What's in a Name?

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Karthas

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Edited By Karthas

"Hey, someone should ask Karthas if he plays League of Legends!"

"LoL huh? I hate your ult LOL"

It happens on a nearly weekly basis, and though it doesn't really bother me per se, I thought I might write out the origin on my "handle" and perhaps inspire some others to do the same.

"No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

At this point, I've used the name Karthas online for about 14 years. Recently, I've had to take to using variations once the second League of Legends player comes through, tries Karthus, and then settles for Karthas. Any time I join a multiplayer game with any kind of chat, there's a 60% chance someone will assume that I am that LoL player.

I'm able to trace the origin of my name despite my horrible memory because it was derived in part from a different game- Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption published in 2000. In the game you play a Crusader turned vampire in a story that moves through multiple settings and times, at one point taking place around the city of Carthage. In the game, one of your elders (or rather, the voice actor) will make repeated references to the "Glorious city of CARTHage". The way the VO actor hit that hard CARTH sound stuck with me for some reason, and shortly after going through one of those cutscenes I was registering on some forum or something along those lines and decided to use that sound as basis of that new name. I went through several permutations of the name (Carthes? Carthelas? Carth?) when I realized I liked the look of the K more for some reason. A few more rings around the word soup bowl and I ended up with Karthas.

So, how did you come about your usual name? Is it a long overwrought story full of twists and turns, or do you just really like the character Sephiroth and the number 69?

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Karthas

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#1  Edited By Karthas

Additionally- my name here (KarthasMI) is because I made an account under Karthas and totally screwed it up somehow when I was first trying to set up my Premium subscription. So, I stole the MI suffix from a friend who used (inMI) to differentiate his rather generic username.

This post no longer makes sense but I'll leave it here posterity. Thanks @rorie!

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doltz

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My name is just a modification of my last name. It came from back when I was playing Ultima Online and needed a name one of my friends suggested shortening my last name. Dolter lost the "er" and gained a "z" to become Doltz. It actually is something that some of my non-gamer friends started calling me in person.

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Slag

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#3  Edited By Slag

Hey Blog notifications seem to be working again!

My name is simple, I'm called Slag because I'm a Fire Breathing Triceratops Transformer!

No Caption Provided

Alright , so I'm not actually a Dinobot. But I did name myself after my favorite one.

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Sbaitso

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#4  Edited By Sbaitso

My name is Sbaitso (Sound Blaster Acting Intelligent Text to Speech Operator for the uninformed) because I like dumb fake AIs and other similar types of software like text to speech stuff. Just be glad my name isn't SHRDLU.

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rorie

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@karthasmi: If you want this account's name changed to Karthas, I can just change the earlier account's name to something different and change this one to Karthas. Let me know in a PM or something if you'd want that; premium users do get to change their names.

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Winterharte

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#6  Edited By Winterharte

Winterhart was a character in a Mercedes Lackey book (The Silver Gryphon) I felt it looked better with an 'e' on the end, and I've been using it for.. probably something like 9 years now?

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Corevi

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Super embarrassing but my handle is from Fable 2 and it's two tiered morality system. You had Corrupted to Pure and Evil to Good.

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enemylandlord

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I came home from a Do Make Say Think show and decided to name myself after my favourite DMST record (Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord is Dead). Unfortunately I had been drinking that night and kind of word souped it. I dug it the next day and decided to keep it. It has now fully replaced an old handle I used for years (and hated).

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TheManWithNoPlan

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#9  Edited By TheManWithNoPlan

The reason for mine's real dumb. I went to go make an account and had no idea what to name myself. Henceforth "The man with no plan". It stuck and now I've grown rather fond of it.

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Vonocourt

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Mashed monotone with the city of Valcourt.

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deactivated-5d0d1bbdad7de

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I combined steamroller and rickroll together

I thought I was a genius

I was 12.

ohgodwhy

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deactivated-5b031d0e868a5

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Skrunch - Captain Qwark's monkey sidekick in Ratchet & Clank 3

FreezyFrog - Dan in a recent Bombcast

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Jazz_Bcaz

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Just because...

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71Ranchero

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#14  Edited By 71Ranchero
No Caption Provided

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Relkin

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Relkin was the protagonist from Bazil Broketail, a series of books I enjoyed when I was younger.

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Aetheldod

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Mine is easy ... Aethel german prefix which means beautiful and dod which comes from swedish or norwegian (the nordic duders can clarify) dead . Tho dod is written with that letter they have whci is an o with / on the middle.

