Usernames

A while ago, I asked greyweirdo where his username came from, mostly because I couldn't think of any other question to ask at the end of his poll. Today, I was asked about one of my commonly-used usernames, and it reminded me that I had intended to answer the question I asked by posting the story behind why I use my username.

Not amanda_lodden, since that's pretty obvious. The only story there is that it is not technically my name. It could be, if I ever bothered to haul myself and my marriage license down to the Secretary of State, but while I was busy being lazy John and I discovered that it's convenient to have different names when running a business together. Some people, upon discovering that we are married, conclude that I am "only" his wife. Then they discover that before I was "only" John's wife I had a technical background of my very own, and that I am involved in running our business not because I have nothing better to do but because I am damned good at it. Usually they discover this because they attempted to BS or bully me into something and got smacked for it. (Those are their own stories, and probably not appropriate for public posts, at least not without a lot of name changing to protect the guilty.) But despite it not being my legal name, it's easier to use than my real name, which is common enough that it's usually taken before I got there. There are at least three other people with the same first and last name as me, and that's just the ones I've run into [*]. There are about 12 Loddens in the entire US, and maybe a couple dozen in Holland where the name originated, and that's about it.

But before I used amanda_lodden, I used ceredwin. I still use it in a number of places, including as my global handle on City of Heroes. I'd have used it for livejournal, too, but someone else took it first.

Once upon a time, before the days of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, there were Multi-User Dungeons. If you're not old enough or geeky enough to have played on a MUD, think of them as text-based World of Warcraft. People logged in, and you typed commands instead of clicking them. The server would give you a description of the room you were in and what items were in it. You would have to (*gasp*) read the description, and on the good MUDs you could "look" at items in the room and get descriptions of them, too. After a while, real mudders wrote scripts to handle combat, and spent their time online chatting and socializing, making fun of the newbies, and engaging in flame wars-- pretty much exactly like the MMORPGs nowadays.

One of the oddities of MUDs is that there was pretty much always an admin who went by the name "Taliesin". I'm pretty sure it was the default admin login for the base MUD code, but despite people changing virtually everything else in the base code, Taliesin was always there. On Overdrive, which was my favorite MUD, the admin actually went and changed the name to "Talyessin" instead of, say, Merlin or Arthur or Gandalf or any other legendary figure ever. On the plus side, it helped me figure out exactly how the name was pronounced. Unfortunately, it didn't help me figure out what the name was in reference to.

In those days, there was no Wikipedia-- there wasn't even a World Wide Web for the first couple years that I played Overdrive. There were Gopher searches and Usenet, but I found no useful background on Taliesin from the cursory searches that I did (deeper searches were a pain in the rear, so I didn't). When I thought about it, I looked for a reference. One day, I found one. I was in the library near my college, and a book on mythology had a few pages on Celtic mythology tucked in the back. The index listed a single reference to Taliesin.

At that point, I was using the terribly-creative character name of "Amanda", and Amanda was a wizard on Overdrive. And I was bored, because wizards didn't get to play. I was kicking around creating another character so I could play around again, but I couldn't think of a good name. The story in the mythology book about Taliesin was interesting, especially the part about how he came into being. If you're not familiar with the story, you can read all of it, but the short recap is that there was a witch who brewed a potion to make her son the wisest man alive. The potion needed to be heated and stirred for a year and a day, so she hired herself some lackeys to tend to it. The young boy hired to stir the potion accidentally took it when it was ready, and the first piece of wisdom the potion imparted was "The witch is going to be really pissed when she finds out." And boy, was she. She chased after him, turning herself into various animals to chase him better, and he turned himself into other faster animals to escape. Eventually, he turned himself into a grain of corn, and she ate him. And then she became pregnant with him, because the legend is older than the medical knowledge that the uterus and the stomach are two different organs. The child born from that pregnancy was Taliesin. The witch was Ceridwen, only in the book I first found it in, it was spelled "Ceredwin".

I liked the guy playing Talyessin on Overdrive, but it was the sort of friendship that cried out for me to tease him, and the idea of using the name of his mother as a subtle poke at him gave me fits of giggles. I played Ceredwin for years, and I started using it as a login name for pretty much everything except email and financial websites (I've always kept a completely different login for anything secure, and for email I usually use something a bit more professional). It's rarely taken, possibly because it's misspelled. (In fairness to the book I took it from, the legend originates from a time when spelling wasn't all that important, and it originates in Wales where they spell things funny anyway. Still, there's a commonly-accepted spelling, and it's not "Ceredwin".)


[*] The first one I ran into was when I was interning at IBM. I worked there for almost four months before I ever saw a paycheck, even though it was a paid internship. The problem, once it was eventually tracked down, was that there was another Amanda [MyLastName] working for IBM out of their Dallas office, and my hours kept getting applied to her, because the company synonymous with large-scale computing did not use an ID guaranteed to be unique as their primary key. The second one was the ex-girlfriend of one of the employees at a vendor of my second job, who responded to my very first service request with "Done. Um, did you go to high school in Phoenix?". The third was a very perky high school girl who emailed me one day because she had found my web page and thought it was "so cool" that someone else had the same name as her. I told her about the other two. I never heard back from her.

