Slashdot Mirror
The Etymology Of NickNames?
not_cub asks: "In the Slashdot FAQ CmdrTaco says he hates when clueless reporters ask where his nickname comes from but also gives an explanation. I for one find this sort of explanation quite interesting. I guess we can all guess where 'CyberBob' got his name from, but I'd love to hear
Slashdotters give their reasons for choosing some of the weird and wacky nicks we see round here (especially that Anonymous Coward guy)."
i got mine from my frat., and it wasn't taken here.
For those that don't know about him (I've always assumed most people here would), he was in a lot of ways the first computer scientist, having designed & built the first computational devices as we know them today (i.e. something more advanced than, say, an abacus). Interestingly now, but fittingly for a Victorian inventor, they operated purely mechanically, without any of the transistors or other electronic components that are now synonymous with computers. Nonetheless, they were designed to do the same basic functions that a modern computer does, and (yes) it may well have been able to run the Linux kernel. :)
I find it fitting that his assistant, Ada Lovelace, was the first programmer. It's nice to know that the field had an even 50-50 gender parity at one point, and hopefully it could again in the future. In the meantime, however, we'll make the most of the sausage party....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I'm a scientist-type and as such have had to way too much statistical analysis for a healthy mind to endure. I'm also a fairly average deviant (black clothing, anarchistic political views, loud goth and industrial music, some BDSM mixed in with my otherwise average heterosexual sex life (come on, who hasn't wanted to tie up their (boy|girl)friend and whip the bejezzus out of them? if roleplaying is deviant, why is the phrase "who's yer daddy!?" so common?), etc.). So: standarddeviant (one possessing an average amount of deviation).
Of course, as my .sig said for a while, deviancy depends on how you define the norm. As an example, according to some studies, if you haven't "experimented" with recreational drug use at some point in your life, you're in the minority of Americans.
My current signature is a Cohen v. California-inspired take on the current climate of information control by the Powers That Be.
--
Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Dude, that would be a cool hack.
Be kinda hard to download a tar.bz2 full of gears and stuff though... ;-)
--
Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I got my nick from the game "Magic the Gathering".
Lord Crovax was a vampire who fell in love with a dark angel he could not have.
I took the name when I was dating a gothic girl but it has sence lost its meaning.
A friend of mine (not a /.'er) got Kielfang
froma random word generator he coded in high school.
--
Spelling by m-w.com.
WhyDNA? -> "Y"DNA -> ydnA -> Andy
kinda like 'WhyNot?' for tony, etc.
-Andy =)
tooth == The Ogre On The Hill (I'm tall and fairly... solid, and our house was on a hill, haha... *groans*)
From ad&d (of course) circa 1990. Also for a joke, I used to write very occasional letters to my friends, writting in crayon, large letters and lots of mis-spellings (not hard for me!) and signed them "tooth". Get a puzzled phone call in a few days... "Is this from you?"
Yes, simple things do amuse simple minds.
How quickly we forget our own history!
In programming, there's a long tradition of using someone's login name as their nickname.
For instance, who doesn't know who RMS is? I've been called JCM and jmaslak verbally more than a few times (from my login names on previous computer installations). These names become attached to the real people because the login name, rather than full name, usually appears in source code. If I read your code, I naturally begin to feel that I know the person who typed his login name. But, I might not know his "real" name!
A new trend, with the networked PC, may be to call people by their computer's hostname. Anyone who has used Perforce will understand this, as the Perforce client defaults to the computer's name when installed. Thus, checkins from a workstation appear with the workstation's name, not the user's name.
By senior year they called me "Commie" (Downer --> Red --> Commie), but I'd rather use a druggie nickname than a political one...
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
This does not really tell the store of the but it is better.
h tm l
http://home.earthlink.net/~elastic/jsb/
and
http://home.earthlink.net/~elastic/jsb/jst/jst.
Oh really?
I'll give you one guess ;-)
I think a lot of nicknames are throwbacks to the old-school. Whatever old-school it is, the classics are the best. Saint Louis Blues was the best variety show ever for instance.
I think a lot of people also want to be able to explain their names as pick-up lines for chicks/dudes.
My real name is Bruce. People have been poking fun at my name calling me "Moose" since 2nd grade. It wasn't until 10th grade that my best friend did away with the "Br" in my name and replaced it with a "M" to get "Muce".
Now I know that "Muce" shouldn't be pronounced like "moose" according to the English language, but what are you going to do? The only time it was ever a real problem was when I was coding for Cry Havoc. Any time someone would interview our development team for the purposes of a web radio show I'd have to explain the name so they would pronounce it correctly. At least explaining it is easier than finding a new nick name. Besides, after eight years, I've kinda grown attached to it.
-----------------
-----------------
Knowledge is Power. Power Corrupts. Study Hard. Be Evil.
I'm not sure what to say.
Actually, at various times I've gone by macaw and mrrrrow. I used macaw because I attended a school that let me change my username to 'anything that is clearly generated from your name,' and my middle initial (as evident from my current email address) is c, so macaw came naturally. While I attended that school. Mrrrrow I used in a MUD for a catlike character, since real names aren't used in MUDs. It stuck for a while, but I'm not much of a MUDer so it went away after awhile.
Someone else suggested that the hackers of old simply used their username, frequently assigned from their name, as their handle. Makes sense, and it's what I've done pretty consistently.
After all, if I go by some 'l33t handle, how let down are people going to be when they meet me? As it is, people are relieved that i'm not quite as boring as most other people who use their real names :)
--Matthew
mostly to watch people try and pronounce it. good for the typing medium.
Well, my name originally derives from The Tower of Power (one heck of a group, if I do say so), and I've been using the handle for CB/BBS/logins/muds/gaming/etc/etc/etc since ~1993...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
well, in 5th grade, I did a report on albert einstein, and one of my friends pointed out that my hair behaved very similarly to A. Einstein's. I as had a great interest in physics, and I am a pacifist who can see the need for the use of force in extreme conditions. So, when I started calling BBSes, and some of these same friends were on these BBSes, I just used the name again, and here almost a decade later, I'm still using that great thinkers name. I would have hoped a bit more of his intellect would have rubbed off over the years, but hey, what are ya gonna do.
