mtgthesource - names origins

[nevilshute]

Hey everybody, I thought it would be fun to learn the story behind people's names on this forum. (If there is already a thread about this, then shame on me. Let me know and I will delete this).

To get the ball rolling:

Like 5 years ago I had just read a book by Nevil Shute (On the Beach - terrific book) and I was still at university then. I needed to create an account on a Danish magic site and didn't really know what to call myself (as I don't really like using my own name on internet forums). So, being a bit locked in a pseudo intellectual pretentiousness of university life I thought it'd be neat to use the names of famous authors on various internet forums. Having just read the aforementioned book I just decided on 'nevilshute'. Since then, it just made sense for that all my magic-related accountnames be the same.

PS: I get that some name origins are pretty straight forward, but all are welcome here!

[Chatto]

I was baptized Chatto, so it's my second name.

Pretty straightforward, indeed

[French Alters]

I started to alter cards around 1 year and a half ago, but I didn't find any good name for it. Recently I started putting my things out a lot more, in the hope to gain a little fame and recognition in the "alter milieu". And then, since I'm french and I do alters, the name became quite evident ^^'

-dat Frenchie

[Sloshthedark]

during the summer holiday back in 2001 we were trying to setup a LAN to play games on (incredible pain in 2001 between different systems) with my cousin's husband, meanwhile he was showing some of his stuff he was working on in Matlab and there was a funny rainbow object/template which represented some function, projection or whateverin the program called Slosh, which was, well funny for some reason... when we finaly had the network working, Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun asked me for my name... I had no idea how to call myself because I couldn't use internet much at the time and hadn't faced that problem before so I filled in Slosh for fun and added The Dark after few seconds to make it sound more ridiculous... and that's it... he had a good laught and I won 13:1 ... so it kind of stayed with me as my most used nickname for the time being... i did not know what std means at the time

[Julian23]

Ok, storytime. On reddit I would create a throwaway for this but whatever.

It was 1995 and I was a 9 year old boy spending most of my summer in the Old Town of Mombasa. I always used to be really into gaming but only of the console variety, where you were never asked to input a nickname or anything of that kind, so I always just went with whatever JRPG I was playing suggested as the name for a character. Until I discovered Sid Meier's Pirates. So this one insanely hot week my SNES finally stopped working; I think it was more due to the isolation on some wires melting than the system overheating but what did it matter - in Mombasa it's not like you can take your SNES to the next Nintendo shop and get it repaired. I was quite pissed but what can you do, so I strolled out into the old harbor to hang out with my friends and go swimming in the sea (When I went back to Mombasa in 2013 our guide promised us that there would be "absolutely no sharks" in the harbor...which was strange because we had never asked for that information). Most of my friends were from this social club that my parents used to take me to before it was closed so we were a mixed group of middle class Kenyan kids and some Europeans and Americans who's parents were assigned to some construction programs in Kenya. When the club closed my parents first didn't allow me to go playing outside on my own, but since the other kids often had some "local uncle" or relatives watching over us in the harbor they eventually agreed.

So, at this point what a lot of people actually don't know about me is that my real name is Frank. And no, my name is not a reference to Michael Jordan, nor was I born in the year of 23 (sorry for everyone who had his money on that). The origin of my nickname which over the years I also partially adopted with everyone whom didn't know me before Kenya is quite a long story, but let me explain:

So this one day we were playing in the harbor and this new kid shows up. Quite a bit smaller than us we first ignored him thinking that he was maybe 6 or 7 years old, clearly not someone we mature kids would want to hang out with. We were sitting at the bottom of the stairs near Fort Jesus and tried catching fish with sticks. Looking bad at it know, we were sooo bad at this and no wonder none of us ever caught a life one, but of course everyone bragged about what kind of giant monster of the sea he had caught "just the other day" when nobody was there. So this kid comes down the stairs and keeps watching us for a while. One of my friends got kinda pissed about this and eventually yelled at him to get lost but his (older) sister shut him up and asked the guy for his name.

"Julian, from Merka"

For everyone who doesn't know, Merka is a coastal town in south Somalia. He told us that his parents had fled the city once it was becoming clear that Mohammed Aidid would take over the city following the UNO leaving Somalia. I didn't fully understand the story he told us (to a 9-year old, a "warlord" doesn't really mean too much) but the guy was so fascinating and genuinely friendly towards us so he quickly became part of our group. His family had been running a successful fishing business in Somalia before they fled to Mombasa and Julian was brought up as the only son of his father to eventually take over. He knew *everything* about fishing. He also wasn't 6 or 7 but actually TEN years old which was either something he made up to impress us or actually true, who knows; he didn't seem like the kind of guy who would think he needed to lie about his age. Naturally, he taught us a lot about fishing with sticks, which is what he used to do from his father's boat. Looking back at it now, he must have thought he was hanging out with some severly retarded kids considering that we were swinging out makeshift angle rods on the surface of the water instead of just letting them sit there and not wielding them around like we had some kind of seizure. Through him I was able to catch my first live fish which I later gave to one of the girls I liked as a present (but she was just disgusted, lol).

