I've been wondering for a while, what does everyone's screen name mean? Especially Adam and Eric. Adam, yours looks like it should be pronounced "Jack's Ass" I know that's probably not right, how DO you pronounce it? And Eric, what does Tadeuz mean? That's driving me nuts.
For myself, A1 means "The best" and nut means nut, so I am "John, The best nut."
You should take Wikipedia off your list of blocked websites.
Just type in a google search with my screen name, and it will become apparant. Wow John and I thought it was John Steaksauce Nut, you learn something new everyday.
Tadeusz is a Polish name. Its one I chose for my SCA persona back when I did SCA. To my mind, it sounded, strong, distinctive, and yet reasonable (I didn't want some airy SCA name, or one that everyone uses, and I didn't want one so outre' that no one could say it.)
It sort of came to me. I do like that I think there is a 'deus' in there which is a reference to God, I'd guess.
when I say it sort of came to me, it probably got planted in my mind by reading 'The Adventures of Conrad Starguard' about a time-travelling socialist engineer who has to defend Poland against the Mongols. Anyways, one of his companions is a very foul-mouthed archer named ....
And I thought J was Gee-Ax-Us.
Eric
Wow John and I thought it was John Steaksauce Nut, you learn something new everyday.
Yeah Adam, I get that a lot. A1 Steak Sauce, The best steak sauce. Get it? That is where it came from actually. I found out what A1 meant from the steak sauce, and I liked it.
From Wikipedia:
Jhiaxus held the rank of Liege Centuro. In one notable occurrence, Jhiaxus destroyed San Francisco, just to anger Optimus Prime. He had a cold, callous personality — a big departure from Megatron's zeal, Galvatron's insanity, Starscream's treachery, and Shockwave's calculating logic — and, as he didn't view organics as being actual lifeforms, believed the Empire was a progressive force of construction. His weakness, however, was his inner demons as he attempted to suppress his past as a brutal butcher and, after constant defeats by the G1 "throwbacks", went insane under the stress of it.
Jhiaxus was one of the Transformers' strongest combatants, sending a berserker Optimus on the run and defeating G2 Megatron in combat.
That's really interesting Adam. Kind of fits you, too. That's not an insult, BTW. What I mean is, I can see why you identify with this character.
"Oak" is short for "Oakmaster", which is an approximate English translation of my own (German-origin) last name.
Eric was actually the first to use "Oak", assigning it to me when I first joined his RPoL Multiverser game once upon a time ago, and avoiding the use of the more common "John". Not that there are any other MV players around named John, after all, but still... :)
I'm here late because John Mastick gave me a call to alert me to the fact that I missed his post--which I didn't, because it wasn't here when I opened the threads, but it took long enough for me to get through the first that he posted in the gap.
Anyway, I was curious as to what this thread was about, and now having read it I'm going to give my own.
Yeah, you didn't think there was a story behind M. J. Young, did you? Well, there is.
I was always Mark Young, but my mother said the world would have a lot of Mark Youngs in it so I should use my middle initial. Thus my legal signature reads Mark J. Young, and I was known as Mark Young, or Mark. (Actually in college the girls used to call me "Mark J. _______", with sometimes complimentary and sometimes derogatory last names, but that's faded into the mists--I'm not certain whether even Mr. Clean would have remembered that.)
After college, I got a job in radio, where I was Mark Young on the air for five years. Sometime around the fourth I was chatting with the associate editor of the local newspaper (they printed our newsletter), and we came up with the idea of me writing a few pieces of satire for his paper--which I did, and they were published. However, to distance the satirist in the paper from the Bible teacher/musician/DJ on the radio, those were bylined M. Joseph Young. That was the beginning of my writing portfolio.
It got more complicated, because I was still writing music under Mark J. Young, but when I wrote Multiverser I decided to keep the nom de plume. I then started posting stuff on the Internet, and it was almost haphazard what name I posted. The Multiverser stuff, including the Temporal Anomalies materials, was always M. Joseph Young; the song lyrics and some of the Bible stuff was Mark J. Young. I had gotten an AOL screen name of MarkJYoung, and so when I used it for my D&D stuff I posted it as "Mark Young's Dungeons & Dragons Materials" because of the screen name that identified the web site.
Then I wrote Morality and Consequences: Overlooked Gaming Essentials, the first article I had published here at Gaming Outpost. I expected there to be discussion of it on the forum, so I had to register on the forum. How, though, would I register?
