread to see what other ludicrous stories we have floating about.
But first, how a cheap gag became my most common username: I had joined a Kingdom Hearts Forum RPG as probably the singularly most useless characters ever (that's another story) and frequently chatted with certain members of that board. These conversations were typically like miniature adventures, completely disconnected from the RPG or from reality in general (Case in point: one memorable adventure saw both my own and a friend's character traveling into hell, warring to take control over it, then finally settling into eating smores. This was until a demon tried to steal the smores from my character, at which point he ate the demon's hands WITH the smores.)
Well, much like the random murders we see in the chats and Randy's House of "Hope", These adventures involved quite alot of dying, resurrecting, and needless slaughter of hapless bystanders in other conversations. Well, one of the times I was killed, in an attempt to do something completely and totally random (as was the norm) I/my character "*sits up and eats a tomato*." It was such a "WTF?" moment for my friend that I adopted it as something of a running gag, which consequently increased the number of times I was killed. It wasn't long before I was most commonly known as "Tomato," and the rest is history... or at least badly written reality.
For anyone who's interested (although I think I've explained this before):
For a very brief time (think less than a month) I had a (thankfully) career as a club DJ in Chicago. I needed a handle, and I was riffing on Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, and came up with randyripoff (all lowercase cuz that's kewl). Flash forward, I wanted a simple, easy to remember username for forums and stuff that would be unlikely to be used by other people, and randyripoff made a comeback.
So now you know my secret. And now you all must die. Because you are evil. Because I said so.
I'm reminded of the world's greatest joke:
Why did the plane crash?
Because the pilot was a tomato.
I have two:
The Glob is a superhero I created when I was 10 years old and thought that Plastic Man was the most unique character created since Spider-Man. I can draw him in my sleep, and when I learned how to skin, he was the second character I did.
Lonespaceranger combines a couple of concepts and several of my favorite things into one.
Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories have always been among my favorite, and there's something about the main character from "The Cat That Walked by Himself" that reminds me or, well, me.
Unfortunately, when I went to sign up for email, I got it slightly wrong and it because catwhowalksbyhimself instead, but I've stuck with that slight variation ever since.
No real backstory, I like C4 (the name for certain explosives :P :rolleyes: ) And my real name starts with a C.
Though generally, C4 being very common, its taken so I use variations like C4004. Luckily here I got it ^_^
Either that or C6 is a +2 model upgrade to me. And we are human looking androids set to kill the human race on
activation. :ph34r:
I liked the Flinstones episode where Fred entered the Indianapolisrock 500.
I thought it was a funny name.
So no personal meaning whatsoever.
Lugaru = what I heard when somebody said Loup Garou. I named a few rpg npc's and it became one of my first e-mail addresses. It's nice because I rarely compete for that username, except against the few people who have played Lugaru, the bunny kung fu game (which rocks).
Mines totally original, stolen from nowhere.
Mine is a nickname I always see to have thrust upon me no matter where I go. (I'm 5'4" and my last name rhymes with Troll). Normally, I just go by Troll, but someone beat me to it on the boards. Has nothing to do with intentionally inciting hatred on the Internet.
Syn is an abreviation of my real name (Symn >_>) and was lengthened to Synthos for a more medieval feel in rp games
unfluffy bunny was a nickname I picked up working for the rspca when I was 16
my username is in reference to Guy Debord, a Parisian firestarter in the 60's. His anarchic and artistic social experiments inspired punk rock aesthetics and culture jamming. I really used to love the intellectual masturbation of academia. But now i just steal art and abuse it to be punk.
so... you'll totally notice in everything i've produced for Freedom Force, it's really just manipulations of other people's creations, usually hobbled together in a sort of mashup (originally referred to by Debord as a detournement)
When I was in middle school, I made a character based off of myself--he was a little purple monster dude who could manipulate electronics. I wanted to be a monster because I already thought I was ugly and wished I was scary enough to get revenge on the bullies. I went with Gremlin because I thought I was good with electronics in general (I wasn't :P). When I went to FR, I just kept the handle because I already identified with him.
Jr. High basketball nickname. I wasn't fast, I couldn't shoot the ball worth a darn, but when it came to getting rebounds, whoo buddy, stand back.
I had a knack for knocking people down, is what I'm trying to say.
My 7th grade coach saw this, and put me to use as an "enforcer" of sorts. If we were down (which was pretty much the norm) and had no time outs left, he'd send me in to intentionally foul someone to stop the clock. I fouled out of almost every game that year. I'm also the only guy in that school's history to full- on tackle a guy going for a lay- up.
Many years back, I got interested with a program called RPG Maker. I joined one of the forums as The Hitman, and the rest is history.