Usernames

A while ago, I asked greyweirdo where his username came from, mostly because I couldn't think of any other question to ask at the end of his poll. Today, I was asked about one of my commonly-used usernames, and it reminded me that I had intended to answer the question I asked by posting the story behind why I use my username.

Not amanda_lodden, since that's pretty obvious. The only story there is that it is not technically my name. It could be, if I ever bothered to haul myself and my marriage license down to the Secretary of State, but while I was busy being lazy John and I discovered that it's convenient to have different names when running a business together. Some people, upon discovering that we are married, conclude that I am "only" his wife. Then they discover that before I was "only" John's wife I had a technical background of my very own, and that I am involved in running our business not because I have nothing better to do but because I am damned good at it. Usually they discover this because they attempted to BS or bully me into something and got smacked for it. (Those are their own stories, and probably not appropriate for public posts, at least not without a lot of name changing to protect the guilty.) But despite it not being my legal name, it's easier to use than my real name, which is common enough that it's usually taken before I got there. There are at least three other people with the same first and last name as me, and that's just the ones I've run into [*]. There are about 12 Loddens in the entire US, and maybe a couple dozen in Holland where the name originated, and that's about it.

But before I used amanda_lodden, I used ceredwin. I still use it in a number of places, including as my global handle on City of Heroes. I'd have used it for livejournal, too, but someone else took it first.

Once upon a time, before the days of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, there were Multi-User Dungeons. If you're not old enough or geeky enough to have played on a MUD, think of them as text-based World of Warcraft. People logged in, and you typed commands instead of clicking them. The server would give you a description of the room you were in and what items were in it. You would have to (*gasp*) read the description, and on the good MUDs you could "look" at items in the room and get descriptions of them, too. After a while, real mudders wrote scripts to handle combat, and spent their time online chatting and socializing, making fun of the newbies, and engaging in flame wars-- pretty much exactly like the MMORPGs nowadays.

One of the oddities of MUDs is that there was pretty much always an admin who went by the name "Taliesin". I'm pretty sure it was the default admin login for the base MUD code, but despite people changing virtually everything else in the base code, Taliesin was always there. On Overdrive, which was my favorite MUD, the admin actually went and changed the name to "Talyessin" instead of, say, Merlin or Arthur or Gandalf or any other legendary figure ever. On the plus side, it helped me figure out exactly how the name was pronounced. Unfortunately, it didn't help me figure out what the name was in reference to.

In those days, there was no Wikipedia-- there wasn't even a World Wide Web for the first couple years that I played Overdrive. There were Gopher searches and Usenet, but I found no useful background on Taliesin from the cursory searches that I did (deeper searches were a pain in the rear, so I didn't). When I thought about it, I looked for a reference. One day, I found one. I was in the library near my college, and a book on mythology had a few pages on Celtic mythology tucked in the back. The index listed a single reference to Taliesin.

At that point, I was using the terribly-creative character name of "Amanda", and Amanda was a wizard on Overdrive. And I was bored, because wizards didn't get to play. I was kicking around creating another character so I could play around again, but I couldn't think of a good name. The story in the mythology book about Taliesin was interesting, especially the part about how he came into being. If you're not familiar with the story, you can read all of it, but the short recap is that there was a witch who brewed a potion to make her son the wisest man alive. The potion needed to be heated and stirred for a year and a day, so she hired herself some lackeys to tend to it. The young boy hired to stir the potion accidentally took it when it was ready, and the first piece of wisdom the potion imparted was "The witch is going to be really pissed when she finds out." And boy, was she. She chased after him, turning herself into various animals to chase him better, and he turned himself into other faster animals to escape. Eventually, he turned himself into a grain of corn, and she ate him. And then she became pregnant with him, because the legend is older than the medical knowledge that the uterus and the stomach are two different organs. The child born from that pregnancy was Taliesin. The witch was Ceridwen, only in the book I first found it in, it was spelled "Ceredwin".

I liked the guy playing Talyessin on Overdrive, but it was the sort of friendship that cried out for me to tease him, and the idea of using the name of his mother as a subtle poke at him gave me fits of giggles. I played Ceredwin for years, and I started using it as a login name for pretty much everything except email and financial websites (I've always kept a completely different login for anything secure, and for email I usually use something a bit more professional). It's rarely taken, possibly because it's misspelled. (In fairness to the book I took it from, the legend originates from a time when spelling wasn't all that important, and it originates in Wales where they spell things funny anyway. Still, there's a commonly-accepted spelling, and it's not "Ceredwin".)


[*] The first one I ran into was when I was interning at IBM. I worked there for almost four months before I ever saw a paycheck, even though it was a paid internship. The problem, once it was eventually tracked down, was that there was another Amanda [MyLastName] working for IBM out of their Dallas office, and my hours kept getting applied to her, because the company synonymous with large-scale computing did not use an ID guaranteed to be unique as their primary key. The second one was the ex-girlfriend of one of the employees at a vendor of my second job, who responded to my very first service request with "Done. Um, did you go to high school in Phoenix?". The third was a very perky high school girl who emailed me one day because she had found my web page and thought it was "so cool" that someone else had the same name as her. I told her about the other two. I never heard back from her.