384 Comments

  1. thegirliestgirl +22

    No here, but on t’internet in general I was Hawkisgirl. I wanted to be Hawkeye’s Girl as was then slightly obsessed with the TV version of M*A*S*H* but whatever website wouldn’t let me!

    1. lizlabz +7

      M*A*S*H forever!

      Important question:
      Trapper or Hunnicutt? (You can love both, but come on you must love one more!)

        1. lizlabz +9

          Same! He’s my fave. I like Trapper, but his philandering always put me a little off. (I know BJ had some missteps, but they were a big deal to him.)

    2. Crivens +7

      When I was about 5 I would sneak halfway downstairs after bed time to watch M*A*S*H over my mother’s chair and sneak back to bed when the credits rolled. She didn’t have any idea until I told her 20 years later. I didn’t understand most of the jokes, but I loved it. (my dad was working nights at the time, he would have spotted me in a minute)
      <3<3<3

    1. Joceycakes +11

      Mine was @rainbowchocolatemilk because…. Wel I have no freaking idea. I was 12?! Milk related beverages 4 the win.

    1. somethingthatneedsnothing +36

      never cave to any pressure to explain this ever. I’m in love with the mystery

  10. thewhelk +231

    Nice try but some of those fora are still indexed and Googlable and no one needs to know my preteen opinions on X-men comics.

    1. thebeagee +97

      True story: I once got an email notification of a new reply to an LJ comment I’d written in a superhero forum years before. Like, YEARS before. Like, I was in my mid-20s and the original comment was something I’d written in high school. And yet, some dude felt the need to reach through the ages to shout at me for being WRONG about superhero comics.

      1. OiSunshine +44

        Obviously it was a guy who needed to tell you you were wrong about nerd details. Why else would someone reply to a post so long after the party was over?

    2. alder_tree +19

      I was genuinely grateful for facebook because once upon a time I’d commented on an ElfQuest guestbook with my school email (which contained my real name) and for YEARS if you googled my real name it popped up. As did a pdf crediting me as a playtester for a unlicensed D&D book about sex.

      I mean, I’m not qualified for the kind of jobs where employers are likely to google me anyway. But still.

  14. alliana07 +58

    On AIM it was allsmiles5763 (I smiled a lot and 5763 was the Jewish year I’d graduate high school bc I was too cool to use 2003 lmao). After that for a long time it was pinkkitten5767 (for email) and allianagreenleaf for AIM (that was my elf name because I was a dork who wanted to marry Legolas).

    1. soopcoop +7

      Mine was all_smiles25!!! We’re username twins?…siblings?

      25 was for my high school class of 2005. I was just too lazy for the 0’s, so you win on the cool points.

    2. Diana_monkey +10

      I had an Elvish screen name too (Arithiliel) for RPGs in the Lord of the Rings chatroom on AOL, but then I realized I am much more hobbit than elf, and changed to MellyCurlyFeet.

  15. raqueue +62

    “Twilight and Silence”

    And then I translated “Twilight and Silence” into Quenya, which I cannot remember. Dinuial something.

    1. OiSunshine +43

      It’s simultaneously really cool and agonisingly pretentious, a highwire act for that also makes me assume it was something to do with goths or vampires.

    2. GarethPavlov +22

      I was all about translating things into Quenya. I spent too much time on LOTR fansites trying to learn how to speak Elvish. I think one screen name I had was “Amaelamin”, which I think means “darling”?

      2. actualmeg +9

        I did this too, up until the point I realized I could be spending all those hours studying a real language that actual humans speak. But yeah, for awhile all my friends had nicknames in Quenya.

  16. atlasblue85 +21

    Idk about screen name but my embarrassing first email address was purplebunny_92. most of my screen names were similar to that….

    1. atlasblue85 +24

      my favorite terrible first username is my friend the_spleen_keeper, which she still had to give to people on occasion well into college

      1. FeuerroteZora +23

        I had a stoner student whose email username was goodbuds4you, and I had to take him aside and suggest that perhaps he might want to use a different email address when applying for jobs. Apparently it came as a shock to him that over-20s might actually understand the reference.

  18. StoatCat +45

    I was Bluenote, because my camp counselor name was Blue Note. The best part of that name was that if people asked why you picked it, you got an opportunity to teach them what the “blue note” is in jazz.

    Somehow I wound up not teaching music for a living.

    1. vividshivers +8

      Oo, camp names subthread??

      I was Doodlebug. Which if I recall was an extended-family pet name?

      1. StoatCat +8

        I like to imagine that you had some similarities to a V-2 rocket growing up, to earn that monicker.

        1. vividshivers +6

          Haha! I had no idea it was a bomb, what a curious development. Alas, I don’t think I resembled a rocket in any way but the part where it sits on the launch pad, maybe.

      2. becky f. +8

        I was Bob at camp. Because Bob was the name of my made-up imaginary friend, which my scout troop leader knew about. So she figured I would be Bob before I had decided on a name. I liked the idea.

    2. thegirliestgirl +6

      What do you mean by “camp counselor name”? If I had to guess I’d say you worked under pseudonyms- if that’s right, why?

      1. StoatCat +9

        That’s basically it. I’m not entirely sure why it was done; it was a long-standing camp tradition at all camps within our Girl Scout Council, dating back to before I was born. I think it may have been put in place a. for fun, and b. to give the counselors a way to make themselves memorable.

        I really don’t know.

        1. thegirliestgirl +9

          So did you also use your real names? Or did the kids and your fellow counselors never find out your real names? Was this a superhero camp and you had secret identities? 😉

          1. StoatCat +14

            Nope, we used our camp names, just about all the time. At the end of camp, if campers really wanted to write to us and we were open to that, we might share our real names and an address. That was pretty rare, though. Even then, they would still write to us as “Dear Blue Note”. I maybe had two campers, total, write to me afterward.

          2. vividshivers +5

            Agreed that this is totally a Girl Scouts thing. At the particular camp I attended for many years, you’d still call other counselors by real names, but the younger kids never got to know. Any younger sisters, of course, were sworn to secrecy. A lot of the girls spent an enormous amount of time mobbing their favorite counselor and trying to guess their real name, which could go on quite a while, especially on overnight trips!

            Good times. =)

          3. vividshivers +15

            Also, a story that demonstrates just how much we identified each other by the camp names – many years later, I was introduced to a friend of a friend, who looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place her. Learned her name, didn’t ring a bell, went on and had a conversation. Mid-conversation, something clicks in my head, and suddenly I realize – “You’re Earthling, aren’t you??” Sure enough it was!

            To this day there are many people out there with whom I could easily have the same experience.

        2. MopRocks +14

          I insisted that everyone call me Mickey Mouse at Girl Scout Camp circa 1998. Also, what IS a “blue note” in jazz?

          1. StoatCat +29

            THANK YOU!!!!!

            The term “blue note” typically refers to the flatted-third in the scale of the key of the tune, and is part of what makes jazz sound so…jazzy. But, the definition of a “blue note” can vary depending on the context of the music it’s a part of. But, generally speaking, it’s a note that is played or sung a semitone or quarter-tone lower than expected.

            Here are some Wikipedia quotes:
            Blue notes are usually said to be the lowered third, lowered fifth, and lowered seventh scale degrees.[3] The lowered fifth is also known as the raised fourth.[4] Though the blues scale has “an inherent minor tonality, it is commonly ‘forced’ over major-key chord changes, resulting in a distinctively dissonant conflict of tonalities”.[4] A similar conflict occurs between the notes of the minor scale and the minor blues scale, as heard in songs such as “Why Don’t You Do Right?”, “Happy” and “Sweet About Me”.