---
I post links to stuff here
I was the biggest guy in my high school (OK, it was a small school, a little over 50 people in my graduating class IIRC). When I was a sophomore a wise-ass upperclassman started calling me "Gargy Gantua". Since it was so close to my real name (Greg), everybody started calling me Garg.
To this day, hardly anybody in my home town (immediate family excepted) calls me anything else.
It's even been my license plate in two states.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
People my sophomore year in high school started calling me "Sharkey". It took me a awhile to find out why, a combination of being a swimmer, having a vaguely shark-like look and spending a few weeks perfecting a flat, discomfort-causing stare. Since I'm a LOTR fan, I kind of liked it. Ahhh, memories.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
When I started at university, user names were assigned via the standard flllllll system.
So I got C(olin) PERCIVA(l), and to this day I explain the spelling as '"C", followed by "PERCIVAL", minus the "L"'.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I'm aka "fat lightning" because I'm fat and I was struck by lightning as a kid. Or "Fat Blitzen" because it's more mellifluous and I can't remember fat in german . . .
Baloo Ursidae came from an alter ego I developed after having many Cub Scouts describe my facial appearance to be similar to that of the bear on the Cub Scout book (I took it as a compliment).
I've since discovered my fur.
--
Help us build a better map!
I pronounce it 'Zen-ecks'. It's probably meant to be pronounced differently, but too bad :)
Anyone that makes reference to Xenix and my nick in the same sentance gets blows to the head, but that is another story....
I grabbed 'Kp2' from the bag of phreak terms when I was in the 8th grade. I usually tack on a sushi to pay tribute to my code-fu.
Eat my butt
I think most online nicknames (unless they're brought from RL) are from band names/songs and book characters/locations. For instance, Marooned (a song title from pink floyd's division bell album) and my IRC nick Toxygen (a shortened version of Toxygene in the Orb's Orblivion album).
A lot of people i know use mainly character names from (esp.) sci-fi books though.
------ Poo-tee-weet?
In high school, some friends thought that I (supposedly) looked like David Letterman, hence Dave was also a nickname of mine. Now if you remember, Dave was the father of the three chipmunks...
--
Juno is part of my usual habit of using the names of ancient goddesses. I've always been interested in ancient history and read a lot of Greek mythology when I was a kid. As it happens, my usual name, Artemis (which I've used for many years, since my MUD days), was taken, so Juno was a second choice. The name Artemis actually reflects some elements of my personality, but I chose Juno mostly because I like how it sounds.
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
iso9k...
ISO9000 - Im sure you all know it. But in case you do not:
ISO 9000 certifies the process or system used to manufacture a product or service. The emblem tells you that the process used to build our products complies with the requirements of the ISO 9000 quality system standard. ISO 9000 is a family of international standards for quality management and assurance. These standards cover design, procurement, production, quality assurance, and delivery processes for everything from banking to manufacturing.
Because of the diversity of the various industries involved with ISO 9000, specific quality elements have been grouped into distinct models that are based on the functional or organizational capacity of the supplier and its product or service. Listed below are the models that make up the ISO 9000 family of standards.
The above was taken from Here
If you want to know more go on and check it out
This nick came into existance last year, from when I played EverQuest. For each of my 20 characters, I tried to create a nice name, with a decent meaning (Somber Forebodings the Dwarven Rogue, Dyllon Thyrn the Halfling Warrior, Vocal the Wood-Elf Bard).
:)
My brother came across daegred while looking through an Old English section in a book on English origins. We chose our names by their meanings, Sincgyfan was my brother's (giver of treasure), while Daegred means "red dawn". While the meaning was somewhat cliche, I thought the word itself sounded and looked nice.
I use another, more derived nick elsewhere, mainly since it's a real pain trying to change your nick in a community that's known you for a couple years.. I know, I've tried before.
- Daegred
My nick is actually the name of a charcater from Larry Niven's Known Space Universe
Shave the Whales!
In high school and college, I was very likely to be either throwing or attending keg parties. A lot. It's a little hobby of mine. :) I have a collection of keg lids that numbers in the hundreds.
During college in the mid 80's, several of us took a roadtrip to a little cabin on Lake Norris in Tennessee. Bubba and I didn't know each other, and when I bought the keg for the weekend, he just started calling me Keg Dude. It stuck immediately and consistently. From that point on, I was always introduced to others as Keg Dude. There were a lot of people at school who never heard or knew my "real" name.
The nickname followed me home from school, too. My family got used to it, although they don't call me that. At my wedding, the napkins had Keg Dude and Betty Love imprinted on them. (Betty Love is my wife's college nickname - another story entirely). The first place we lived, out on this little farm, we painted ourselves up a sign and christened the place the Keg Dude Ranch.
So, after more than 15 years of being Keg Dude, it certainly wasn't hard to figure out what my login name would be for Slashdot!
I used to wear a blade in my ear in College (yeah, yeah, I know)
So, ever since then, I've used bladerock or bladeroc as a nick, when I don't want to use my real name.
-- God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.
My nick is an anagram of my real name.
Try out the Internet Anagram Server.
I get asked a lot where mine came from (Mul Triha).
It's a random collection of syllables that came to mine when trying to find a name unique enough that it wasn't already registered on aim.
"i'm . . . mouseman!"
I am not named after the capital of Tasmania, nor am I named after an industrial dough mixer brand.
