How did you find your internet nickname?

[orihalcon]

I was big into Golden Sun the for the Gameboy Advance at the time and Orihalcon was one of the items that you would use to forge into the Excalibur Sword. I believe it was the second most powerful weapon in the game and something that you wouldn't get at all unless you got fairly lucky as forged items come out at random and it requires luck to have forgeable items dropped by enemies. Good times.

[thefarside]

thefarside is named after The Far Side, one of my favorite comics:
https://www.thefarside.com/

[Karmel]

Salted Caramel -> Assaulted Caramel (funny) -> AssaultedKarmel (shorter) -> Karmel (even shorter) -> Whatever else I can think of if it's taken.

I decided to look it up today and "Assaulted Caramel" is also the name of some book I've never heard of.

[troglotype]

On Deskthority my nickname is a portmanteau formed from troglodyte and type to indicate my lovely personality and love for old keyboards.

"troglodyte, n. (figurative). A person who lives in seclusion, unacquainted with the affairs of the world; a ‘hermit’. Also: a person who lives in a hovel or slum; one considered to be like a prehistoric cave-dweller" (From: Oxford English Dictionary)

My avatar proves that the world wide web holds an image of just about anything.

[TheInverseKey]

GTA 4, Games for Windows Live. Random name generator and it stuck.... You, want to go bowling?

[ifohancroft]

Around 2003 someone purposefully wrote a commonly used way to shorten my first name, with an F instead of a V and IFo was born. I've always disliked my "real name" and I instantly fell in-love with IFo so I started introducing myself like that to everyone.

Then, around 2007 I started playing Second Life and back then the game still allowed you to have a last name. You had the option of either writing whatever you want as your last name or picking from a list of options (and to check out new options if the existing ones weren't to your taste). That's how I found Hancroft. I liked it on its own and how it sat along with IFo.

So, IFo Hancroft was born. That worked out perfectly because now I could use it everywhere a first and last name are required.

[Burton]

I decided not to invent anything like that and just took my last name. In my opinion, it turned out fine. Maybe if it was some kind of role-playing forum, I would need to come up with a character and play his role, it would be different.

[ifohancroft]

I decided not to invent anything like that and just took my last name. In my opinion, it turned out fine. Maybe if it was some kind of role-playing forum, I would need to come up with a character and play his role, it would be different.

I mean you have a really cool last name so that totally works for you.

[Go-Kart]

Go-Kart, a play on my surname 'Grocott'. Going to an all boys school, we referred to each other by our surnames and plays on those names were common place. Gerkin and Krog are the only other ones I can recall offhand but Go-Kart was a tag I used when I first played CS 1.6/signed up to Steam. Used it ever since.

[jiekebo]

Got my nickname while studying in China. 杰克波, or in pinyin jié kè bō, has similar sounds as my real name, Jacob. Normally Chinese names have nice meanings like beautiful flower or storm petrel, but my name is more clumsy and translates to something like heroic gram (yes, the unit of mass) surge.

[John Doe]

in pinyin jié kè bō, has similar sounds as my real name, Jacob.

that explained why I found its easily pronounced when put it in Chinese language system, I thought it's coincidence at first.

[SK-8K]

The first keyboard I am modifying is a Silitek SK-8000, so SK-8K

[Sanzarote]

I've had to plead the Fifth on the motivation for my own online handle (what the young whippersnappers call "Internet nickname") so many times that I sometimes wonder if I should just discard it and start being known as "IPleadTheFifth".

You could've at least told them to go play [REDACTED] to find out.

[Muirium]

I found my name by looking in the mirror ... rorrim eht ni gnikool yb eman ym dnuof I

[snacksthecat]

I was using just Snacks, but that nickname is taken on almost every platform I've ever tried to register it on.

I'm pretty sure I stole snacksthecat from seeing it on a blog I read a lot ~2009-2012 called hipsterrunoff
https://web.archive.org/web/20090201003 ... unoff.com/

One of the band members of Best Coast had a pet cat with this name. I have no idea why I took this name, since I really never listened to the band very much (they're good, just not my cup of tea). I had to google the artist-to-pet relationship to make sure I was remembering the origin correctly.

[inozenz]

One day I searched for old names in different languages like Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, German and I kinda liked the German name Innozenz, but I didn't like the pronunciation of the double n in the name so I made it shorter to inozenz. So instead of inno it's just ino. I also liked that the name resembles the word innocent. Since then I've just been using it.

[Muirium]

I had no idea there was a classic name: Innozenz. I assumed you meant "Innocence" and were clearly trying to hide something in plain sight.