            Blue notes are used in many blues songs, in jazz, and in conventional popular songs with a “blue” feeling, such as Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather.” Country blues feature wide variations from the diatonic pitches with emotive blue-notes. Blue notes are also prevalent in English folk music.[5] Bent or “blue notes”, called in Ireland “long notes”, play a vital part in Irish music.[6]

          3. j_bird +1

            This is late but…can you point me to any examples of blue notes in Irish or English folk music? E.g. names of tunes that have them? Maybe my google-fu is not strong, but I see a bunch of results that mention that they exist, but no specific examples. Apparently there is something called the long note reel (here. Does it actually have blue/long notes in it?

          4. StoatCat +2

            I’m afraid I’m no ethnomusicologist and not much of a master of music theory, much to my chagrin. And I’m afraid I’m having trouble turning up textual explanations of how blue notes work in English and Irish music.

            But! Despite that, I do have a musical example of how Irish music can dovetail nicely with jazz, in the form of the tune “Cardinal Knowledge,” played at the end of the movie The Secret of Kells by Irish musicians Kila and Bruno Coulais. You can here blue notes like flat-3rds and flat-sevenths all throughout it, especially in the bassline. It’s also a nice funky tune for your Monday morning, so enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feTJYmXM4LI

          5. j_bird +1

            Thanks!!! After listening to that plus some youtube tutorials on how to sing and play blue notes, I think I have at least some vague idea of how they would show up in Irish music. Would you say they appear in the opening flute notes of this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MMv2rmIe6A

            This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MMv2rmIe6A has some bent notes, especially starting around 0:19, but I’m not sure if they count as “blue”.

            I can’t tell if this pair of (English?) tunes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CD-yLG_-aA has blue notes or if they are just in a minor key.

            Anyway, I’m just kind of interested in this because certain Irish traditional music always sounded kind of “cool” to me in the way that blues (and jazz, and various types of popular music derived from them) do, and I could never figure out why. I think it may also be that some of the dances have interesting rhythms. I’m just guessing at all of this because I don’t know anything about music theory. Thanks for letting me ramble at you. 🙂

          6. StoatCat +1

            Hmmm, I wish I could see a transcription of the flute solo in that first example. Then I could really analyze the notes she’s playing against the chords. I’m inclined to think I’m hearing blue notes in that piece. Sounds like it might be in a relative minor pentatonic, shifting back into the major key on the bridge.

            The second one, however, sounds to me to be in a straightforward minor key, all the way through.

            I think when I go home tonight, I’m going to do some exploration of music theory to figure this out.

    1. surferemoji +13

      i know you already know this but maybe someone read your name, thought of the show and thought of it fondly:
      they are rebooting it and the showrunner was like “we r not going to be coy about her sexuality” on twitter. sooo

  20. ramina +195

    xXPyroFaerieXx. Because clearly the world needed to know three things in 2002:

    a) I was HARDXCORE
    b) I liked FIRE
    and c) I played NEOPETS

    3. mintypins +14

      Neopets!! Do you remember the weird chat rooms on Neopets? There was so much in-fighting and drama.

    5. keristars +11

      oh dang i forgot about my neopets name.

      it was pretty much the same three bullet points, except A) girl-punk?? and B) RAINBOWS. (ie: PinkRainbowFae) – i thought the xX thing was passé in 1999 (or i was just too snobby for it)

      1. dameacademyalumna +11

        The “xX” thing was still a big thing well into the 2000s. I think the consensus was adding as many x’s as possible to your name, because I remember people with usernames like xXBloodyxVampireXx.

        1. Summer +5

          I thought I was cool for opting out of Xs and into the unlucky 13 (why) with punky_angel13. It was also a Known Rule that underscores were cool and hyphens were TERRIBLY uncool. I remember people being shamed on MSN for hyphens.

          1. kardashian_bff +8

            OMG I created a Toast account just to reply to this 2 days late, after years of lurking here, because this just gave me a psychological breakthrough:

            After growing up in the early 2000’s, I became a programmer, and some products I use require hyphens in name and don’t allow underscores (looking at you, Amazon), and this always makes me SO UNCOMFORTABLE and now I know why

  21. spacevalkyrie +45

    sailor_red_star, which was also the name of my personal sailor moon character, who was a sailor star light. So yes, if you were wondering, I was Very Cool

    But I’ve actually had spacevalkyrie for over 10 years across various platforms, so, yes, I am still Very Cool

    1. lizlabz +3

      Not my first sn, but I continue to use variations on Marsfire(relevant numbers at varying points of creation) in some parts of the internet.

      1. sophiakiona +8

        Oh my god, my yahoo account in middle school was marsfire3! I eventually signed up for another yahoo account that was a reference to a super obscure Fushigi Yuugi character (like, google barely knows what I’m talking about when you search for it), and I think that is still linked to my flickr account.

  22. rosacymosa +12

    peakechick (An homage to Mervyn Peake, since even as a twelve-year-old I insisted on being as nerdy and bizarre as possible.)
    …and now for some reason I can’t dissociate it from certain things like my personal e-mail account and thus am periodically re-embarrassed whenever someone I don’t already know gets ahold of my address. /facepalm

    1. emily +2

      Mine was fuschia88! I thought it was so cool that no one knew where it was from. Yeah, I was super cool.

  23. haunting_of +43

    Dolphinstar474 because DOLPHINS! Later it was something like… greenleafgal56. My password was ‘mellon’ for like 6 years.

  24. tianabyers +32

    Don’t remember which came first, but they were

    Roxybaby120
    BenjiBabie120 (I still don’t know who Benji is/was?)

    and my favorite..

    ACslashDC120. Spelled exactly like that.

  25. SarahDances +28

    icedragoness

    I was a figure skater, and we all had screen names that had “ice” in there somewhere. I love(d) dragons, but thought icedragon sounded too masculine.

    1. RudyRed +21

      True story, E. L. James published the original version of 50 Shades of Gray (back when it was a Twilight fanfic) under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon.

  26. daftwingduck +33

    What up, elvish-name people? Mine was echoirieloelenath. Something about shadows and stars.

    1. queen_bunnie +16

      Keeping my elf name from the LOTR plaza a secret for the ages, but I like the number of us that really doubled down on that.

      1. builtahouse +6

        LOTR PLAZA. <3 oh my early Internet days. I didn’t know enough Elvish to make a screenname out of it, so I made “Lontriae”, a phonetically “eh, sounds elvish enough” name. Even though I was a Rider of Rohan….I don’t even know, really.

        1. queen_bunnie +6

          hahahaha amazing. I was very serious about my LOTR plaza-ing. I remember being so upset when I wasn’t made a mod- I was 13 THANK GOODNESS they did not make a 13 year old a mod.

    2. StoatCat +14

      When I was bored in band class, I would transcribe the titles and all western words on my sheet music into Elvish script.

      1. Ivennelluin +16

        My friends and I in middle/high school used to exchange notes in class written in elvish script. The one time we got caught exchanging notes the teacher tried to read it outloud (per his policy) and had no idea what to make of it.