:-P
;-)
I am named after one of the two protagonists from The Adventures of Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh trilogy by Brian Daley, who died on Feb 11, 1996. He wrote the novelization of Tron. He also wrote many Han Solo novels, and Robotech novels under the pseudonym "Jack McKinney". The trilogy is a pretty decent read, it includes:
REQUIEM FOR A RULER OF WORLDS
JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE
FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR
Unfortunately I believe all three are out of print. It'd be nice if Del Rey or someone would release never-to-be-reprinted novels on the 'net under some free license
Further history: Upon getting a modem in 1985 at age 11 for my Atari 8-bit, the first handle I used with any regularity was Asmodeus, then The Shadow. When I signed on to DiversiDial #6 (DDials were a 6-line 300 baud multiuser chat system run on Apple IIs with all 6 slots filled with modems! They were networked to each other like some giant realtime Fidonet!) which was "Silly Chat", I ran into "Alacrity" who was already a user (and I think another Atari user). He pretty much said that there were several other "The Shadow"s, and suggested Hobart. The name stuck.
For the record, I've also been using the nick on EFNet since 1990, and I am not the alternative-lifestyled gent from Australia.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Well, I didn't think that quadong meant anything in real life when I started using it, but I did some fairly exhaustive searches and this is the grand total of what I found that has nothing to do with me, none of the following links mention "quadong" outside a list:
1) It is a fruit bearing Australian tree (referenced here, here and here)
2) It seems to be a game for Amiga (referenced here, here (tried to follow up, no luck), and here) that can be sold in German for 5DM.
In reference to me and without knowledge of the above two meanings, here is an IRC log showing one amusing incorrect interpretation of quadong.
And finally, you may chose between a well written but inaccurate story (free verse psuedo-poem) and a correct, but boring, story (prose) of how I came to use the word.
Not quite sure when I chose Gandalf, but I was the proud sole owner of the appelate for awhile (at least in the 407 area code). I can't quite remember if it was before or after I started my own BBS (later titled The Crystal Wind) in 1983/84. 200k of storage! Wow!
Sometime mid/late 80s, I gave up on trying to retain Gandalf and tired of explaining that "No, I was the first", and switched to the Grey Elf. Later, I found another Grey Elf and switched to the made up name "Xandar", which soon was dubbed by the local community Xandar the Magnificent. I always pictured one of those awful carnival magicians when I pictured the name.
Of course, eventually I ran across another Xandar. In frustration, I mangled the name of a poem I liked (yes, it is *very* intentionally misspelled and interCapped), and produced "JabberWokky". Since then, it's been fairly unique, and I've only run across one other guy who uses it (apparantly he dosen't know how to spell it correctly). Also, I've given up on finding a unique handle... I had to mangle names for a half hour to come up with a AIM nick: Wokky4711 (the number being the tattoo on Frank'n'Furter's leg in the Rocky Horror Picture Show).
I'd be very interested to see InitZero add to this discussion: he was rabidly anti-handles for quite awhile.
--
Evan (oh, and I sign my own name now, as the handle is merely a reference tag).
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
oh and now they don't like my yelling!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Lemon Curry?
signed Ira S. Kiddy.
Or not.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
I made up my nickname in the sixth grade (I am a junior in college now) whem I discovered all "real"-word names taken on the Internet. Several years later I discovered that the word also represents a Kingdom of viruses, the memetic viruses. You can do a Google search that will turn up several links proving this. Apparently even words I make up had already been thought of in the 19th century!
Name is Eric, had a teacher that called me Erk, then it became Erksum and thus Irksome. On other boards I go by EA, just because that's my initials (and the fact that EA sports makes a good hockey game).
Once, long ago, I got drafted into Staffing Utena MUX
Now anyone that's seen the show (Shoujo Kakumei Utena) Knows the prevalence of Rose's in it so all the staff got X-Bara name's when Bare=Rose in Japanese
For me it was Kuro (Black) bara (Rose) hence Black rose
Just kind of fell in love with the name and used it
My nick is a very, very obscure Tolkien reference. The only other person I ever met who knew what it meant spoke Elvish. It was delightfully obscure until a year or two ago, when they came out with that #!%^%@! stupid Middle-Earth clone of "Magic: The Gathering". One of the prominently-featured cards featured my nick. I was horrified...I started running in to people everywhere using my nick. For a while I couldn't get on irc, even. I considered getting a new nick, but too many people knew me by this for me to change. I was really ticked that a bunch of "Magic: The Gathering"-playing gaywads got for free a cool name that took me much study to find. I picked my nick specifically for its combination of coolness and nobody-else-would-ever-find-this-edness. That, and the fact that it started with "A"...my last name is far back in the alphabet and I was tired of being last all the dang time.
About a half-decade ago I worked for AOL. This was shortly after they "got" the internet. I was in the one group (Web development) that really had a clue about what went on in the net at large, outside of AOL's little gated community. But we never had much support from our VP, so most of our efforts were fruitless.
I digress.
I *will* digress.
Boy, will I ever digress:
Back then, the bosses tried to distribute the new AOL 2.6 software via the internet, in addition to the ubiquitous mailings (at least the floppies were more re-usable than the later CD's). The problem was that damn Certification Code. (You know, the paper with "Garble-Grabel" printed on it.) The Cert was the key to letting the software install. They made it necessary, because it would tie your account into whichever mailing list or magazine attachment got you the disks. (AOL paid a premium to the mags and list sellers for everyone who signed up.) The Certs were designed to all be unique.
So the problem was that no-one was going to download the software from AOL's FTP site or homepage, and then have to WAIT for snail-mail to get them their Cert. So AOL decided to make an exception. There would be *one* non-expiring Cert, and it would be published with the software on the FTP and web site.
And that was just the chink in the armor that AOHell needed.
AOHell was a script kiddie tool for AOL. It could fake the system out to think you were in a "free" area and still let you access premium content. It had canned macros that let you fish clueless lusers for passwords. It could "bust" into chat rooms by sending the entry command several hundred times a second until either you got in quick when someone left, or sometimes the overloaded system just *let* you in. But most of all, it had a fake credit card/name/address info and could reset your software so that you didn't have to re-install it. And it had the non-expiring Cert wired in.
Your (current) account would get cancelled after you got caught. AOHell would let you roll another account up in seconds. Of course, the screen-names couldn't be released for reuse until the account had been dead for more than 3 years.