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emfromthesea

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#17  Edited By emfromthesea

Anyone familiar with the Souls series will know "SunBroZak" is a reference to Warrior of Sunlight covenant. Can't say it's the most creative name in the world, but it at least adds some flavour to my real name.

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fleabeard

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#18  Edited By fleabeard

I chose the name Flea from Chrono Trigger and used it in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy years ago. I have no idea why "beard" was added but it happened when I started playing TF2 again back in 2012.

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pr1mus

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#19  Edited By pr1mus

People usually assume i'm into Primus the band. I didn't even know Primus before picking that name a good 12-13 years ago and don't much care for their music. Pr1mus is just a mixture of all sorts of names and words, including Solidus, Optimus and "(insert clever word/name here)_Prime" among others that i used before that. The 1 came from Primus generally being taken everywhere i tried to register so i had to get "creative".

I guess the South Park theme is alright.

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Oscar__Explosion

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I'm a fan of the show Metalocalypse and my handle is the name of one of the main character's father. (Oscar also happens to be my first name)

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Justin258

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#21  Edited By Justin258

I had just gotten pretty big into Christianity when I signed up for Xbox Live (early 2008) and the name stuck. And these days I'm an agnostic (or agnostic atheist, whatever you want to call someone who doesn't know for sure), but the name still sticks because I can't think of another one that really strikes me well enough to get rid of this one.

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PatODay

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I just use my regular name.

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StarvingGamer

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Because in those days I was a starving artist that played games all the time.

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Wemibelle

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#24  Edited By Wemibelle

Mine is two words flipped backwards and stuck together. It's slightly juvenile now, as I created this name in 2003 or so when I was like 12 or 13, but I still like it. It's stuck as my name since I've used it so much in games.

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Turambar

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Just google it.

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TruthTellah

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#26  Edited By TruthTellah

I used to write about politics and religion under the "TruthTempest" moniker, because I was young and thought it sounded cool. You know, get out there and knock down lies and extremism with a honest take on things. Idealistic stuff. As I started getting back into the videogames community a bit more in my 20's, I joined Kotaku and met someone named SpoonyBard, which inspired me to change my name to "TruthTellah" in memory of Tellah from Final Fantasy 4 for a single response to him. It then just stuck.

People seemed to like it, and the play on "Truth Teller" and Final Fantasy felt right. I almost changed it to just "Tellah", but a lot of commenters seemed to have fun referencing me as someone who makes good comments and "says it like it is". An informal "Truth Tellah" as it were. I've had fun and stuck with it for many years now. :)

Bonus: I decided to go with the Civility user pic because the idea of bitter Mortal Kombat enemies working out their differences fit with my interests in having civil discussions and working through problems. heh.

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fisk0

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#27 fisk0  Moderator

Mine is easy ... Aethel german prefix which means beautiful and dod which comes from swedish or norwegian (the nordic duders can clarify) dead . Tho dod is written with that letter they have whci is an o with / on the middle.

Død is Norwegian and Danish, while död is Swedish (the same word is also used in German, written as tod).

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Bollard

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For the longest time I went by "Chavtheworld," a username I created way back when I was about 10 and playing Habbo Hotel. At the time I found chavs incredibly amusing and somehow construed that using it as a verb in my username was acceptable.

Recently I won the Twitch name-change competition, which allowed me to take over a dormant Justin.tv channel's username - Bollard. Bollard, being the first letter of my first name and the rest of my surname makes way more sense, and isn't a username I made when I was 10, which is awesome. Plus, I really like it. Even if I can't have it in a lot of places because it's taken. (My Xbox Live is "Chav The World" and PSN is still my old user too).

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ZolRoyce

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I combined steamroller and rickroll together

I thought I was a genius

I was 12.

ohgodwhy

Ah, don't feel too bad, we all commit sins in our youth, I spent an entire year calling myself Zoolander and incessantly quoting the movie in every game and forum I was a member of.

Anyways, I used to be a big fan of the dog Solleks in white fang, who was basically a one eyed bad ass wolf so I took to calling myself that, then I had that year or so of calling myself Zoolander and went to myself "I should combine the two!" so, Zolleks came about and I really loved the look of it and that became my mainstay for forever, then yadda yadda yadda many many years passed and I started to feel like I should include my real name in my user name, I got over my hatred of it and my fear of posting it online, like if anyone knew my first name they would find me in real life and beat me up or something? "I highly disagree with your opinions on the internet! punch punch punch"
But I had the word 'Zol' in my name for so long that I didn't want to give it up, for better or worse it was a part of my online presence wherever I went so I just combined the two and gained ZolRoyce. Which I am pretty happy with, has a nice ring to it.