        …and I may or may not still use it when writing reminders to myself…. >_>

        1. Hollis +13

          I’ve never met someone else who did this! I learned elvish script in middle school and still use it now in my 20s. One time I wrote a note to myself in elvish on my homework and my college Hebrew teacher asked what it was and then actually looked up the script online and half-deciphered my note and wrote a note back to me in elvish!

          1. swordsnspindles +4

            Oh hello, never mind 14-year-old me, who also learned Sindarin and wrote her notes in Tengwar. None of my friends picked it up though, so I dropped it again at some point. God, I understand why I was being bullied.

    3. raqueue +10

      Yes!!! I still use elf names for some of my screen names. My first BF used endearment like “Lissenya” (my sweet) and others, and they’ve been useful through the years.

    4. FeuerroteZora +24

      Once again and forever, Toast readers are MY PEOPLE.

      Thirteen-year-old me would, of course, have rendered that sentence in Elvish.

    5. Ivennelluin +16

      I’m still using my elvish one! Supposedly “I vennel luin” means the “The sky is blue”.

    6. PallasPerilous +17

      I was “Angwen” for about five minutes. It’s apparently a real Irish name, but in Quenya it means “Iron Maiden.” Pretty hardcore there, 10th grade me!

    7. lilotelasserie +12

      Yay! There are so many of us! When I was in middle school I translated the meaning of my actual name into very literal Quenya (using a Quenya > English/English > Quenya Word doc that I downloaded from a Teach Yourself Elvish site) and got Lilotelasserie. And I still use it everywhere on the Internet to this date, as you can see. It’s never taken when I sign up for a new internet Service. I wonder why…

  27. friendofdaja +13

    TokiDoki65, and then another name for my Gaia account (which is somehow still searchable, even after I disabled it 6 years ago, gah)

    But I still remember the screen names of ff.net writers I liked when I was 13. MadamStella and TapDancingWidow wrote some fun stuff.

  28. gavinbyrnes +47

    I only used two in high school: walruspiggie and, a couple years later,
    karlmarxonastick. It was very important to me that there be no numbers.

    1. daftwingduck +13

      A lack of numbers has always been very important to me too. I will insert weird punctuation marks if I have to.

  29. evieskye +12

    libertystar and joshua1_9 (yeahhhh I was real churchy in my teens). Shout out to gurl mail for my first email address… also perpetualnovember (on xanga) and philosopherstar (on neopets)

  30. wickedtongue +34

    ilikechainmail

    Why? Earlier that summer I tried on a chain mail top at the Ren Faire (the completely impractical kind), and kinda liked it. Plus all the tolkien names were gone.

    Had to field questions for the rest of my time on AIM about whether I liked the other kind of chain mail, which I did not.

    2. OiSunshine +7

      I have a friend with blacksmithing skills who actually made a chainmail top (of a practical kind, I believe) but I think that was on the order of “It’s great that I did that, but I won’t devote the time and energy to do it again.”

  31. vividshivers +7

    My first one was StarFlyer001. The one that was in use for most of my high school years I will not be revealing, because it’s way too related to some handles that I still use. 😉

  32. catweazlol +48

    I was 10 when AOL happened and after a frustrating five minutes trying to find a free name that included the word “smile” or “smiley” I settled for Grins10.

      1. catweazlol +44

        I honestly can’t believe that there was ever a time in my life when my personal brand was happiness.

  35. sagerenee +25

    Psyche was my first. Ah when we were young and it took 30 seconds for the chatroom screen to reload and you could do your American History 101 reading in between talking about Xena and X-Files.

    1. alder_tree +4

      Yup. My first online addiction was an html-based chatroom that was basically a rolling guestbook. If the room was hopping there were twenty people in it and it would take up to five minutes to load (and we had the fastest internet of anyone I knew). I have never done so much high-school homework as I did then, with my textbooks propped up in my lap as I waited for the page to load.

      1. sagerenee +2

        Yessss. It’s a wonder my roommates didn’t murder me for the clickyclick keyboarding at 1 in the morning.

  37. zizzivivizz +9

    I was ronabeth (a combination of first and middle names) on aol and everywhere else for a realllllly long time. Then when I grew up (ahem) I switched to holyspit777 for email and such. I don’t know, guys, I had a thing about it being my superhero name? I blame my lifelong obsession with puns tbh.

  38. Flustered135 +22

    Warped_4, as I just came back from Warped Tour ’96 and wanted people to know that I was a punk even if my parents didn’t let me dress the part.

  39. LuneMoth +17

    btrflygrl (butterfly girl) because vowels weren’t cool. Somehow I got into college with that as my email address… And now I use LuneMoth because apparently I’m all about things that come from caterpillars.

  40. tragicallyludicrous +58

    Potato1001, I was probably like 11 and I thought the word “potato” was cool? Idk. A lot of things are a mystery.

  41. daisymerolling +10

    Smart Chicken on Poptropica (I am such a youngun)
    other than that, AnjiliSladen.
    Anjili after Anjli Mohindra, who played Rani on the Sarah Jane Adventures,
    and Sladen after Sarah Jane herself, Elisabeth Sladen.

  42. protocoach +14

    Like I said elsewhere, I have always been protocoach. You can track me across the internet with that name if you so desire (and maybe hunt down my real name from it, but I think I’ve done a decent job concealing that).

    1. jenavira +4

      Same! I’ve been jenavira since I was about twelve. (And I’m one of very few people using that username, so you can pretty much find my life story if you try very hard.)

  43. OiSunshine +6

    “Ike”, on the forums for the webcomic “The Devil’s Panties” (she’s still going, and still supporting herself through it). It was a real life nickname at the time. Later , I used the names “RedBlueGreen” and “Doug S. Machina” (an idea for a story I never wrote).

    What’s the relevance of the picture?

  44. smallpistachio +44

    CorncobHat.

    My dad set up our home internet and told me I needed to pick a screen name RIGHT NOW, and I was making a corncob doll at the time, so I was CorncobHat for like a week.

  47. Prawns +19

    alienlove42

    I literally just thought of the weirdest shit I could think of. Also, clearly I needed to scream to the world that I was cool and aware of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

    1. femaelstrom +10

      I’d be lying if I said I don’t still use 42 in some of my usernames/passwords. It’s just easier for me to remember at this point!

  48. lmrrrr +18

    Mine was a pretty straightforward combination of my initials and middle/last name, but I had an alternate username that I used to troll the Yahoo forums my high school philosophy/theology teacher set up for us (I may have been one of the few people more comfortable with Yahoo than with AIM and Gmail. Good times.) That name was purple_peeple_eater and I was so obnoxious with how I used it it (and everyone knew it was me of course) that it became habit for it to be dropped in casual conversation in class. “Wow, really bringing out the PPE today” if I was being especially annoying with playing devil’s advocate or something.

  50. featherpillowcase +8

    because my first forays into the internet overlapped with my I-don’t-know-what-cultural-appropriation-is phase: sitarserpent. It was for a social network/forum site for renaissance faire enthusiasts.

  51. grumblyqueer +7

    10000 Volts, for Club Penguin. I was ten and I liked Pikachu; my penguin was always yellow.

    1. Toft +2

      Club Penguin!! What was the name of that game where you try to break all the ice? That game was great.

      1. grumblyqueer +4

        I don’t remember that one, but I was aces at the pizza maker, the fishing game, and the bean counter. I had like a dozen puffles and my split-level igloo had a shitload of furniture. I’ve never been more baller than I was on that site.

