How did you come up with your Pen Names?

[littleelliebot]

My high school BFF who I super love was putting 'bot' at the end of everything after we were playing around with the Cleverbot website, and she started calling me Elliebot, and I loved it so much it's been my online handle/pen name since then >w<
(i love robots so it works out : P )

It's also kinda been adapted into a family name?? My kid is (well was) called Babybot (she prefers Kidbot now (("I'M NOT A BABY" as she says)) ) n' same for lots of family members and friends :3c <3

[NickRowler]

My name is actually a character I made up when I was about 9 or 10 but later gave him the name Nick Rowler when I was about 14-ish. I don't know why I gave him that name, I thought for the longest time it was based off of Rick Roll (Rick Roller Nick Rowler) but the name predates the meme.

The character was a hermit who wrote books about magical creatures, no one knew his real name so everyone just called him Nick Rowler. So the name is sort of like a "John Doe".

I use the name because I like it and 99% of the time it is available as a username.

Before I used the name Lilnanny (also my current DA). It is also based off of a character however a lot of other people use the username Lilnanny (including a daycare) so I am sort of moving away from it.

[EdanraTilna]

Jane Apricity, which I use more often is made up of the name my mom always wished she had and a cool word that not many people know. Apricity is the "warmth of the sun on on a snowy day". A contradiction, but the good sort. Unless you dislike the idea of going snowblind.

Edanra Tilna is composed of the names of different characters I had in a fantasy world. Edith, Vivi ana, R azael, Tilverune, Aali na.

Those are my two most common, and I somehow have them both on Tapastic. awkward shrug

[TACOBERTO]

"Taco" has been my nickname for years until it sort of kind of become my de facto name. My real name is only mentioned in official documents and stuff
"TACOBERTO" then is just the gamertag my brother made for me on our old Xbox 360. I've just stuck with it as my online handle ever since

[Valalaraptor]

Mine comes from the distant year of 2010, when those "Silly Bandz" were en vogue. At my workplace, I got a pack of rainbow dinosaur bandz, because fuck yeah rainbow dinosaurs. One of my co-workers took an interest in them, and found one shaped like a velociraptor. She, however, called it a "valalaraptor", and my new internet web handle was born.

[ratique]

I really like rats and kind of created something.

[Ringarune]

I hated my old username so I got out a sticky note, wrote down all the names that came to me off the top of my head, and chose the one I liked best

[ahhvecadoes]

There's this SNL skit called 'The Californians' and the way they said avocados made me laugh so it became my username. It just kind of stuck.

[tomatobird]

I like birds and I like tomatoes, "tomato" has been a family nickname for me since I was very young so it fit i guess!!

[shazzbaa]

There's a whole story here,,,

[Morair]

By accident lol. I wanted to have More-Air as my tumblr url but every variation of it was taken. I realized it would sound the same without the e, so I took it and it became Morair. To be on the safe side I googled it to make sure it wasn't a curse word or something and found out it meant 'Lord' in Scottish Gaelic. I thought that was really cool so it stuck

[agentfink]

Umm, I have two I guess. One is a general username: wootjay (my twitter, tumblr, and Instagram) so it's easier to find me.
I say "woot" a lot and my name is Jay... so naturally they go together. The other was jaybird, but that's always taken.

On Tap it's AgentFink because it sounds... cool? I love my character, so I didn't think twice with the name.

[PaulDevers]

My name is not actually Paul, believe it or not. However, since I am shy and meek person in real life, I could not introduce myself comfortably at my old school. Some girls decided that my name had to be 'Paul', because 'I looked like a Paul'. At that point, after telling the story to my friends and never really correcting them, it became an in-joke that my name was Paul. That's where that came from.
The Tower has a little more reason to it. When I was younger and stressed, I always made symbols with my hands to calm myself down. The symbol at the top of the tower, the weird double-diamond thing, is the oldest of those symbols. I slapped it on top of the tower, which I enjoyed drawing separately, as a personal in-joke to myself. And so, Paul's Tower was born. At this point, I always represent myself as a sentient, infinite tower and always sign my name as Paul. No going back now.

[lunaartemisasama]

This is my name from my internet alter ego lol. Luna and Artemisa from greek mythology and Sama because that was the family name of the first virtual group I ever joined when hotmail groups existed many many many years ago (before youtube and facebook). But sometimes I shorten it like Lunarte or Art-chan.

[WhatAHero]

WhatAHero is a call out to how some characters in common media would say "What a hero~" whenever they were talking about someone who did a cool thing. However I think it's funnier when people use it ironically for when someone just shits the bed and fails at doing something heroic. Most of my writing pertains to anti-heroes or people that really shouldn't be the heroes of their own story so I think in a way my pen name is fitting, especially now that people use the phrase sarcastically more often.

[efdvorsky]

My name came as an accident??

Not efdvorsky that's my first name and first last name, but Cosmographia which is the one I use 99% of the time.

I was trying to make a new account back in my dA days when I entered college. You know, start a new life, try and be more serious, feeling like restarting, all that jazz. And the original name I wanted wasn't allowed for some reason?? So, in college, I was going to study computer science so I could either animate or work on software for NASA (I dream big sometimes, I ended up graduating in public communication funny how the world works).

So I thought I'd see if the site was down or something and went through random ideas and found something called the Cosmographia. Which is an old book (c. 1544 by Sebastian Münster) full of the dumbest creature designs I had seen at the time and thought I'd test it out. The site accepted it and I just went "OOPS. GUESS I'M COSMOGRAPHIA NOW."

And...it just stuck. So I've kept using it and people call me Cosmo which I like it tbh since it's kind of gender neutral. After that it just kind of spun into Cosmoquences on twitter as a mix of me loving the cause-effect aspect of writing, cosmo, and puns.

The end.

[shaneoid77]

I studied Cosmology as part of my Philosophy degree at University and my cabal of friends at the time nicknamed me Shaneoid, and it's kinda stuck. I like it.

[smoce]

I couldn't have Smoke as my username for tumblr or something so I replaced the k with a c and I thought it sounded cool. The rest is history, I guess?

[Marton]

Marton is my middle name. It's a very uncommon name, I have yet to meet another person named Marton.
It's like i connect my online self with my IRL self with that name, if that makes any sense.

[Quinineer]

Something something quinine. It's a medicine for malaria with unfortunate side effects.
No, I have no idea how/why I got this weird mashup of quinine and queer.

Quinine is also quite bitter. I'm also quite bitter.
Strange and bitter? Okay, sounds about right.