[invalid mr_a500]

I got my Amiga 500 online around 2003 and needed a username to join an Amiga forum. I thought of the old 1980's "Mr. Big" chocolate bar commercial tagline,"When you're this big, they call you Mister." (...or was it in a porno..)

So I thought "When you've got an A500 this kick-ass good, they call you Mister". I tried "Mr. A500", but no spaces or dots allowed on that forum, so had to reformat to "mr_a500".

I used that Amiga 500 online exclusively (all browsing, posts, emails, eBay wins, etc.) until 2008 when I switched to BeOS for a couple years, then finally to OSX.

Amiga 500 16 colour Workbench 3.1:

A500Picot.png

This is 1985 graphics! (a screenshot of this will display 100% correctly on a 1985 Amiga 1000. I've tried it on my A1000.)

[Muirium]

But the watch says your system clock’s wrong…

[invalid mr_a500]

It's expecting a lot to get the background wallpaper to keep up with the system time on a 1987 Amiga 500.

[Muirium]

The clock app icon on the 2007 iPhone didn’t even do that for a fair while.

[Muirium]

I've used "Findecanor" since 2005 or so.
_______________________
custom bottled spam

That’s so meta. Glad to see a twinkle of a spark of sarcastic humanity in the canned meat product who also calls this home.

[Findecanor]

You'd think a spambot could be smart enough not to repost a post from the same effing thread, but not even that ...

[TNT]

You'd think a spambot could be smart enough not to repost a post from the same effing thread, but not even that ...

It's the bot! GET HIM!

[CaesarAZealad]

It was late night, I was playing a good old game of Civ, and I was tired of people calling me "One thousand, three hundred and thirty seven dayz"
So I looked at my screen, saw the pincushion in the making i was playing as, and thought "Yeah might as well." So I slapped salad boy's name on me, and retroactively on a nameless raccoon character I had. About a year later I'm playing Elite Dangerous and I needed a last name, and I couldn't think of a name that started with Z (I wanted the initials CZ ) so I chose Zealiot because it sounded alien. Then that kinda devolved into Zealad as a caesar salad joke.

[Muirium]

I'll just picture you playing Civ 2. It was a pretty big deal back when I was just a titch younger than you are.

I still kinda preferred Civ 1, but. Those animated tides were classy, but the city screen was abominable.

[Palatino]

I spent many a summer holiday in the 90s playing Civ 2. What a game. When I finally, guiltily, bought Civ 3, my computer was too slow to run it! Instead I got a copy of Civ 1, as well as Colonization. They must be kicking around in my loft somewhere, but I don’t dare look for them for fear of instant readdiction, which I have no room for what with keyboards, bicycles and caffeine.

[CaesarAZealad]

I'm a little too young for Civ 3 (I still have it in my steam library tho). I was still playing Civ Rev on the 360 when Civ V released and I only got it when Civ VI released

[Muirium]

Civ Rev? Shudder. I remember that one. <Rummages in the files> Here's something I wrote about it, back in 2008…

Civilization

Once upon a time, I really used to love Civilization. I got hold of the first one a few years after its release on some borrowed floppies which featured the game along with other dusty DOS titles, and Elite. Never did bother playing the others much at all. Soon enough I picked up my own legitimate copy of civ.exe on a still newfangled-seeming CD-ROM, and read the hefty instruction manual on a trip along the Firth of Forth the same sunny summer's day. Not the worst travel reading I've had! And it did explain a few hieroglyphs I'd had to guess before.

Civ was great. I loved rewriting history. The screen may have been full of garish green and blue with orange, yellow and white squares on it: but that was the earth itself and the citadels of vying empires. Sure, it wasn't much to look at, even at the time; but as if that counted for anything. Far more important was the concept and indeed the successful implementation of it even on the humble systems of the age. There were keyboard shortcuts for just about anything and fundamentally it was a perfectly playable mouse game. This thing was all about ideas in your head and the simplest means of interacting with them in surprisingly powerful ways.

Civ II came out in 1996 and I "shared" that purchase with a friend. It was easy enough to copy! I remember debating whether to play it in Windows 3.11 or 95, which was what passed for nerd debate at the time. Little did I know I'd still be playing it on Windows XP six or seven years later. It was a solid improvement on the original game, and best of all could behave itself nicely alongside other tasks. The scale of maniacal conquests and modified worlds I got up to with that on my meagre Pentium laptop with 16 MB of RAM still lingers in a long lost gaming corner of my mind. The game's concepts were vast but its demands were simple.