  52. longlostlullaby +11

    pandadestroyer

    It came from an inside joke I don’t remember now that I was a panda killer, but AIM wouldn’t let me put kill in my name. I was 15.

  53. Toft +8

    Makuta Juice, on a Bionicle fan forum.

    Lego.com was SO good in the early 2000’s, mostly because they had Naomi Clark designing puzzle games for them. Anybody else play Junkbot, Nightfall Incident, or Worldbuilder?

    1. Pebble +2

      JUNKBOT. I love when Junkbot got the junk and went OH YEAH. I still get some of the music running through my head at times. And I never solved Trapped in the Freezer in anything like the required number of moves.

    2. barnaby +2

      AAaaahh lego.com has fallen so far. Junkbot, Nightfall Incident, World builder, Mata Nui, Robohunter, and the other surprisingly well-made little flash games were my childhood.

      Turns out a lot of people archived the game files and published them elsewhere, but you need very old shockwave plugins to play them 🙁

  54. butteredghost +12

    5ilver5urfer if have shame of it, the shame is like a sorrow or my balls, it belongs to me.

      1. vmartinipie +2

        5 and 17 were my two lucky numbers at the time–not anymore, can’t explain why but the shine seems to have gone off them

  56. becky f. +5

    bikiwiki (not here but still lots of other places, half-my-life later). My high school best friend gave me the nickname just a couple of weeks before my dad made AOL accounts for the whole family.

    1. Toft +4

      I was on Prodigy around 1994, but I also don’t remember if I had a screen name, because I was 4 years old. I didn’t talk to anybody – I was there to wander around MadMaze, mostly. And to endlessly fill out Mad Libs. I think I went on a MUD once and got really confused and left.

      Come to think of it, I must have had a screen name if I was on a MUD. But I have no idea what it was.

      1. katenepveu +4

        I was 13 and theorizing endlessly about _Twin Peaks_. And whatever soap operas I was watching, in my brief period of watching afternoon soaps.

      2. GingerHawk +4

        I miss MadMaze so much. I never did solve that. Supposedly someone on the internet archived a playable version of it, but now it no longer works with the most up to date browsers.

      1. nopants_mcgee +1

        Glad to know I wasn’t the only text role player on prodigy then! (I was in Pern fandom) Remember when Christopher Pike would comment on boards?

    3. nopants_mcgee +1

      I was on prodigy around 1993-4 to play a Pern text roleplaying game. Log ons were assigned to the 6 accounts you could have for a family (mine was EMUY73A-F). I don’t remember if you had a specific screen name beyond that.

  66. RudyRed +38

    flamingweaselofdoom

    I was in junior high and deep within my Invader Zim ~*~*~*LOLZ SO RANDOM*~*~*~*~ phase.

    1. femaelstrom +11

      I put out the fires!

      You made them WORSE!

      Worse…..or BETTER?

      I hate that this still runs through my mind at least once a day.

      1. RudyRed +6

        I think I average about one Invader Zim quote a week. Usually about sweet, sweet bloodcandies, my GARGANTUAN HEAD, or how “more organs means more human.”

  67. singstrix +4

    Mine was Khaibitt, because I was in 6th grade and my social studies teacher had read us some YA novel about Egyptian things (???) and there was a cat in the story named Khaibit, but that was already taken on AOL.

    I have never, ever been able to re-find what the name of the book was, and because the Khaibit is a concept in the Egyptian Book of the Dead AND in apparently later in a World of Darkness thing.

  68. michelle w. +11

    fizziwink. i have no idea why.

    My first non-school email address was [email protected], because I was in grad school for religious studies but didn’t believe in god. Such clever. Very iconoclast. I still use it when I have to sign up for junk online.

  69. Po Chen +2

    lundqvist_to2 was mine. Because Alex Lundqvist was hot (probably still is, but I’m not looking at up right now) and I also had a massive crush on Todd Oldham (to2).

  70. christinaemoss +12

    christina_jeopardy_rox. Because I was 13 and Ken Jennings was in the middle of his winning streak and my career goal of choice was Jeopardy champion.

  72. Smalldahl +13

    Mine were whatever version of horse + girl that was available because I was once a tweenage girl, therefore was obsessed with horses and long flowing hair and the idea of Legolas and Aragorn and strapping men with antiquated weapons.

  74. houblonchouffe +6

    Except for here and a very few other places, I have primarily just used my IRL first name plus either middle name or last initial, turns out there are some advantages to having a highly unusual name

  75. kewpiedoll99 +12

    my first was [email protected]. this was before graphical browsers even. I was the sixth person with initials BAD there, obviously, but I liked it because it sounded a bit like “bad sex.” I used it at a bunch of other domains afterward. my first discussion handle, at EchoNYC, was “demon of air and water” which was a Star Trek (OS) reference.

  76. Kat +6

    There was a Parker Stevenson series in the ’80s called Probe, in which he played a scientific genius who solved crimes for fun. In one episode he destroyed an evil computer by hitting it with a baseball bat or something (more visual than typing in a virus, I guess), and as the computer died, Parker exclaimed, “Sing Daisy!” So my first name was SingDaisy, which I thought was kind of a clever reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but people took it as a kind of perky pixie happy flower name, so I changed it after a while.

    1. phoebeblue +4

      That’s an amazing reason to choose a name! Such a shame you can’t asterisk an explanation (or, alternatively, use tacky forum style sig paragraphs? No, not that).

    1. StillT +5

      This inspired me to google OCrush1 and I found out that my beloved old screen name is now the Hotmail address for ORANGE CRUSH – “New England’s Premier 80’s Tribute Dance Party Band!”

  78. Ivennelluin +11

    The first one I picked for myself was wombatsrule009. I’m pretty sure it’s self explanatory. (Except for the numbers, which was my girl scout troop number.)

  79. Slugs +7

    I can’t remember the first one, probably ‘sparkle face’ or something, but the favourite is ‘Suzie_Cucumber’, an allusion to Suzie Creamcheese, invented to troll boys on a local ‘music scene’ forum when I was 15ish.

  80. littlehuntingcreek +4

    kathilatte -which is my name now in Twitter @kathilatte (it’s a pun on my name and caffe latte, which my little brother made up and thought was the height of hilariousness)

  81. Chance_Hale +14

    I was about to give what I thought was my first screen name, but then I realized I was actually thinking of the password! It’s a good thing I stopped myself, otherwise *anybody* could’ve gotten into my 18-year-old AOL account (named after a character I made up in elementary school that was basically one of the Warners from Animaniacs but with a skateboard).

  82. Rose +7

    i was [email protected] because this was in the olden internet. I just googled it and found out that in the fall of 1995, I wrote to a Lois and Clark newsletter to ask if anyone had a video tape of Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher on Entertainment tonight. I was one of several people who wanted this on tape!

    2. dameacademyalumna +3

      I remember watching this show! I probably watched it later than 1995 but we would have gotten along.

  83. Onymous +8

    Absolute earliest was TheThing. Earliest that saw any real use was Izan_Frootloops (well froot is spelled correctly but I still have an active email account from those days and I don’t need it getting scraped) which came from the movie Hackers when Matthew Lillards character gets introduced as “Cereal Killer… as in Frootloops” and I thought they were saying his real name was Izan Frootloops, which I took.

    1. jimmyjimjimjim +4

      And really if Matthew Lilliard’s character had actually been named Izan Frootloops that would not have been even close to the silliest thing about that movie (that movie which I love)

  85. MopRocks +41

    I was 11 years old and went with ‘yes369.’ I thought, “this will let everyone know that I’m nice and what my three favorite numbers are!”