By the end of summer, the social club we used to hang out with reopened and they hosted a big "Kenyan Summer Olympics" for us kids. It was all fun, no real compeition but of course to us it meant the world. We were split in groups of 4 and I was on a team with Julian, my friend's older sister and one of her friends. We had to do different things such as a quiz about the Big Five and rolling our team on a big skateboard around some city course. One of the last stages of the "Olympics" was "fishing" with a makeshift net in the ocean (somehow they thought letting us actually kill the fish with a stick wasn't appropriate ). The "net" was made from whatever stick you find on the ocean and plastic bags you had to cut lots of small holes into to allow it to glide through the water. We let the girls take care of this and they made two very nice nets for Julian and me and then each followed one of us with a big bucket to ferry the caught fish back to the referee who would then drop it into a pool. It's kinda funny how know that I think about it it was probably some big scam to get free child labor but whatever; at least we had a ton of fun. We had about half an hour to catch as many fish as we could to determine the winner. I thought I was doing pretty well, catching about 4 in the first 15 minutes and sending "my girl" back and forth all the time. I didn't know how the other kids were doing since we all spread out over the entire beach to not overlap on "fishing grounds". After my first great catches the sea "dried up" really fast and I hard a hard time even just finding any fish, let alone catch them so I didn't catch *any more* for the rest of the competition. Once time was running out they called us back to the club and I was super pissed about how we were gonna losenow because of me and how life sucked and how I wanted to go back and play Super Nintendo but couldn't yada yada yada.

So the way they counted the fish for the competion was to announce the name of the kid, followed by the number of fish he/she had caught, then combined them for team's total. We had a total of 5 or 6 teams competing and the way the overall scoring system worked, the only competition that really mattered was this one. You could name all of the Big Five on both Swahili and English, ride the skateboard better than Tony Hawk and score 6/6 at the football target shooting, it didn't matter if your fishing skills sucked. Another reason why I thought they were actually just using us for cheap fishing labor, especially since we never got to know what actually happened to "our" fish; somehow I don't believe they really threw them back into the ocean after sitting in some random tank in the club for over half an hour by now.
They started calling out the numbers and most kids had caught either none at all (haha, losers) or an average of about 7-8 (the guys who knew what they were doing). Needless to say I felt pretty bad about my mere 4 that I had caught and thought that I was letting my team down and would be made fun of for weeks to come. By now the winning team was sitting at a combined of 20 fish. Since we used to be in the (meaningless) lead before this last part, our grand total was called out the last:

"Frank, 4"

At this point everyone starts their (friendly) booo-ing and I start complaining how they were all thieves and stealing "my" fish because I couldn't find any more on my spot after a while and how I was still much better than them. Nobody cared and they started boo-ing me harder now. If only I had already known about the Barbara Streisand Effect back then. I was getting really pissed and would have loved to punch this one guy straight into his face, especially since he himself had only caught 5 fish, so who is he to make fun of me, this idiot? In the midst of all of this with me trying to supress my tears (I really couldn't take people making fun of me very well), the lady running the club calls out:

"Julian, 23"

Silence. TWENTY-FUCKING-THREE??? That was more than the two guys in the best team combined and the win for OUR team regardless of my performance. Suddenly, I wasn't the center of attention anymore and everyone was stunned to hear that Julian had caught 23 fish in just 30 minutes. People weren't really praising him but it was the first time I actually heard someone clap for somebody else outside of birthdays or stage performances. I was clapping as well but to be honest, I was more happy for being relieved of the guys' mockery than for winning the competition. From that point on, the whole "Julian, 23" thing developed into a running gag amongst our peers and it came up everytime people bragged about something, someone would go over the top to make fun of them. I remember once one of our guys bragged about how he had kissed two girls in his primary school class and how "cool" he was. I just turned to him and said "Julian, 23" indicating that Julian had kissed a whole TWENTY THREE of the girls in his class; we probably didn't consciously notice it but in a way "Julian, 23" was our way of telling someone to shut up because we were growing tired of his annoying behavior. I really, really loved that phrase because of the cool ring to it.