There was such a proliferation of l33t haxors during that year that AOL *almost* ran out of screen-names. They'd hang out in known private "WAREZ" chat rooms, forwarding emails with attachments of pirated software to one another. (Yes, AOL *knew* about the chat rooms, but figured that if the policed those areas, they'd be legally required to police ALL private chat rooms.)
Since screen-names without numbers appended (Icarus4639) were becoming hard to find, they were pretty highly prized by the AOHell kiddies. I saw some pretty hilarious ones. I'll give the kiddies that. Many of them showed at least some inklings of creativity.
Sporktoast was the first one of them I could remember when it came time for a Slashdot NickName.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
I originally used the nick of SERPENT in Descent 1 games back when I was into gaming, then messed around and added the illegal character ! making it SERPENT! which made me seem different from all the other Serpent wannabe's (I was a pretty good player on kali).
When my soundcard died I gave up playing games for a few months and ran across IRC. Since it didnt allow ! in the nick space I ran around as Serpent- in #loonybin and #ircaddicts (and got my arse kicked often in #eggdrops). Then that nick started getting used by other people so I decided to find a new nick. At the time I was fascinated with art and scupltures with dragons depicted in them. So one day while watching Dragonheart, I logged in and started using the nick of DRACO- (keeping the - from SERPENT-).
Now Im quite well known on the undernet, and an op on #eggdrops #eggys #dmsetup and recgonized by helper friends on #zt and #cservice by some (except for the commando Channel Nazi, we all know who he is).
It's very true that many geeks get attached to their Nick, I have had DRACO- for over 4 or 5 years (I cant remember far enough back). I have and will ask people who take my nick to change or enlist the help of other users who insist the imposter to change nicks. The most I will deviate from my nick is to change the o to a 0, (sometimes i will clone and use both nicks at once and confuse people :P )
I work at a concert venue called Millennium Fortress, and the lady who coordinates everything calls me DRACO- because we keep in contact via email so much and remembers my nick faster than my realname. I dont mind, I think it's funny when the kids I work with call me DRACO- too. What is silly is I actually instinctively answer to DRACO- if someone calls out my nick. I encourged some people to call me by my nick cuz my first name Justin is so common. I think there are 4 younger kids that work at the concert named Justin, and a 3 kids named Jason (if you are named Justin you know why Im mentioning Jason everyone mixes them up but Jason is closer to Justin than steven,travis,tyson,cody or jacob).
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
My old nick was LPT1, being my initials, and me being the first in my family with the initials. Add to that the fact that I'm a hardware nut (think printer port), and well....
But, alas, people on IRC using windows and auto-logging got a rude suprise. GRIN! So, now LPT1 (and COM1) are locked out. Since I use lpX for quite a bit of interfacing, DIGItalPORT 1 seems to work nicely.
My nickname is Welsh, for "green woman". Basically I decided what phrase I wanted, then went to a few web language pages and experimented with different languages until I found a phrase that sounded pretty nifty :)
I adblock all animated gifs.
Blessed be the prime numbered slashdotters
My name is Jonathan, and I'm a nerd. That's basically it. On ICQ et al, I use Nerd314159, because it's <= 10 characters. And on Slashdot, I quite often go by Anonymous Coward (especially when trying for a first post or posting goatse.cx links).
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
When I first started ircing (7 1/2 years ago) I wanted to use the nick 'bobo.' For some reason I wanted to pretend to be a small monkey, dunno why. It was taken, so I inverted a letter, and never bothered to find a new nick.
For the record, I am not associated with Bopo Records, Bopo Books, or Bopo.com, I am not this guy, nor have I ever joined the circus.
A few people have pointed out that phoenetically, 'bopo' means 'beautiful skin' in French, and supposedly is the word for 'kiss' in Korean.
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
Its kind of a long boring story involving cheap beer...
but to cut to the chase it is a very vague reference to popular culture. Thanks to america's really short attention span, not many will remember a mousy guy that ran around swiping other peoples limos.
My nick comes from a Spartan general who led a band of 300 troops to hold a mountainpass at Thermopylae against the invading Persian army. The idea of a few hundred troops facing off against an army reported to be a hundred thousand strong seemed very cool. :)
I first heard the name from a story in the Bolo series from Baen books called "The Legacy of Leonidas" where a monstrous sentient tank sacrifices itself to fend off an invading army. (Those cheesy Bolo stories are big on self sacrificing sentient tanks
A interesting side note: my mother was very mad at me when I told her about my hotmail adress, eduardoleonidas@hotmail.com. She had never heard the story about the greek fellows, she just knew the name to be the middle name of the former dictator of the Dominican Republic Trujillo.
"Go tell the spartans..."
Wir mussen wissen. Wir warden wissen. I am a wuss
Organon, (the name I used on several other sites) was taken. ooze sounds good and is a mangling on a fancy project I just started called oose (object oriented system environment).
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
well... I've gone by the nickname “nihil” (a Seigmen song; also Latin for nothing) for just about all my online life; though when I signed up for a /. account I was reading R. Jordan's Wheel of Time, and I couldn't get the name “Moghedien” out of my mind.
Some people also know me as “lavpuls” (low pulse) because of a weird incident involving alcohol some years ago. I think someone still has a video recording of it... :D
I've come to... anesthetize you!
If you cut a Moebius strip down the middle, trying to cut it in two, you end up with a single Moebius strip that's twice as long and half as wide. Do it again, and it gets twice as long, again. There is a very strong correlation between Moebius strips and infinity.
--Be human.
I used to play basketball. Dino Radja was a basketball player. he was muscled, tall, strong, a good basketball player and made the occasional block.