I have used a few usernames over the years, but they almost all correspond somehow to my real name, JC, in that they usually start with a "J" or a "C" :doh:
The current name, Camma, is my main in City of Heroes, but that originally came from a celtic storm deity i came across in research. The City of Heroes character is a storm summoner, and it not only worked with my usual naming scheme but seemed content appropriate. The only problem being that I am a guy and i use a female avatar. It can be confusing to noobs and less enlightened individuals, but thats really half the fun.
In the past i used the name Jenar (like back in table top days and that was my SW Galaxies name), which again fit the usual naming scheme and was also the name of the evil rat in The Rats of NIHM. That character always intrigued me (well scared me when i was a little kid and saw the cartoon movie).
Well . . . I've had three names that I have used here over the years.
"Journeyman" - A reference to the old Eric Clapton album and the first alias I ever used on the internet. This was back in the mid-90s when I chatted on some chat havens that hosted on Unix.
"Whiskey Saint" - The idea came about from a discussion about a song called "Bound to Be" that was wrote by a Pennsylvania based band called The Gathering Field. It was further developed by a comment made to me by a lady who worked in a Christian bookstore once after I mentioned the character and the concept to her.
"Mr. Hamrick" - Hamrick is my real last name. I decided to change over to it for two reasons. The first being that I have trying to adapt The Whiskey Saint character into a script. The second is that I was ripping on the thing that "Mr. Kennedy" does in the WWE with his promos. Basically he goes to announce himself then does a dramatic pause and repeats his last name an additional time.
When I first logged in to FR (way to many years ago to admit when I was having trouble beating Shadow in the original Freedom Force Game). I needed a name. As a geologist, I always enjoyed the whole age of the megafauna here in North America and the name Dire Wolf just sort of came to me. It has become a major alterego over the years....
my daughter came up with mine.she said since i liked superheroes,comics.ect.she said since i was her dad,her hero and my love of comics and she said i was her #1.thats how herodad1 came about.pisses my ex-wife off when she tells her that! waiting on hitman to make her an avatar so we can fight the forces of evil together!
I already told this story in some long-lost previous incarnation of this thread, but okay...
"Alaric" is my actual first name. When Freedom Force first came out, I happened to see a copy in a store and subsequently looked it up on the Web. I found the original official forums for the game and become a regular lurker, then was lured into registering and de-lurking due to the amount of fun the posters were clearly having. I thought of several possible user names, mostly trying to come up with something superheroish for myself to fit the theme, then realized that my actual name was unusual and superheroish enough, so I went with it. Eventually, I cobbled together an "Alaric" skin for the game, based on a highly idealized version of myself, with that green "A" on the chest for a slight super-hero-y touch (green being my favorite color). Sometime later, I came up with my "Verdant Vowel" (verdant = green, "A" is a vowel) identity as a joke, and found myself having a lot of fun with it. My original idea was that the main joke would be based on the idea that it should be really obvious that the Vowel and Alaric were the same person, but it somehow wasn't, but somehow the Vowel took on a life of his own...
I had to come up with a name in order to post here in the first place - I wanted to pester some mod makers with questions about installing and running their work and needed a login name in order to do so. I bounced through a few options before settling upon this name what I have.
The character and persona built up over time as I was drawn into the strange worlds of Posting Games and the Fiefdom, where he developed into the lovable and generous hero we all know and love. Once I got a handle on the sort of person the Eyebrow should be, I then built a herofile and he made his way into the world of Freedom Force proper. This was an iterative process and he went through several incarnations before settling on the well-balanced and thoroughly agreeable power set he has now. These (very) same powers all also borne by the online version here at the boards, so beware all who would face his fearsome forehead fringe!
The look of the character is the result of numerous artists and skinners here at FR. My thanks to all who contributed there!
Back when AOL was the rage and AOL disks outnumbered the dollars spent by the US Congress...
I had to come up with an online handle upon signing up for AOL. I wanted something unique.
Fancying myself as a poet and a storyteller with an ear for music, as well as a veteran AD&D player, I liked the idea of identifying as a bard. The blue part comes from the fact that blue is the color I wear and identify with. (No, nothing pictish about it. I don't run around wearing nothing but blue paint.)
So, Bluebard. It's stuck with me as much as I can, though sadly others have claimed it over the years.
As an avatar, I finally created a BlueBard superhero for a Glitch Girl sponsored fan fic challenge. GG created the first visual image of him later.
More recently I've gone by some variation of Bluegeek on other sites, but here I will probably always be BlueBard
Long ago in a city far far away....
Well, Miami during my college days to be exact.
Thanks to my roommate, I had recently discovered the wonderful world of UseNet and newsgroups and had started to frequent a few that had topics of interest. This was how I came to discover the Legion of Net.Heroes, a fiction group that wrote original superhero stories with their own characters. Humor was the norm and some of the stuff had some great reads.