My Super Nintendo was never repaired (and I eventually got a new one for Christmas) so when I came back to Munich, I was spending more time playing games on my Dad's computer. Unlike my SNES games, those games often asked to pick a nickname. More or less just for fun I ended up picking "Julian23" since I was playing Sid Meier's Pirates and thought it was quite fitting since just like Julian, who grew up sailing with his Dad, I was playing a guy sailing on the ocean. Stuck with it ever since despite a short-lived fling with "Zlatko99" during my Quake years...

So yeah, that's my story. Should better get back to work now

/edit: at work right now, sorry can't proof-read atm :-O
/edit: did some proof-reading; shot, there were some horrible mistakes :-O :-O :-O

[nevilshute]

A lot of great stuff everybody, thanks

@Julian: wow that's one heck of a background story. Can I ask, is your official first name still Frank then? Or did you change it officially to Julian?

[barcode]

I like to be somewhat anonymous and Korean Starcraft 2 players will use a name of |||||||||| on ladder to hide their real name/alias in order to practice extremely high level strategies. Casters (people who commentate the games) refer to those players as "Barcode players" because the || look like a barcode, thus, my nickname here, barcode.

[sjmcc13]

Back in 97-98 I decided to get a hotmail account, and entered my initials (My last name starts McC) it came back with my initials and 13 afterwards as available.
No longer have that email account, as I have not used it since switching to Gmail back in 2004-05 but I still use the name ocasionally.

[iamajellydonut]

I always figured my name was pretty self-explanatory.

[Pilhas]

So.... Freshman year, people pick names for the freshmem and they started calling me Pilhas, which is Portuguese for Batteries, the name stuck and most of my university friends probably don't even know my real name
Sometimes you see my name as Stackz at other venues because Pilhas inportuguese also means Stacks so there's that.
My magic friends like the name since you sometime call a pile of something random as Pilha, and my decks are usually random piles so there is also that.

[Megadeus]

When I first started playing magic I bought the Red-Green starter deck from Alara Reborn and I was playing it with my friends (who had been playing much longer than me). He game me a bunch of random stuff to put into the deck and one of those cards was Deus of Calamity. I'm not 100% certain why, but I fell in love with the card and every time I cast it my friend called it the Megadeus. So when I joined my first online magic forum I figured I'd make a Magic related name and that seemed catchy enough. Still searching for all of the foil foreign languages of the Deus sadly. I've got the non foils covered but I only have Japanese and English foils :/

[Admiral_Arzar]

I started writing a sci-fi novel out of boredom in high school. It was bad and I never finished it, but one of the alien characters was Admiral Arzar. I thought that name had a nice ring to it so I started using it online.

[clavio]

Moved around the letters of this guy's name - http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Calvario

[iamajellydonut]

Moved around the letters of this guy's name - http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Calvario

Taking "the r is silent" to a whole new level.

[Whitefaces]

Mine is the name of a band. Lovely chaps.

[danyul]

@Julian - Wow. That is quite the story. I feel like you could write an insane memoir.

The origin of my handle is quite simple. My name is Daniel but at the time (11 years ago?! Damn!) I was a freshman in college and kept meeting people who would mistakenly call me "Danielle". I found this very strange because I assumed most people were familiar with the name Daniel. It's a fairly common name in America. It's like the Tier 2 version of a John, Sam, or Bob. I'm essentially as common as a Scott or a Trevor or a Phil. I'm definitely not a Scout, Mason, Booker, Paxton or whatever the fuck kids are named these days. Anyways, I was feeling angsty about that and changed my AOL IM sn to Danyul so it was clear that my name is Daniel, not Danielle/Danyell. A week later I got over that. But the memory remains.

[mini1337s]

Most people think I'm a short nerd. 6'3", 210.

[Octopusman]

I used to think Decoy Octopus was hilarious from Metal Gear.
Octopus is also my spirit animal.
I played worms 2 (+armageddon, +world party) a lot and had shortened the name to Octopus for a worm. Then he became one of the best worms on the team so he graduated to being a man and was Octopus Man.
How generic is sounds appeals to me too.

[Richard Cheese]

It was originally Dick Cheese but they made me change it.

[Parcher]

Ed Harris is my favorite actor. William Parcher, one of my favorite characters. I love the sort of devil-on-his-shoulder role he plays as a figment of Nash's illness. In the same vein, Parcher was a Planeswalker in the Urza series. One who was so insane, Urza preferred having the deamon Tevesh Szat on his side against Yawgmoth, rather than risk the complete unstability of Parcher in battle. The combination of the two always spoke to me.