I just made the occasional block. And Radja kind of resembles my real name. IMO, the best nicknames are the ones given to you by others.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
and those are my last nicknames :)
on slashdot i'm kipple, a work that I found in 'blade runner' (the Philip K. Dick book) meaning 'chaos', everything that grows up until it covers and eats up all free space left.
alt255 is the other irc nick (well it's kinda different but that's the meaning, looks like there are others alt255 out there), for those of you remembering ms-dos when there was no dosshell (add a alt255 char between a REM and a letter, let's say the char A, into AUTOEXEC.BAT; then hide a file called REM_A.BAT where _ is the alt255 char, and viola - hidden executables) or when you wanted to hide a directory with the ALT255 char. And yes, alt 255 looks like a space, but it's there and it's not a space, in few words it's there but you don't see it, and that sort of fascinating mistery stuff.
latin 'cause I was nemo on FIDONet, considering myself basically 'nobody' (the meaning of 'nemo' in latin), being a little kid at the time.
have fun
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Used to use one at university ('twas my first name translated into another language). By the end of my three-year degree course, I hated it, and decided never to use another nick. Ever since, I've gone by my full name, or just "Stephen".
-Stephen
Back in the good old days(1985) i was sitting at my c64 and played F15-Strike Eagle. I had to enter a Nickname for my Pilot. Since i've seen "Dr. Strangelove" the night before, i named myself after the pilot who rides the bomb at the end of the film : Major T. J. "King" Kong.
Ever since my name on any system where it is allowed is Kong.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
"Bob gives Tie a taste of rink justice".
From that point on my alias has been rinkjustice. I guess it's an homage to the hockey enforcers who make hockey such a great sport.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Even after Sig11 packed up & moved on, I still get the same shit. So, I decided to keep using this account. I figure those of you who judge me by my nic are only making yourselves look stupid, and I'll gladly help you do it.
I post whatever I feel like posting. Overall, I don't take Slashdot very seriously. I usually don't post unless I have something to say, but if I'm in the mood, sometimes I'll post a blatant troll, or something completely offtopic, and I've been known to flame a user or two, but I never post as an AC. I don't give a shit about Karma, but I'm regularly called a Karma Whore -- even after the cap was implemented.
I recently submitted a story, and (much to my surprise) Hemos posted it. I assume he noticed my nic, and credited me anyway. Good for him. All the bullshit those guys get from /. users has got to wear on them, and it's refreshing to see that my submission didn't get swatted down in a knee-jerk reaction to my nic.
I had another account, but I've abandoned it. I like my nic. I have no intention of going back to the old one - even for the low UID. Frankly, I don't give a shit about that status symbol.
--
--
You are a fucking moron.
Since I was very young, people in school always shortened my last name of Flickinger to "flick" .. mainly because I hate to be called Daniel by strangers and disliked being known as "Dan F." all the time. I never really suggested to be called flick, but over the years people call me that anyways. In high school, a girl I knew always called me flikee (and even spelled it as such.) This stuck as an online handle for some reason. flikee usually got shortened to "flikx", so most people wouldn't assume I'm female. (though that doesn't happen often since I don't spend time on irc.)
I'm usually protective of my first name, so most people do not know it and only know me as flick. On another note, I used flikx online quite a while before I came to slashdot, so there is no relation to spiralx.
--
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
JON Ragnarsson - used it since 1989 or something, tried a few hax0r names, but never liked them, they make you look stupid.
ArthurDent - Nick taken
FordPrefect - Nick taken
ZaphodBeeblebrox - Nick taken
Slartibartfast - Nick taken
Stavro
Stavro was taken on slashdot so I switch o for 0 and there we are.
---
I read somewhere that Java bytecode can easily be identified because the first 8 Hex digits always spell out "CAFEBABE". (Supposedly, the team that developed Java had a certain 'appreciation' for one of the female workers at a local coffee shop and decided to immortalize her in their work.)
I'm a girl, I code Java, and I wanted an appropriately geeky name, so that's how I picked my nick. I considered 0xCAFEBABE, but I figured that would be going a little too far.
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
My name is Latin and means unattractive or uncharming, specifically in a sexual way. It was an epithet used by Gaius Valerius Catullus, my favorite Latin poet, for people he really didn't like. Slashdot, you think you're geeks? Try hanging around with some Classics majors. It's a whole new standard of geekhood.
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
grep -ri 'should work'
Mine's pretty boring, but I'll post it anyways. Basically around 9 years ago I got a modem (2400!) and I logged onto a BBS that required the use of a nick name. So, I sat and looked around to see if anything around me would spark a nickname. Then I saw a pack of Mr. Sketch markers (you know, the scented ones :) ), and I've been using it ever since. In college, my friends shorted it to just 'Sketch' and called me by that instead of my real name, in fact I think one of my friends hasn't call me by my real name in well over two years. But on informal boards and online, I still like to go by Mr. Sketch.
So that's the history behind my name, if anyone cares. One of the drawbacks of it is that people assume that I can draw which is sooooo far from the truth: I can't even draw a stick figure well.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Well, I've only had two nicks that stuck for any amount of time.
The first is my old AOL name -- DOOMGuy. I was obsessed with the game at the time, and as everyone knows whether you've used AOL or not, all the good nicks are taken. Took me the better part of a half hour to find this one (I refused to pick a name with numbers tagged onto the end). That stuck with me for at least 2.5-3 years.
Near the end of my AOL years is when I switched to this nick. I picked up "Cray" from a short story I have since lost, with a character in it named Cray that could easily have been me. Since we were so alike, and I was looking for a new nick, I picked up the name.
The "Drygu" half of it comes from my boyfriend (no, the "DOOMGuy" above wasn't lying, I'm male). His online monicker had that last name, and since I was lacking one, I adopted his.
P.S. If any of you knew me as DOOMGuy on AOL, could you reply to this? I'm just curious to see =)
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
I don't use it here, but I created this one in college. I had created a webpage (running on a webserver the school didn't know they were hosting *grin*) called "The Hitchhiker's Guide To OBU". Take the first letters (THGTOBU), mix thoroughly, and you get Boghtut. I basically did it because I wanted something nobody else had.
human://billy.j.mabray/
human://billy.j.mabray/
"Every good system has a backup." -- Dale Hanchey
Hrm... this is one of those stories that should be immortalized on a web page with a picture of my cats and a (loud) midi file of some horrible 80s ballad playing.