The stories stirred something creative inside me, and I decided I wanted to write something. In their FAQ they said you should come up with a persona that fits you somehow (the classic example being "If you have a personality of a limp asparagus, then you should ne Limp Asparagus Lad!")
It was also at this time that I had started to notice that technology acted... odd around me. Odd little flukes, like a side scroller character in an arcade game somehow getting flipped and moving through the entire level backwards, or the network crashing after I logged off of email, or other strangeness. Among my friends I was rapild getting a reputation for making things "glitch" by my sheer proximity.
Now there's a character idea... :)
and thus Glitch Girl was born. Her look was an attempt to come up with a costume that was practical and could be thrown together by someone without access to a tailor specializing in spandex, with a slight nod to the pulp stylings I loved so much.
My other common name online is "Mea", which just happens to be my initials.
My user name has a good back story if you live in Los Angeles.
Everyone in my family, except my sister, calls me LAW and has ever since i can remember.
My initials are LAW2, because I didn't want to be called junior anymore and filled out a Social Security card using II instead of Jr. Thus when the internet craze finally came my way I used the name LAW2.
A few years ago (I don't know if it's still true) there were commercials for a law firm for accident victims (ambulance chasers). The phone number was 1-800-THELAW2. People joked with me about it and it stuck. I changed the name to THALAW2 in order to avoid a law suit..ironic aint it? Anyway, I've been trying to think of a more superheroy type name but can't.
Quote from: thalaw2 on March 20, 2009, 12:40:26 AM
My user name has a good back story if you live in Los Angeles.
[snip] I changed the name to THALAW2 in order to avoid a law suit..ironic aint it? Anyway, I've been trying to think of a more superheroy type name but can't.
Why worry? I think of Judge Dredd every time I see your name.
I don't know if anyone is a fan of the "ghost in the machine" concept of philosophy or the album by The Police called Ghost In The Machine, but my username has nothing to do with either one of those. (Someone at another board I joined believed my username came from the former)
I like ghost stories and I also like just about anything with cool machinery, be it gadgets, weapons, vehicles, robots, androids, cyborgs (part machine), giant mecha, etc. So I just jamed "ghost" and "machine" together to make my username.
And for the record, its one word. I just use a capital M because I thought it looked cool. Most people type it as two words if they don't type it the way I do.
My original online username was Revenant71, which was my AOL e-mail address. Revenant from my main Shadowrun pen and paper RPG character (a Wolf Shaman, and its a long story that I won't bore you with about how he got the name Revenant, which wasn't his original alias; I changed it from Blackdawg after his fourth or fifth Shadowrun, where something went horribly wrong), 71 from the year I was born, 1971. I've pretty much abandoned using that username at all.
Back on the original "MyFreedomForce" boards I had to come up with a user name to post my first question "how do I install a skin?". And since that was my first ever message board to be apart of I had no idea what to make for a name. So I thought, what character was I most interested in when I read comics? Then I remembered when I started reading West Coast Avengers I saw 2 Captain Americas, and I just had to find out everything I could about that 2nd Captian...His name was USAgent and through all my research on him he became my favorite character, so since I wasnt very creative and couldnt think of a name I choose USAgent.
Now over the years I actually changed my user name a few times with the different boards and since I had become much more creative I had come up with:
USAgent
U.S.A.gent
us_agent
US Agent
and the elusive "The USAgent"
Boy I bet I fooled the lot of ya with some of my other names!
I wanted to create a character based upon my career choice.
I'm an electrician.
There is a website us UK sparkies use called Voltimum. I made my very first skin of a silver age electrically powered character by the same name. When I grew tired of making skins but not getting very much feedback, I made another skin. This time it was a modern electrically powered character I changed the "mum" to "max" and thus was born Voltimax. I decided to create an account with the user name Voltimax and posted that skin and a few others. Needless to say when people thought I was a newbie, I got a lot more feedback. I still use my old user name here from time to time, but I go by the name Voltimax mainly at electrical forums and of course when I was a contributor at NPI.
I was in high school and a friend of mine was telling me about DC Heroes rpg. He and some friends had made these weird versions of several characters including Danger Mouse with a set of "cosmic crayons" that could make real anything that was drawn.
I went out and got a copy of DC Heroes.
The Super Dave Osbourne cartoon was on Saturday mornings and I really got a chuckle out of the disastrous stunts that the Super One's stunt coordinator, Fuji Hakayito, would would design.
At this time, Guy Gardner also had Sinestro's yellow ring and was struggling to be a second rate GL ripoff.
So I thought it would be a hoot to mix some of these ideas together: a Justice League ripoff made up of powerful but temperamental and sometimes bizarre people trying to be 'heroes'.
And so Justice League Fuji was born.