  86. ectocool +4

    Smthng888, because chatspeak was EVERYTHING in 1998 and also, I sat for about an hour trying to figure out what my screen name should be before I told myself to ‘just pick SOMETHING’. Ah, the days before firstname.lastname online handles.

  87. Jedoc +5

    velveeta_child. It’s not a specific reference, I was just 12 and I thought it was a funny combination of words. I had no strong feelings one way or another about processed cheese.

    It’s still an active Hotmail account, since I inexplicably used it as my primary email most of the way through undergrad, and I end up logging in about once a year to dig up someone’s parents’ address or some other obscure trivia.

    1. VaguelyDownward +3

      My first AIM account was canofcheezwhiz12, also created at age 12 for no particular reason, so perhaps there’s great comedic potential in processed cheese products at that age. Or maybe we were just similarly weird sixth graders.

  89. Helen +8

    it was SailorMoon9191.

    I was seven, got AOL for the first time, and was really upset they didn’t let me use, “SailorJupiter” instead because Sailor Jupiter was obvs the real star of that show.

  90. logicbutton +6

    Mathkitty, to represent my two primary interests. When I got AIM in high school, I started out as DianaBanana02 before switching to flutingfrenzy and then, after instantly forgetting my password, flutingfrenzied.

  91. AnnaHowe +11

    EVERYONE EVERYONE EVERYONE you need to go to https://www.what-dog.net/ and put in photos of yourself, your loved ones, your cats, and various celebrities.

    I begin with our cat. They were spot on in their assessment of her personality.

    Next, you may want to consider the X-files.

    Or Bernie Sanders.

    1. jimmyjimjimjim +4

      Brussels Griffon:
      Adorable, energetic, face of a werewolf

      … face of a werewolf… I’m clean shaven in that photo too. I mean yes it’s accurate but come on.

      I also got Staffordshire Bull Terrier from another picture take seconds later but looking in a slightly different direction.

    3. actualmeg +3

      “known for barking a lot” ahhh dying

      I put in several pictures of myself and it insists I am a poodle, which I resent.

  92. Lethologica +8

    First email username: xy_cubed. I’m pretty sure it’s because my sister had xy_squared and I wanted to be Cool Like Her.

    First forum username: math_mage. I was signing up for a Magic: the Gathering discussion forum, and I’d made being Good At Math a significant part of my identity.

  94. Cricket +16

    I was deeply, deeply obsessed with Ancient Egypt in 6th grade when I made my first AIM screen name, and thus decided to be Isis189. Definitely didn’t age well…

    Eventually I shifted over to balletchic12…meant to be balletchick12 but I didn’t even notice the spelling mistake until about a year in…my s/ns were just a hot mess throughout middle school.

  95. kayjayoh_ +4

    Kayjay, Kayjay13, then kayjayoh, which I have stuck with and get royally pissed whenever I find myself up against “this name has already been taken.” (here, pinterest…) Like, what bitch? *I* am Kayjayoh.

    There was a forum that I wanted to post in and not be traceable, because it was about dating and in the year 2000, so I was alizarincrimson. There and only there.

    1. vividshivers +2

      Re: your taken name problem, I have this problem with my variant-on-actual-extremely-unique-name username on BANKS. It irritates me endlessly.

  96. InsertCoolNameHere +2

    Cressie Rock, the Cressie is a shortened version of my given name and Rock because I was cool like rock and roll? Ugh.

  97. breccia +6

    First real AOL name: Dunkle.

    It was SUPPOSED to a reference Jean-Benoit Dunckel of the band Air, but I guess 12 yr old me never bothered to like, verify the spelling?? first??? Anyway I still liked it. My dad called me Dunkle sometimes.

  99. Emily Barney +14

    Britomart23 – why I thought I needed to add a number to the name “Britomart” as if everyone was clamoring to be named after figures from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, I dunno.

    But female knights FTW!

  100. Charlotte +10

    0yvey, with a 0, not an O.
    On ClubPenguin when I was a tiny child.
    I am now studying Yiddish in college though.

  102. silveredbow +18

    bigsistercaitie. I was a painfully naive fourteen-year-old deep in the clutches of the Christian homeschooling movement. The most important thing to me was OH MY GOSH MY SIXTH SIBLING WAS JUST BORN, I HAVE MORE SIBS THAN YOOOUUUUU.
    (I kid you not, this is how big homeschooling families kept up with the Joneses, pun completely intended).

  103. pajamaralways +8

    leo182rose on AOL.

    I was 12, and aol had the thing that helped you make a username by answering questions.

  105. wordnerdy +3

    Chicklet27 was my first AOL account (chicklet was one of my nicknames). I actually have had the same aim name since 1997 though and still use it–Leesharama (Leesh is one of my other nicknames).

  106. deenuhh +14

    Mine was padfoot1516 because my group of middle school friends and I all went by a marauders nickname but yeah. Lots of awkwardly explaining my email until I just changed it when I first started talking to my ex on AIM as a senior in high school, haha. I remember explicitly changing it because I didn’t want to see dumb.

  107. nicolescchung +15

    As I was telling Papayajaya last night, my screen names were pretty dull — I was “n patria” for a while because I loved the novel Les Miserable, and I also had several different names all involving “niks,” which only my bestie called me. Dan’s was stripedtiger11, which I thought was cute because of Daniel Tiger. So. Now you know my type.

    1. builtahouse +4

      that is the most adorable detail of a love story. Also I feel like “people who also appreciate Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” is a great type to have.

  109. lizzythecat +2

    dixiegal_15 because I loved my sweet dog, Dixie, and 15 was (and still is!) my lucky number.

  110. alpheratz +3

    Starbuck[numbers I don’t remember anymore]. I was a Scully fan. Still am, but I haven’t used this screen name since middle school.

  111. Meg B +3

    sadlittlepanther21 on AIM. Then I was emo_panther in various other messaging places (I swear to goddess it was an inside joke) which then switched to Bagheera21 because aside from being a sad teenager I apparently bore resemblance to a character from the Jungle Book.

  114. jwhittz +4

    jennybug92
    jennybug because my best friend at the time had gotten an account first and used her family nickname, so that seemed like the way to go
    92 because there were already 91 other jennybugs, apparently

  115. deleted7410012 +8

    my first email: doodleratgirl
    my first screenname: orangecutie232
    my first AIM name: wastexofxink

    you can see the angst develop!

  116. irenarowley +2

    Peri81. Peri was a character in a story I was writing, although there were so many of those that I no longer recall why I chose Peri to identify with above the others. I did win a senior writing contest in college for the Peri story, though, so that’s cool

    My second screenname, which is still my twitter handle, was also a character’s name, but I got it from a friend’s cousin. It’s an almost unique name, such that I can use it as a handle or username almost anywhere without needing extra letters or numbers. So I kind of feel guilty that I’ve co-opted it from the girl who actually has it as her given name.

  117. ambrockwrites +6

    heyhey_mouse

    HeyHey was the name of one of the dogs who played Lassie (the one who was a miserable failure at the role, as I recall), but I thought it was such a great dog name. Mouse was my cat.

  118. jld0340 +6

    Slippersno7. I was seven when we got AOL and my cat was named Slippers because (despite my complete lack of discipline or grace) I was obsessed with the idea of ballerinas.