WAAAAAAY back in the olden days - 1981 I got my mitts on a -real- computer (with drives and everything) the Osborne 1. About two years later, I had snuck into a "business" computer show/conference under the pretext that I looked 16 - hardly as I was about 12. In one of the interconnection hallways, there were the usual crop of guys hawking cheap hardware, including a "VolksModem 300" for $99CDN. I jumped at the chance to get it and pulled out my hard-earned newspaper money to buy it. Got home, hooked it up and used Modem7 to dialup a local BBS. Got hooked on BBSing in about 15 minutes and started using my firstinitial, lastname as my nick. This carried on until '86 when I got a freakshow call from someone who had looked up my number on the basis of my username.... needless to say, I started looking for a decent replacement. As that was a rather fateful year in space exploration, I was waffling between MIR and cBomb (first one should be obvious, second was a grim teenaged angst view of the challenger disaster). I went with Myr because it was -=way=- more 'cyber' than just plain Mir. Over the years, I gave people lots of interesting explanations as to the origin and about a decade after starting to use it, I discovered that people weren't pronouncing it properly (usually pronoucing it as 'myrrh' instead of 'meer') and made a little change to make it more obvious how to pronounce it - 'Myr as in MEER' was a common phrase. After a few months of that, I relented and accepted the pronunciation - changing to Myrcurial (mercurial) as an apt description of both my nick and temperment. In '98 I made one decision to reuse my original nick 'Myr' when I had it tattooed on my right arm in 7digit binary ASCII code with a stylized @ above it. Turns out that people shake their heads when I'm wandering a choice goth-industrial bar with the tat exposed, but man, it draws a crowd at real geek places (Novell Brainshare 99, I had a dozen pencil protector geeks trying to decode my arm while I was listening to a presentation by the CEO of Caldera)
It's a traditional Yorkshire (County[1]: Northern England) thing to simply add a Y to the end of any name to make it a nickname Hence I became Reedy.
I've since replaced the Y with an I to conform with various edicts on usernames in the companies I've worked for over the years.
Ian
[1] Some would say occupied nation. Are there many Yorkshire nationalists on /. ?
I live in The Glebe, hence I am glebite...
Strangely enough, glebite was a word bantered about in a response to Ayn Rand's "Who is John Galt?" back in high school. Every once in a while, this guy would say "What's a glebite?"
I am.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
I had just finished reading a collection of his stories when I first registered on an internet chess server back in 1990 or thereabouts and so chose it as a nick.
--
unitron is a contraction of University Electronics
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Zulfiya comes from a mangling of my real name Sylvia. I found it wasn't usually available as a login name, so I applied a little morphological shift, and voila! Imagine my surprise when I found out that I had picked an acutally used name - in Azerbaijan (one of the former Soviet nations). I did pick up some interesting pen pals that way...
Karmakaze is just a cute handle dating back to my BBS days. I quite deliberately avoided using it on Slashdot because of the alternate interpretation here.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
my login name at Uni was butcau, which I used to pronounce as Butt-cow, hence my nick of cowbutt.
Besides, my old one was inspired by (read: stolen from) the pencil-and-paper Shadowrun game.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Mine is a variation of my confirmation name: Thomas More.
Quotes from A Man for All Seasons
It's from high school/college when everybody said what up dogg
I used to use Tactical Neural Implant, which is the title of a phenomenal Front Line Assembly album.
But I was tired of it being shortened to Tac or TNI, and out of all fairness, the nick was far too long.
I love blue. Blue hair, blue lamp inside the computer, and not a powder or pastel blue - a vibrant deep electric blue. And of course, a daemon reference for Unix. Someone else was called Bluedemon (apparently he modelled the nick after a Santo-era Mexican wrestler with the name) so I was offered BlueDemon2 or whatever. I added the X (another *nix reference).
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Well, I wanted a second handle some time ago, and I had a CD with Chaostrophy as a track title (Coil, the album "Love's Secret Domain"). Then I needed a vanity domain, and it was availible. It's a cool sounding word, and unique. A web search on it pulls up me, band refernces, and a Cal Tech physics prof's paper.
It is not the best track on the album though.
Plato seems wrong to me today
I got mine on a band tour bus going to beautiful King of Prussia PA. We were passing part of the 5-6 hour ride watching "Grease," and when skanky Cha Cha DiGregorio came on screen, I was the only one who could remember her name. That was four years ago, and the name has stuck big time. A couple of my friends' parents call me chacha (or the shorter version, 'chach'), instead of Jen, which is my more official name. Heck, it even got back to some of my college professors, who also started referring to me as chacha in class. I'm pretty sure I have friends who don't know my real name... anyway, when I got into IRC a couple of years ago, it was a pretty easy choice for me.
In one of the skits, some happless conservatory judges start judging Performance Art, and call in a "Mr. Ska". I just liked the sound of it, and it's since stuck.
As an aside, it was only about 2 years later that I even realized that there was an entire genre of music called "ska", which I moderately enjoy.
If anyone has any info on the whereabouts of any of the members of Chill and the 4 Brother Fresh, please let me know!
Mr. Ska
I slit a sheet
A sheet I slit
Mr. Ska
I don't think my name needs much explaining, but for those of you who need to know, Mostly Harmless is the fifth, and last, book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (for those who don't know, HHGTTG is a five-part "trilogy"). It also happens to be my favorite installment. And there, fellow Slashdotters, is my story.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
I am what I am.
"pr0n": An anagram of "porn," possibly indicating the use of pornography. - www.microsoft.com
All my user names that aren't variants of my real name are based on RPG characters. Valdrax is the name of my all-time favorite character, even though I only got to play it for 4 sessions, and the character cannot really be replayed outside of that game world. So, I use it as a screen name, in lieu of getting to play the character again.
