So where did your forum handle come from?

Mine is an Orson Scott Card homage.

Mine, well, was originally Captain Sinfonia, for my fraternity in college. (Phi Mu Alpha, they call us Sinfonians) Later on I created a rad/sonic defender that I named Sfortzando, a musical term. It seemed clever at the time, because the toon hit things hard then it was quiet when there were dead. Although apparently it's spelled Sforzando, but I swear I've seen it spelled both ways on pieces I've performed. That got shortened to Sfort by people on Ventrilo and it just kind of stuck.

When I made the move to Freedom from Pro I around the forum migration time I decided I'd consolidate and just took Sfort as my name for everything.

Mine is based on my first character in the first MMO I ever played: Caliban Loreseeker, a monk I played in Everquest many years ago.

(The name Caliban itself comes from a character in Shakespeares "The Tempest"... or a morlock from Marvel Comics (who was named after the same character).

Are you ready for this? I used this name long before I came to CoX, shocking right? I actually started using this on Starcraft when I was in middle school. I was taking a latin class and I loved it, Arbiter translates to judge so it was Judge Shade. Shade just because I was a teen dark things were cool! But now I really have grown to like the name.

My forum handle came out of the concept that I would mostly post something that was already said and my post would just drown in the vast sea of other posts and I would go about in these forums as an unknown. So using that as inspiration I created the forum handle, Unknown_User and seem to use it in just about any forum that I sign up for.

Its the first character I made for CoH, a tribute to a They Might Be Giants song and a nod to a boy who'd recently broken my heart.

Long ago I needed a name for a character for my now-abandoned book. He had, among other things, precognitive abilites similar to Spider-man's and Premonitions was shortened to "Prem" I grew to like the word and use it in almost every online community I join.
I prefer to be called "Premmy" "Prem" or "premalemadingdong"

Well I had a girlfriend i thought it was funny when it happened and made most of my handles that name for email or log ins. I was depressed at one time about it so after i looked at it i thought it was funny to have and to make fun of. Besides it happen like years ago so yeah I'm over it.

Knightwatch was the name of the super team from a tabletop Marvel game my group played some years back. When the team split up and headed off to college and went their separate ways my Char adopted the name in his solo career.

It was also my Global name till I took a break, missed the Global reset and someone bogarted it.

Contrary to what some people will tell you, Umbral came before the devs (/shakefist) stole my name (/shakefist) for those accursed shapseshifted alien monstrosities (/shakefist)!

When I was making my first character (also my first 50), I wanted a name that espoused his powers while simultaneously using an advanced enough term that it wouldn't already have been taken. Thusly, because I was running a Dark Melee Scrapper, and "umbral" is an awesome and comprehensibly vocabulous way of saying "shadowy", I dubbed him "Umbral Fist". In running his up the levels, people began to truncate it down to just "Umbral", so, when I rolled a new character, wanting to ensure that people that knew who I was no matter which character I was on (this was back in the days before global chat, of course), made sure that I prefaced all of my character names with "Umbral". Of course, this lead to some interesting assumptions about what my powersets were (such as my Rad/Psy defender that was assumed to be a dark/*), but I didn't care. When I came to the forums, I was already running on multiple characters, so it didn't make sense to run with my main's name so I stuck with the moniker that I had begun to be known by.

Of course, I still rue the day that the devs stole my name for those Warshade powersets. I used to be able to get any name that I wanted because "umbral" isn't an adjective that generally comes up when most people consider naming a character. Now that there is an entire AT that uses my name, it's almost impossible for me to find a name that is either associated with darkness or even relatively theme neutral.

The first message board I ever posted on was a Star Wars one about 10 years ago. I wanted a Star Wars related name, but I didn't want to be another Darth Dave, or Bill Skywalker, so I tried to think of a more obscur SW character.

Then I remembered the first time I saw Star Wars with my dad when I was 10, and how funny I thought the scene was in the Death Star where Chewie roars at the little toaster-looking robot and it squeals and runs off. I looked up the name of that robot and found that it was called a MSE-6 mouse droid, so mousedroid became my forum name.

Subsequently, I joined other message boards and just used mousedroid on all of them, except for the time I joined a message board for curly-haired women and briefly changed it to moussedroid. Seriously.

Well, Pan Demonium was not the first toon I made, but he wass the first to 50 and the only hero survivor of my first 2 weeks of toons, Zura of Zura being the villian.
I had previously rolled a storm/nrg defender, and being new to the game, was merrily pushing mobs all over the place and was being told that I was creating chaos and ruining everyones fun, well the melee toons fun anyway. So of course I deleted that toon and rolled one to celebrate the chaos of KB that is storm and found that Pan Demonium was available, thus my plant/storm troller was born.

Plus goat-legs are my favorite costume piece!

that's not a handle...

...you have to ask?

A curiosity, though. I noticed the other day that Lord_of_Time predates me here by a good couple of months. Why didn't he go for TimeLord (or Time_Lord, He Of The Underscores)? Or is this one of those "center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop" things?

I've had the name Ocularis in four different MMO's. First was eq1. CoX is the only one I still have tho.

-Oc

Well I really wanted to call one of my first tank "Captain Battleship" but that was taken. Sooo I.. well... anyway you know the rest of the story.

One of my first toons, first to 50.

And my chat handle is just @Pez

The name 'Sigium' came on a whim of the mind.

You see, a long, long time ago, I was a KotOR nut, and loved every minute of it. I don't know how or why, but the names of the Lightsaber modifications popped into my head, particularly the 'Sigil' Crystal.

I didn't want to just have the same name as it, so I made a bit of modifying and made Sigium - Pronounced Si-jum.

It's the Internet handle I've been using for about a dozen years now.

As for how I came up with it, before that I went around (in my adolescent way) as "The Dark Knight", ie pre-Paladin Cecil from FFIV, and then got tired of people mistaking me for being a Batman fan (nothing against Batman, but back then I knew nothing outside general knowledge of the character, so I couldn't be called a "fan"). Trying to come up with a new handle with the initials "DK", I flailed on the keyboard for a while to come up with "Damien Kellis".

I strongly suspect that more people in the world in general are familiar with me as "Damien Kellis" than as my real name.

My forum name is always my main name in any MMO i'm playing , at least "touch wood" i've been lucky to get it so far

It's my local Scottish footie team , Hibernia FC but i like it as an individual name as well.

I touch souls?

Was the name of my first "serious" MMO character, a Half Elf Druid in EverQuest way back in '99. After falling in with "the wrong crowd" (read: being port b*tch for a couple who farmed & eBay'd gear for RL cash), I got into some drama with my guild at the time so I deleted him and went back to playing my true first character, a rogue named Kension (which incidentally, was my forum handle on the old boards). I re-rolled him a month later and got him back into the 30s (back when leveling in EQ was actually sort of 'hard') before jumping to a newly opened server.

Since then, the name has stuck and there are so many people now who use 'Remi' to refer to me (even when they know my real name) that it's hard to shake.

I've been SpaceNut (with numbers appended on larger communities) since 1999 when I first signed up for AIM. I'm nuts about spaceflight and space in general.

@SpaceNut - My 50s, AE arcs and current projects at ParagonWiki