    My first NEOPETS username was bookwormgurl10 because I was 10 and loved reading. That was the account on which I won THIRD PLACE in a Caption Contest and had a faerie Shoyru, but it’s long gone now 🙁

  119. mgwg +17

    Sigh. It was RandomBizkit13. And I was so proud of it that I used to coach others on how they, too, could choose the perfect screen name.

  120. darchildre +4

    It’s been darchildre since I first got on aol. I was a 13-year-old proto-conlanger (and very bad at it), it was a word in the language I was making up, no one on aol had already taken it.

    No one has *ever* already taken it, and so now it’s just my name.

  121. guedita +8

    My mom made mine. I wanted some iteration of roxiegirl or roxiestar because I wanted to be like a “surfer chick” and shop at Pac Sun and have surferbros love me. I guess I didn’t tell her or she didn’t know that it was okay to have a combination of numbers but she was so excited to tell me that my screen name was StarGrlRox. I hated it.

  122. daisicles +5

    My very first one, chosen with my dad’s help, was JDanse. J for my first initial and ‘danse’ because I liked to dance and my dad thought it’d look nicer translated into French. That was back when we first got AOL, so if that screen name were still around, it’d be old enough to drink. I just realised this and I’m feeling a bit horrified.

  124. sueyres +34

    This is just an elaborate exercise to get inside info you can use to track us, isn’t it Mallory?

    WAKE UP, SHEEPLE.

  125. Ace +7

    RadicalEdward, on a forum best described as “the gleeful feminist nerd corner of Yugioh fandom”. I’d basically decided Ed’s general apathy towards gender was The Best Thing after watching Cowboy Bebop earlier that summer, and, well… I ended up with a pack of older sisters right when I needed one.

    I also went kind of off the rails after a couple years there, but… well, I was basically still a kid.

  126. kekekekobe +8

    Mine was Trident1993. Named after the gum. I would go into chatrooms and say ‘Who wants Trident?” and people would say “I do! I do!”.

  127. jweinbender +3

    hawkman900x5(@juno.com): Which—if I’m not mistaken—can be dated rather precisely to the summer of 1999.

  128. elsajeni +11

    I am and always have been Elsajeni! Which, uh, derives from the name of the Star Wars OC I created when I was 11.

  129. ballisticjaguar +15

    For the purposes of this discussion lets say my name is Megan Smith. My first screenname was….smithme. I decided the next one MUST be great and unique. I settled on ‘ballisticjaguar.’ I am and have been satisfied with that one since I was oh, thirteen or so. I use it everywhere.

  131. quiescently +7

    CHITCHATTYIZZY

    yes, all caps. I must not have developed a personality or interests yet when I first got AIM in 6th grade because I distinctly remember spending way too much time trying to come up with a screen name by cycling through very generic names that had already been taken, like HugsAndKisses89. which I now realize was probably just taken by a porn bot. and then I think my logic finally was “well my name is Izzy and I’m here to talk!” and regretted it immediately.

    another one I remember was randomcarrot because it was 2003 and everything on the internet was soooooo random!!!!11!1

  132. Sophia +11

    itsnotacostume

    this is the first time I will readily admit that I was an emo preteen who wanted a screenname WITHOUT numbers and the my chemical romance song title of “it’s not a fashion statement, it’s a death wish” was TOO LONG.

    whenever someone asked I just said they wouldn’t understand, obv.

  133. stateside_ +8

    Oh god. It was MoreMahler. I can’t. I’m really sorry.

    I thought it was so cool until I wandered onto a Van Halen mailing list (yeah, I know) and in the perpetual “Sammy or Dave?” thread (were they threads then? whatever) I tried to make a case for both and was instantly lit up by the likes of FkYeahSammy5150 for being too weak to make a decision. “Who the fuck wants more Mahler, anyway?” he sneered, as he popped another cold one and prepared to shred the living shit out of the riff for “Finish What You Started” on air guitar.

    I chuckle sometimes because I imagine that mailing list still exists, and will outlive us all.

  134. Nic McG +5

    I was Fireflyff and my best friend was DeFlutterby because we were really into faeries. The extra ff’s were there because we tried to type in Firefly but the computer took a while to register so we started typing again then it caught up.

  135. tabletop_joe +4

    earthslumber. I was very young and very goth.

    I set one up for my daughter that she’ll never use but I’m proud of: parakeet_fancier. Don’t steal it!

  138. julialovesfood +6

    my dad made one for me that was jpoem112 (why i dont know) but then i changed mine to tacogirl112, which in hindsight was awesome.

  139. lizlabz +8

    Dramachk13 on AOL.
    I really wanted it to be WitchChick, telling my dad it was because I was auditioning for the role of the Wicked Witch, but it was really because I was becoming a ~%*~@SECRET WICCAN~*@%~ My dad thought that sounded “too adult.”
    I was also still 12 when it was created. By many months.

  140. celery

    XmasKat1224, because that was my birthday and I liked cats, and I guess the letter K was cool…? I don’t remember. I also am not positive whether that IM name came first or whether my neopets name came first; I still use my neopets name online to this day. It is much less quintessentially early 2000s; there are no Xs or numbers in it.

  141. CleverManka +6

    Chernobyl Red (based on a character from a tiny little unknown comic calle fRiNgE)

    Finally got out of an interminable meeting (Friday afternoon meetings wtf) and am so sad to be late to this thread. I’m loving everyone’s internet history shame and so glad that I was at least out of high school by the time I got on the internet (1989).

  142. blackpopsocial +5

    Looney4lyfe360. I’m not proud of this. Nor am I proud that my BU username was jansport (yes the backpack)

  143. catmanscrothers +3

    baddawg117 for aim, and mrsskellington91@gmail was my first email. You can smell the desperate longing for edginess

  145. crawlkill +1

    billofamber, because I was a Zelazny fanatic from a very young age. I was going by “Billy” at the time and have since graduated to Will, but I guess I thought a hotmail address should sound more mature.

  146. catmanscrothers +6

    oh I forgot! About a year after my original SN I wanted to change it, so I made a new one called “SoccerGod.” I was not even very good at soccer, but a book I loved called the cool soccer people “soccer gods,” so there you go. My mother saw this SN on the list, freaked out, and I got a real talking-to about not using “god” in diminishing or colloquial ways. I had to delete the SN and everything!!

  147. cuminafterall +4

    Mallory, mine was food-related, too: couscous253. What can I say, I just really loved couscous.

  148. Briannerz +2

    Briannas10thKingdom – used for whatever my parents allowed my fifth grade self to use, mostly Neopets.

  149. fcjaugusta +4

    AuroraBorealis, which I used well into college, and variations of which I still use occasionally for login names.

    I am from the north, but not quite THAT north.

    1. Clor +9

      Doesn’t it seem like everyone inexplicably goes through an Ancient Egypt phase at some point? Mine coincided with wicca being trendy, so I’ve got a stash of ankh chokers somewhere..

  152. lesliejroot +9

    lesterjane02! Nickname, middle name, hs graduation year, pretty unobjectionable.

    Funnier story, though, when I was about 14 a friend from summer camp gave me two emails to keep in touch. One was nymphomaniac699@angelfire or something, and I emailed her at that one (not knowing what a nymphomaniac was!), only to get a reply months later that I should use the other one – she didn’t sign in to that one much, because she didn’t want her parents looking over her shoulder and seeing that she was calling herself a nympho. Everything about this is extremely late ’90s and I love it.