Then I kind of fell out of it. I've not been much of a gamer in this century really full stop. Civ II saw less and less action as the internet grew to become the thing to get on with when nothing else is up. Civ III didn't play nice at all, and I faced a global meltdown experience in Civ IV as the game engine dissolved into a piteous death as I launched World War Three with more nukes and tanks than my enemies had civilians. That forced an end to trying out that game right there. (If it can't handle my play and Civ I and II can what the hell is up?) I played a bit of Battlefield in the years since, but overall gaming just didn't seem to be my thing any more. Not that it's likely gaming's fault. We all change after all.


Revolution

Then, last week, I heard about Civilization Revolution. Tycho's take on it was fairly promising, and a friend who's never been into Civ at any point in the past decided to try it out on his PlayStation 3. I went around on Saturday to see what it was like … and let's say my take-away is a little mixed.

First of all, it's very visibly based on Civ IV. I pulled up a screenshot from my game of that as I'd saved back at the time to show off a mess of enclaves at the imperial fringe, and lo and behold the similarities were as clear as I thought. Fair enough. It only makes sense to reuse what you've got. Indeed, if Revolution had been more like Civ IV (minus the molasses) I'd have been happier…

Alas, it is not.

You seem to be forever zoomed right in. I urged my gaming friend to pull the view back as far as it went, and all that seemed to achieve was a glimpse of the vanishingly small game world. Uh oh. That's not the Civ I played, although I'll admit I'm unlikely a normal Civ player, as if there were such a thing for a game with this kind of vision.

Comically, I mistook the fog of war for a world covering ocean as they seem to have elected to tart up the darkness. Oops! That was a confusing first minute with a lonely settler.

Anyway, I advised him while he played it for several hours. Our Arabian Empire was doing well enough – we'd established the all important self-replicating city factory fairly early on – and the simplified tech tree was quickly being filled. The neighbours didn't like us much though. Indeed, their dazzlingly huge avatars kept barging onto screen (a handy forty-incher 1080p) and had to be silenced after a while … although not turned off per se, as that is impossible. Dang. Soon enough they were making demands at frustrating regularity, confusingly presented demands I must add which both of us had to pause to figure out more than a few times. After being told where to shove these, we had a war on two fronts to deal with. One of those fronts was the lonely city of Berlin, so it was nothing we couldn't handle.

Apparently my friend had gone through an entire game before this without really fighting much. I taught him the classic techniques of churning out mass produced armies and rallying them ready for singular onslaught. This worked against little Berlin, and the Germans could be seen scurrying away in a boat for a new beginning just before we seized their ancestral home. So then eyes were turned north, (only partly ironically) to Spain.

Civ Rev had another card up its sleeve. Fresh from easy victory over Germany, our ever increasing armed forces concentrated on the nearest Spanish town and duly pounded it. But why were we making no progress against its defenders? They didn't even have a city wall to add to their defensive score, unlike that we faced in our siege and then bombardment of Berlin. After losing a great many men (all instantly replaced by the industrial engine back at home) we moved against other Spanish city. Same story. Eventually we worked it out.


They had a wizard

Civ Rev calls them Great Generals, if I recall. And supposedly their genesis is random. Random … oh bête noire of every strategist! This guy would wave his arms as though casting a spell during every single one of our stream of engagements, and not once did his hit-points fail. He decimated a mighty army many times his defenders' strength. He did so with the unbreakable fantasy-magic of a monumental gaming frustration.

While trying to attack around this fellow, with ever more powerful and bloodthirsty units pouring from our machine of an empire, we made our last discovery. The Spanish launched an attack on our western outpost, our conspicuously well defended outpost I should add. It mattered not. They had another wizard. Pain in the arse! Their victory was instantly ensured. The arm waving spirit summoner led his part time cadre of goat herders through the lakes of blood hitherto known as our comprehensively superior defensive lines. The city was seized, just like clockwork. And we stared into the certain knowledge that fanciful diplomatic capitulation aside, our fate was just as ended as the pitiful Germans we had suffocated an age before. It wouldn't be so horrendous if Spain were our equal. But they were not. We had four times the population and ten times the military might. What abomination! Comic, certainly, but not what you want at the peak of many hours building a meticulous creation, under the now deluded assumption that up is the opposite of down.

Metal Gear Solid 4 was the easiest disc swap away ever at that very moment…

[CaesarAZealad]

Civ Rev was the gateway drug for a young Caesar, for a game series he still sucks at
It may not be the best in the series but I still revisit it sometimes when I'm using my 360 as a DVD player.
It still remains the only Civ game I've managed a science victory in, and I did it as Napoleon of all people XD