Most of my passwords are also really obscure RPG references too -- with numbers thrown in because of draconic password requirements. I had to give that up on the public server at my college where they force you to change it every 90 days, they remember the last 5-6 passwords, and they won't let you change it twice in a 24-hr period. You just have to pick a consistent series at that point.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Finally, I decided to make a break and change my online title to Ocelot Bob. Ocelot, after the aforementioned member of the cat family, and Bob after, well Bob. The two words became lowercase and one when I started using it as my login on my home system.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
For whatever reason, I combined flux with the word corn to make cornflux.
did gyre and gimble in the wabe,
:o) one of my favourite poems..
All mimsy, were the borogroves
and mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son,
the jaws that bite, the claws that catch."
"Beware the Jubjub bird and shun,
the frumious Bandersnatch."
Yes, I know the whole damn thing by heart
I chose Hermetic long ago becuase of how I view most people's reaction to technology. So many people are simply flabergasted to learn that I didn't go to school to learn computers.
Why are people scared to play with their computers? Or the VCRs? Does your grandma know how the light gun in Duck Hunter(and similar games) worked? Would she care?
Hermetic knowledge is no longer about alchemy and summoning of spirits...
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
I started this account to see how quickly I could karma cap a new account. (About 4 weeks, with pretty contrarian opinions. No whoring here.) I picked the name because I'd been doing some Qt programming the night before and had been calling update() a lot. I've kept posting mostly on this account, to protect Otter from karma erosion* and because if people know one of the names, it's more likely to be the one I've used lately.
* Yes, I know, karma isn't really good for anything. But it feels like a reward I've earned so I'm resisting letting it get eaten up by crack-addled moderators.
"Mr. Slippery" is, of course, from Vernor Vinge's famous and most excellent story "True Names".
Other nicknames I have used, or that have been applied to me, include:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm a diehard Van Halen fanatic thats biased towards the David Lee Roth era. Sammy Hagar was cool, 5150 and Balance were the only oustanding albums from him, the others were just average, but the first six with DLR were just the epitome of raw ass kicking rock and roll that even the mediocre not-commonly known tunes sound far better than the shit that is
Top40/MTV/Boy Band/Bubblegum pop/angst filled alterno-crap on the airwaves now.
Don't even get me started on that 3rd singer/bastard son of Freddie Mercury and Judy Garland known as Gary Cherone...WTF were they thinking when they hired that flaming wannabe??
My nickname started from my online gaming alias, especially counterstrike servers so I just carried it over to here, and wa-la! found it wasnt taken.
Cut it the first time and it's DOUBLE-LOOPED. Cut it the second time and it's two interlocking loops.
Beats me... I just like it.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
SagSaw short for Saggital Saw, a type of saw for cutting through bone which is made at the company where I co-op.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
Well, originally, I thought conio.h was cronio.h...I found out (through compiler error) that it wasn't, and said "hey, that's a cool name, cronio", searched for it on the internet and only found some foreign language sites, so I started using cronio as my online alias.
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
I have an award jacket from making regional band in H.S. It says "Mark" on one line, and "Trombone" on the second on the front where there would be a breast pocket. Once college arrived, the name evolved from "trombone" to "trommy" to "tbone" to just "t" because everyone was usually stoned and eating, and "t" took less time to say :) But I took TBone.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
namespan is meant to be an all-encompasing nick.... one that "spans" an entire namespace.
The derivation comes from me trying to get an AIM nick, and EVERYTHING (and I mean EVERYTHING -- even some of the most unusual words or pet phrases I have in English or in SAMOAN for cryin' out loud) was taken already. I thought "Gee, this is a small name space", which really it wasn't (it was just crowded), and so I happened on the intermediate nick "smallnamespace".
Later, when signing up for my second slashdot account, the linear algebra classes I'd had kicked in, and I came up with namespan.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
This might be a little hard for you all to follow (yes, especially you linear algebra freaks or you history buffs), but my parents came up with my nick. It's on my birth certificate. It's... it's...(*gasp*)... my REAL NAME!
Apparently they came up with it sortof on accident. One said "How about 'Winston'? and the other said "'Weston'? How did you come up with that?" and the other said "I didn't, but I like it!" I don't beleive they remember which said what.
--
Tweet, tweet.
coz Prosthetic Conscience probably aint gonna fit.
Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
Yes.. I did take it from the 5th Season StarTrek:TNG episode.. It was a good episode, and it's a good enough nick, that it's not overtly 'trekky'.. which can be a good thing, sometimes :)
I've been using it for years (well, since the episode aired) back in the BBS days of the early 90's
Unfortunatly, it was already take on /. by the time I signed up, so I used my fallback nick (which I started using on IRC, after getting dropped off, and Darmok was still connected)
--- RB
Well, when I was the asst. admin at work, if someone would poke their head in my office and say 'Are you in here?', I'd often answer 'Nobody's here!', or some such witticism. (since the regular admin quit, I just grumble:) It seemed natural to continue to be 'nobody' on /., but it was taken, so I stuck the 69 on since that's when I was born. On deja, I often go by 'alshaddai', which I picked up from Robert Anton Wilson's excellent overview of conspiracy theories, 'Everything is Under Control'.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
I was a freshman in college working in the labs when this guy was showing me how to use TPU with vi keymaps on a VAX. Then he showed me how to change my shell prompt. The lab I staffed was in the library, and it was the beginning of the semester. I was bored and reading my thick Edgar Allen Poe collected works book. He looked at me and said "poeman," and proceeded to change my shell prompt. Being from the south and in college, some people thought that it was an assessment of my socio-economic status at the time, but that's simply not true.
I just wanted something short and easy to spell...
-------------------------
A person of moderate zeal
Does anyone know the etymology of the word "nickname" itself?
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
there is a story behind this one.