  153. eisoj5

    eisoj on AOL. 😀

    Subsequent iterations included eisoj2 and eisoj3, but NOT eisoj4 (because I couldn’t remember if I’d already used that on a previous AOL trial disc or not.)

  154. Tammy +2

    padme_rox if I remember correctly. Or frodo_rox. I also went to freothuwebbe pretty soon after that cause I didn’t want to be limited to a fandom :p

  155. perianwen +5

    Pretty sure it was usenet that I was on (it’s so long ago! mists of time etc etc!), and there I was xphile42.

  156. Clor +3

    Trumoonprinsess99 [sic]

    I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that my first few years on the internet were spent browsing Sailor Moon fansites for 8 hours a day

  157. thewildland +3

    LavenderMagic17, followed shortly thereafter by BladeofDawn.
    …can you tell I was an aspiring fantasy novelist at the time?

  158. Angelan_ +7

    FyreSpark, probably on fanfiction.net. A really, really long time ago. Many things on msn messenger, usually involving liberal amounts of ~*~*~* decorations around the ~*~*~CaPiTaL LeTtErS LiKe ThIs~*~*~

    I’ve been Angelan for a really, really long time though. I wonder if facebook etc being what they are, weird screen names will become a thing of the past and everyone will just use their actual name.

  160. Peggers +15

    Peggers02

    My name is Margaret, and I though the nickname Peggy was great (no one called me that), so peggers it was. I grew up and found out what pegging is and realized what a hero I was at age 10.

  161. mintjulips +2

    aurorajewls, which is the name that my mother ALMOST named me + my nicknamed spelled in a way that I liked to spell it and not the conventional “jules.” I still like the anonymity of it, and I was too embarrassed to use any band name in my username.

  162. bookwormV +4

    Mostly I had usernames based on a real life nickname, along the lines of “littlered” (I am short and red-haired). Someone once admitted they always read it as “lit lerd”.

  163. phoebeblue +6

    I’ve always been phoebeblue. For twenty-plus years, which is ridiculous, but I’ve never ever been able to think of something else I liked as much. A few years ago I noticed some girl using that name on DeviantArt and got super-bummed that I can’t use it there and she can’t use it anywhere else.

  165. ashurredly +6

    Mine was queenandy2001. I didn’t realize until much, much later how very gay the implications of the name were.

    (The year, obviously, was 2001. My initials spell AND and any variation of andy was already taken, so.)

  167. indrabbit +6

    urania1192 on neopets, the numbers are from my birth-month and year. I have always been into mythology (and (briefly) wanted to be an astronaut/liked space), and Urania is the muse of astronomy.

    I wanna say that after that I was freya1192 to keep on sounding like a cool kid, but really before that I had a puppy1192 yahoo account, because I wasn’t feeling creative at all.

  168. pteranodonptutu +5

    Spent my late middle school years in AOL chat rooms under the name flyingpig99. I always gave my name as Natasha if anyone asked (not my actual name, of course, I just wanted a ~persona~).

  169. indrabbit +3

    After reading the comments, I think you should now ask something specific about our Neopets, but perhaps that would be like opening Pandora’s Box.

  170. popcultureddotme +3

    From 6th grade: TweetyLovr18

    ughhh

    As a toddler, my family called me Tweety because I was bald with a huge head. 18 meant….literally nothing.

  172. Hollis +7

    My first screen name, in 2003 when I was in seventh grade, was a bunch of first-person singular pronouns in different languages (Spanish, French, Hebrew, and, um, Elvish). I now have a degree in linguistics, so…yay for the predictive power of AOL screen names?

  173. velocipedestrienne +3

    Mine was tmwlotr. It stood for “the monkey who lives on the roof.” Thirteen-year-olds!

  175. shaqattaq32 +1

    Lmao. GLAtlas. Don’t ask me why or how. Bahahahahaha. My best friend at the time was BlueCow49

  176. andiebiagini +2

    Very first was andieb6, because I was six and that’s what my dad picked. First one I made up myself was trumpetmuffin, because I was in middle school and my friends thought muffins were very funny.

  177. lamismamuchachasalvaje +7

    Supernovagirl13

    because Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century is a true classic and Protozoa is a rock god.

  178. actualmeg +6

    Mine was ZodiacChild, because I was really into astrology at the time, but now I feel like it makes me sound like a serial killer.

  180. silllarskitty +3

    Late to the game but . . . Raspberrycatsroc . . . what? They are all great things individually and spelling is a social construct . . . DON’T JUDGE ME

  182. neriad13 +4

    Neriad13. Always and eternally. >.> It’s been this way since I made a Runescape account when I was 15. At the time I was interested in Greek mythology, loved to swim and had no idea how to spell Naiad.

  183. kateoriot +6

    twitchesfan

    Who remembers the Twitches book series? Twitches was about twin teen witches for those of you not in the know. The Disney movie adaption was awful please ignore.

    1. Clor +2

      Did you ever read the Daughters of the Moon series? The early 2000s were a grand time for YA novels about girls with magical powers

    2. friendofdaja +1

      I read those (and Daughters of the Moon)! Apparently you were supposed to say the title as “T-Witches”, but I always called it “twitches” to piss off my friend, who was a diehard fan.

  184. dameacademyalumna +1

    I used my first IM username for a very long time and on a lot of sites so it’s still attached to awkward things like RPF about a writer (not a living writer).

  185. laurabeeboo +1

    I was Kristen of Mistalia on fanfiction.net, I think.

    My first non-AOL email address (and resulting screen name in many places, including the sheroes forum) is, embarrassingly, still in use in several places.

  186. eclaire +3

    Tbh I don’t remember my *first* screen name, but the best and most embarrassing was surely XxDisBeLIZxX. (“This is Liz,” for those who don’t speak confused preteen.)

  187. Stubborn_Ginger +2

    sunkissed201- because I’m pale, and “sunkissed” without numbers wasn’t an option.

  188. captainbartlet +5

    [firstname][email protected] was my first email address because I was 5 (having been born in 1999 god I’m probably too young to talk to all of you I never had AIM) and was making it under my mom’s supervision while sitting in the tiny office space of her yarn store and lacked other inspiration.
    The reason I needed my own email at age 5? I wanted to be able to receive pictures of my uncle’s cats without clogging up my mom’s inbox. baby!captainbartlet knew what she was about.

  189. Annie Þ +4

    Sciencebot.

    This was my username on the Lego website, which I think tells you more or less everything you need to know about what sort of a kid I was.

  190. kayloulee +3

    I just googled my old GaiaOnline username and found the forum my friends and I used to hang out in (it was the most painfully Gothic By Teens – type bar and inn RPG type thing ever), and tonnes of conversations between me, my friends, my sister, and …. uuuuuugh the guy who was really into me in a stalkery kind of way for most of 2005. Ugh. Well, until Gaia goes the way of all flesh I can go and find that anytime I feel like being nostalgic, embarrassed, and sort of sad.

  192. OctoChriek +4

    I was Abishag64, because I had been taught that Abishag was the subject of Song of Solomon and, as I was a horny, evangelical teen, that was right up my alley. The 64 was because I was a Beatles fan and basically I was the worst teen.

    (This is fantastic time to debut my Toast only screen name. My previous screen name is regrettably remembered by too many people in RL)

  193. rawlibrary +2

    Oh god. I was one of those obsessive ‘need a new name every three months’ pre-teens, but my first one, in all its glory, was diva_bugz. Because my mother’s nickname for me was Bugsy-Lou. I regret everything.