If I registered as Mark Young, no one would connect me to the M. Joseph Young, author of Multiverser; and a substantial part of why I was here at all was to let people know about Multiverser.
If, though, I registered as M. Joseph Young, it might dissociate me from the Dungeons & Dragons materials, which I knew was good stuff that was going to catch the eye of many gamers (and it was eventually listed in Knights of the Dinner Table, so it has done so).
Mark Joseph Young was just too much to use for a screen name.
I thought perhaps if I used M. J. Young, it would connect to both the Mark Young and the M. Joseph Young materials, and people would recognize it as short for whichever they knew.
It backfired entirely. Now I am known to uncounted gamers as MJ, a name I've never used except on Internet communications. They call me this at conventions. Many of them don't know that I'm either of those two other people.
So I'm M. J. Young, and several other people as well.
It's a good thing I'm a role playing gamer. I know how to be several different people. I've even got multiple signatures.
--M. J. Young
Seeing as I first met you at a con, I hope you won't take any offense if I continue to think of you as MJ. That identity seems to have taken on a life of it's own.
As for my own, John O'Sevens started on another forum, www.youthrights.org - the forums of the National Youth Rights Association. I don't really know where it came from. I think I was using it as a character name in a series of short stores at the time.
In fact, yes, that's where it came from.
He was William Johns, who had the breath of the Six Gods of the Sea in him*, and who was also incredibly lucky, thus he was called John Sevenwind at sea and John O'Sevens on land, but would answer to either. He's sort of an idealized version of myself, as I wasn't a terribly astute writer at the time, which is why it's easy for me to identify myself by him as a Verser - in a way I always was him, or he always was me, depending how you look at it.
*In that setting, the Six Gods of the Sea ruled all seafaring life, and those who heard the call of one of them, or two of them, could accept a Geas in order to gain a Blessing. William Johns was one of the rare few who heard all six, and didn't go irretrievably mad from the experience. So he gained six blessings, but had to observe a specific geas from each god. The one that hurt him the most was the one that demanded he never use magic on dry land...
Anyway, the reason I am called "Minister of Information" along with it, comes from a story my friend Vicky and I were writing, that was a sort of farce about what would happen if the people of NYRA founded a country based on their ideals. My position in this fiction was Minister of Information - basically head of the CIA. I got such a charge out of this that I put it in my signature. A couple of months later, I was made moderator of their News Wire, and then editor of their Newsletter, and the title became official.
So I was, and am, John O'Sevens, Minister of Information (currently on hiatus from NYRA).
After my freshman year of college, there were a couple of video game machines I was doing well with, and was placing my initials, LMA, on the leaderboard fairly regularly. A friend of mine started referring to me as "the Grand High Llama" (one-L Lama, he's a priest; 2-L Llama, he's a beast; and a 3-alahma (alarm-er as pronounced in New England...) is a heckuva big fire...). It stuck. I've accumulated a fair number of llama-based things over the (20+) years, used "Llama, Grand High" as a screen name in places and "t.g.h. Llama" in others, and it only made sense to add the second L to Larry. (There's an old Far Side cartoon with the caption "Llook out, Llarry, it's the Llandllord!")
One of the funniest jokes in Pratchett's Discworld novels is the guy from the Discworld "Wales" (I forget what he calls it in the book). When he speaks he uses double Ls and is thus identified as "welsh" by his accent.
What is that Welsh double-L supposed to be pronouced as?
q.
Or on Wednesdays as "Wednesday".
Eric :)
That was the joke - you can't tell if someone uses one or two Ls unless you are reading a book.
Of course, you may be asking what 'll' is pronounced as in actual Welch, in which case it is sort of an H sound.
Blue Canary, you never said what your screen name meant.
Once upon a time in English, double consonants were longer than single consonants.
The difference dropped out sometime after orthography was fixed by the printing press. However, in Chaucer's era, you would not use a double letter unless you pronounced it doubled--words were written exactly as pronounced. (Chaucer complained that some of his scribes did not spell his words the way he pronounced them, leading to the problem that with their spelling (and their pronunciation) the words did not rhyme.)
Thus you tended to flip a single L and mull a double one.
--M. J. Young
And by the way, since this thread is supposed to be about Screen Names and the like, I'll add that the picture I use as my image on here is from a picture of Artemis Entreri. If you don't know who Artemis Entreri is... go look him up before I revoke your geek card. :-P