As team founder it would be unseemly for Fuji to do all the missions himself so he set about recruiting folks into his team. A young British model came to Fuji's attention. She had been saved from certain death by Green Lantern (secretly test pilot Hal Jordan) and become obsessed with the emerald gladiator. She attempted several times to woo GL and followed him around whenever possible. Naturally, Hal rebuffed the crazy kid because he was in love with Carol Ferris. It was then the model realized the only way to get GLs attention was to be a superhero too.
Then Fuji Hakayito approached the lovelorn lass and told her that he could produce an exact copy of Green Lantern's power ring for her - if she would agree to join his super team.
As with everything Fuji designs, the ring was not an exact copy of the green power ring that could do anything the wielder willed. Rather, he created a yellow ring unable to affect green but could copy any power the user was deft perform. Hardly noticing this slight difference the young lady was overjoyed to begin her pursuit of GL anew but she also held up her end of the bargain and joined Justice League Fuji!
When I was graduating college I had to get a new email account since I was losing the one through school. I flailed about for a couple minutes and finally settled on 'yellow_lantern' but that was taken so changed the spelling to use a zero. Ever since then I've been too lazy to come up with anything new.
I'm called Dr. Mike in real life, on account of having a PhD in Ocean Physics.
I think I used just DrMike when I first logged in to this board, then forgot the password, and decided to re-register. I chose the "surname" 2000 in an attempt to sound badly retro-futuristic - its the sort of name someone might have given a robot or computer in the 70's. The gag is of course that I chose this name in 2002.
I've since used DrMike2000 on pretty much every other messageboard I can, if pseudonyms are allowed.
I just wanted to make a character that was pretty much useless, like a Boy with a Pointy Stick, a thug with gun would probably outmatch him in every way, even a thug with bat could probably beat him. I made a comic and he basically just developed into a moron who decides to fight crime completely obliviously.
Even though I'll always try to make everything into a double entendre, I didn't mean for it to sound so weird.
I've had the user name cmdrkoenig67 for many years, based on a character from one of my very favorite Science Fiction series, Space:1999 (not Star Trek, as some have thought)...When I first joined FR, I considered creating a more super hero-sounding name, but I couldn't think of anything....LOL.
Dana
My name is totally the start of my email address. First started posting back on AOL comics message boards to rip into and make fun of Rob Liefeld. There were a few other Mikes, so I added the B7 to distinguish myself. Kept it when I registered at FreedomFans, as I wasn't sure if I'd actually stick around with this weird bunch of people with their crazy talk.
I'm still not sure about you whackos.
I was bitten by a radioactive tommy, which crashed through my window one stormy night, and I gained the proportional speed and strength of a tommy. It seemed only natural to strike fear into the hearts of crinimals by assuming the mantle of "tommyboy".
(Or, it's what my God-Daughter used to call me when she was little, and I couldn't think of a clever nickname when I signed on at the old irrational boards.)
When I first started to log onto boards messengers I used Protoclown77, Protoclown was taken so I added the 77 at the end (if 1 7 is lucky then 2 7's are really lucky o.O). I was a big Tick fan Protoclown was a misunderstood villain type much like the hulk, CLOWN SMASH!
Like so many other I lost the original password to that account I created 77 and it's stuck, can't seem to get rid of it now. I did think to use PC77 but I didn't want anyone to think I was politically correct 77, that just doesn't fit....
My name is from a character in an old PS1 game called bushido blade 2 which happens to be one of my favorite games for some reason. Hell, I cant remember why I chose his name though. I guess cause our names had the same first letter or something.
Midnight is an old character I used to write about. Middy was the nickname that DarkMagik gave me.
During college, I took a class in Greek mythology. For one of the assignments I did a comics on the titan Prometheus, the rebel god of forethought. This became the basis for an über-mega all-compassing comics tetralogy of cycles about various mythologies, religion, advertising, AI, etc. Needless to say, after more than ten years of researching and plotting and sketching and drawing and making numerous false starts, it had collapsed under its own weight (that, and the fact that Y2K had come and gone, making it a bit less relevant; beside, mythology had by then made a big comeback, so this wasn't ground-breaking anymore).
A close friend who became a collaborator early on (and who is currently writing this as a novel, mostly on his own) took a liking to what was in my eye a minor character, Prometheus' twin, Epimetheus (Épiméthée in French), the clumsy god of hindsight. Because of they way the got fleshed out, I thought of Epimetheus as being a funnier and more apt avatar for the FF/FR forums.
Uncle Yuan was the character I was playing in a Champions campaign when I signed on at the original Freedom Fans site - so that's the name I used. He never has made it into the game, although I've tried sporadically over the years. I do have a hero file somewhere - just no skin/mesh to go with it. This site is now the only place I use the handle. Most everywhere else I am some variation of "spbtc" which are my initials (spb) and Twin Cities (tc) where I live.