  196. alder_tree +3

    My very first username, which I did not keep for very long, was Beatlelover-Neohippie. It was 1996 and I was OBSESSED, okay.

    About a year later I had a mild religious experience and started calling myself aprilstarchild. (April being my real first name.) I used that quite positively EVERYWHERE, until just a few years ago. I think the only place I still use it is LiveJournal!

  198. bugpaste +2

    Way back in 1995 when we had AOL 2.0, I was Magegift. I haven’t thought about that name in YEARS.

    My last AIM screenname was MapleTomato, which I abandoned in 2010 or so. I sometimes wonder if there are people out there just waiting for me to log on so we can chat again.

  199. Rebecca +4

    Ferret archer

    (I really love[d] the Redwall books, y’all, and thought that ferrets didn’t get a fair shake)

  200. quizbowlantichrist +4

    mod1123. mod stood for “mistress of doom” (I’m so sorry) and 1123 was the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence. but quizbowlantichrist was an early one and honestly it was brilliant so I still use it.

  201. theshehulkchef +4

    I was Dubelmint1 and my middle school bff was Dubelmint2. AOL didn’t give us enough letters to spell it right! Later I switched to SameOldEmoGirl which was infinitely more embarrassing…

  203. editrickster +1

    I was cranfan36. I also had a gurlmail email account before they started charging for them .

  204. onefinemess +11

    I can’t remember what I used on pre-internet BBS, but I believe my first internet alias was “spam”.

    This was before it was an internet term, and it became my first email address…[email protected]. Eventually the ISP took it from me to receive their spam complaints. Which was cool, I guess. I was tired of getting the complaints anyway.

  205. hilld +2

    i was, at different times, defyingravity72 (due to my teen obsession with Wicked) and lemonfish72 (i truly have no idea why)

  206. Mar +4

    Elf alien.

    My two favorite things. And yes, that’s a space between “elf” and “alien”. A freer time!

  209. Manders +7

    chaosbutterfly, because I had just read my first Terry Pratchett book and believed that I understood chaos theory (I did not understand chaos theory).

  210. robotca +6

    Goulash Goulash Goulash the Third was the name of the water balloon my sister and I kept as a “pet” one summer.

    We also did not know what Goulash was.

  212. enafucoy +6

    Mine was baby_yodi2000. Not bad considering my classmate’s was lil_wh0re91 – we didn’t know what that word was.

  214. Sof +2

    The first screen name I remember using is “Chuchkit”. My first e-mail, however, was DangerPuss@. I was young. I did not realize.

  215. smiavs +1

    My first was Dancer Girl or something. For the record, I was not a dancer, so it’s really inexplicable. I guess I thought it sounded cool? The next one was dragonfli and then a number. I want to say 33 or 333. I wasn’t particularly into dragonflies, either, so I really have no idea why….

  217. theodolora +2

    iceskater893.

    I was an ice skater. I was very proud of it. And all of AOL needed to know this.

  218. Liz +3

    Okay, so I wanted mine to be jaguarprincess but my sister wouldn’t let me 🙁 so instead I settled for lizzykittycat4 which I guess was less slutty sounding for a 9 year old?

  219. thebewilderness +5

    My first and last name. I realized my mistake within a matter of weeks and switched to the name of my house.

  220. ptdramaqueen +2

    … ptdramaqueen. “dramaqueen” was taken, so I prefaced it with what obviously stood for “pre-teen”!

    I was a very reserved child. Aspirational, I guess?

  224. JKnsmn +3

    When we got the internet on my home computer I was 17. My first screen name was “gone girl”––or maybe “gone_girl”––not because of the book, which did not yet exist, but because I was obsessed with the Beat Generation and jazz and I wanted to seem effortlessly cool. Later I would change it to “beat chick”, which was supposed to have the same feel, but had different connotations:people thought I was tired, into drum & bass, or was being hit. :/

  225. k8-the-gr8 +3

    swingerprincess

    I went swing dancing a lot in middle school.
    I was pretty bummed when I found out what a swinger was.

  226. lauralyzer +7

    In 1994, Jada Pinkett Smith (then, just Jada Pinkett) starred as a character called Peaches in “A Low Down Dirty Shame”. I remember nothing about this movie except that I LOVED the character of Peaches, who talked fast and took no shit from nobody. What a perfect role model for 19-year-old me! Having no idea that “peaches” had any other connotation, I tried to name myself after her for my first screen name. “Peaches” was already taken, as were many many variants, so I ended up with the vaguely-French “lespeaches”.

    I got hit on by women CONSTANTLY in the chat rooms and had no idea why. For years.

  227. hammocknap +2

    Mine was, mortifyingly, “idk2222,” because I was completely uncreative and apparently wanted to broadcast that.

  228. whatisthisicanteven +2

    WELL there are a coujple.

    My first email address was [email protected] (“Icky” was a nickname in elementary and middle school, since it rhymes with my my first name. I spelled it differently because it looked cooler to my 14 year old eye).

    My first screenname was Leggs384 on AIM (“Legs” was my nickname in high school, independently bestowed by two different groups, and I added the extra “g” because it looked cooler to my 15 year old eye)

    And through all this I used “stone biscuit” as my handle on forums and whatnot. And I still do. Obviously.

  229. Sheila

    Mine was Valentine, which seems pretty innocuous, but you have to take into account the fact that 1. I had named myself after a character in a comic I was was writing at the time, which incidentally was a rip-off of the Bordertown books and 2. she was both an elf and a coffee shop waitress, because I was as yet untainted by retail and thought that would be a glamorous job.
    I also tried to make my first email address [email protected] and was shocked–shocked!–to find out it had already been taken.

    1. itiresias +2

      I’m pretty sure I tried to make my first email address my first name @netscape.net, and was shocked that it was taken.

  231. ricecooker +2

    fat platypus. and i used it as my email for the longest time. fat because i felt fat and platypus because i fell in love with the mammal after reading a quote that it was some god’s joke on earth. (something i felt about myself too)

    now i use ricecooker, because rice cookers are great and can cook almost everything

  234. itiresias +2

    YumYumBug1118. The titular alien species in the fiction I wrote at the time, which I truly believed would be the next Animorphs.

  235. nopants_mcgee +2

    Oh man, this takes me back!
    TimeHolder on AOL (10 character limit and I was like 14)
    EMUY73F on prodigy (because you couldn’t choose your username at the time)
    kestrelle on Geocities where I posted my Buffy fanfiction
    stardancer for my Wiccan Angelfire site

  236. taylorlweeks +1

    spriteremix023, used for AIM and more notably Neopets, where people in the forums would address me as “spriter,” bc apparently they had not spent 2003-2005 consuming mad Tropical, Berryclear, and Aruba Jam flavored Sprite, as I did.

  237. FlaxMojo

    spriteremix023, used for AIM and more notably Neopets, where people in the forums would address me as "spriter," bc apparently they had not spent 2003-2005 consuming mad Tropical, Berryclear, and Aruba Jam flavored Sprite, as I did.

  239. cellardoor10 +1

    Mine was clydefan9 – I was a big fan of the Houston Rockets, and particularly Clyde Drexler at the time. It also meant everyone online thought I was a dude. Followed up by marinergs9 – I sailed with Girl Scouts for several years, and 9 was my favorite number, obvi.