Basically, it's an onomatopoeization of a beagle howling (try it, with a lazy pause on the 'r'). I grew up out in the country, and once a couple of friends were dropping me off from a night of drinking around 2 in the morning. Our neighbors, much like the Bumpuses of A Christmas Story, have approximately 782 hound dogs, and one of them started barking/baying/howling at us (we were doing something dumb which made noise, but I forget what exactly), as only a beagle can do. Anyway, my comment was "that dog is just like 'what the fuck?'", and it kind of became an inside joke amongst us that a certain type of howl/bark was beagle for 'what the fuck?'.
A few months later, I was signing up for hotmail, or yahoo, or something, and every nickname I could think of was taken, so I say to myself "self, what the fuck?" and then for giggles type in barooo. It wasn't taken, and it kind of stuck. I use it everywhere I can (but there are a few other barooo's out there).
--
One more drink, and I'll move on. --Dave Matthews Band
I portrayed the part of the loon in a skit once so well that the Loon name stuck; the XTall represents my 6 foot 3 inch height.
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
My name is based on my faith MT2MB (Empty Tomb) refering to Jesus Christ. and when he was crucified (sp?) for us. then rose from the dead, causeing (hence) an empty tomb. It just reminds me to be a Whitness to the light at all times
Never put off till tommarow what you can avoid all together.
mod this up! do it! do it now!
p.s. can u make me a wizard?
Gendou :-)
Comes from my favorite character in Shin Seiki: Evangelion. I like the character because he's incredibly focused and determined to accomplish his goals. *shrug* I think there are good qualities here.
the Silicon Dragon :-) To those of you that saw the NY1 H2K Video: that was me. :-) The reason I said that I was one of MANY silicon dragons is because well, how many people pick an animal they like and tack on "silicon"? Pah! I'm cooler though. I got on television and I own the domain. :)
Yes, he was a member of Future Crew, but when I saw his alias, I just could believe how cool it was... so I ripped it. (I actually though the fact that I did was good when I found out he was killed in a car crash. Some people will remember... and the name floats around.) The reason I like this handle is because, well, I love dragons - they're majestic and fantastic creatures. Now, imagine a robotic one. That's this.
Lethyos
Main character from a book I'm writing. He's an underdog with some very impressive skills (much like hackers, yes?) Not very well liked (also a common factor with geeks), but everyone will depend on him to save their asses in the end. Very poetic.
It seems like everyone here has some reason for having his name. *yawn* Well, my handle is entirely arbitrary. It was specially crafted to sound like it perhaps could be a name in Spanish. As far as I know, it isn't, although a quick search on the fish showed me that it means "leasing" in Portuguese. This was entirely coincidental. I don't care, though, because no one would be stupid enough to intentionally choose a nick that means "leasing," and thus my name is almost always unique. Except on AIM. Then again, it seems any pronounceable string of 11 characters or less is taken on AIM (a throwback to before they allowed longer screen names).
was given to me by my Platoon Sergeant back when I served in Haiti. I was the biggest mofo in the platoon, and the Haitian Creole word for tiny is petit(e), familiar usage is "ti". Sorta like Little John of Robin Hood fame. Hence, Little Dave.
The name followed me back from Haiti and stuck ever since...
My name isn't too interesting. I was thinking, what I am, after all. "Image Flux" sounded cool. I shortened it into "Imgflux" (yuck), but realized how ugly that is. "Flux" was reserved for one guy at #Linux.fi. Then I thought, why in the hell should I use English, that ugly Anglosax babble? The Finnish word for flux, Vuo, was unique and compact.
Vuo is used also by Veterans United Online and a Finnish folk music group. Screw them.
But the story about Sepponen is much more interesting.
My BBS friend was grouping with his friends. Their theme was wedding, thus they named their group "Just Married". Then it shortened to jma. This friend picked up the name "Best Man". It was shortened to "Bemari" (btw nick for Mercedes-Benz) and then to "Bemmu". "Bemmu" was stuck in the use. Year 2000 he changed his official first name into Bemmu. He used to be Mikko Oskari Sepponen, now he's Bemmu Mikko Sepponen. The officials didn't like it, but accepted it when Bemmu said he's gonna go to Japan, where Mikko is a girl's name.
I play tuba. I was a server admin in high school. I thought I should use a name the implied power and no one else would use. I worked.
Other nicknames:
Sneil = from boy scouts. Some of my friends decided it was appropriate because I tended to hike in the back of the line. Snail + Neil => Sneil
Little Egypt = Scoutmaster thought may name was spelled wrong. Neil -> Niel -> Nial -> Nile -> Little Egypt.
in high school, i was friends with an upperclassman who was at the time, the editor in chief of the primary underground school paper. (This was Leon High School, Tallahassee, FL in 1992-93)
i joined the staff, and to ostensibly conceal our identities from the administration, even though we openly sold the two-sheets in the morning every month or so for a quarter a pop, even to teachers, we all had aliases.
i was for some reason given 'Captain Kangarooski' and just started using it as a handle on the net. it makes looking for me on google pretty easy, i can tell you.
no one's ever called me that irl though - it's pretty strictly an online thing. and no i don't know if it's supposed to be a naval captain or an army captain. that's one of the great mysteries of our age.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Back in the good ol' days of the Internet, before the advent of the WWW (1990, to be exact), I started using telnet BBSs from school. When the time came to create my very first account on the Mars BBS (Greetings to those who remember T'ruth, Xenia, Lynn and the rest), I was wondering what nickname to use.
Being a teenager, I tried a few names that came to mind. Let's see... "Maverick"! Taken. "TopGun", taken too. "Montana", ditto. (Don't ask me why I wanted to chose those names. Please don't).
So, without any other fresh ideas, I just glanced down and saw that I wearing a Vuarnet t-shirt. So, I tried "Vuarnet", no one had used it, and therefore started using it as a login name in several BBSs, DikuMUDs and IRC.
Most of my friends which I made during college, met me in the computer room. Online, most of the time. So there's still a few friends who cant remember my name, but they dont care since they always greet me by my nickname.
Hell, it could've been worse. I could've been "Fruit of the Loom" or something like that...
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.