Moniker Junkie
Oh, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;-- Bill Shakespeare
I admit it. I fully confess. I know that overcoming denial is the first step to recovery, and thus I willingly say; I am a moniker junkie.
"Moniker?" you say, "What the heck is that?"
Momentarily putting aside the issue that you are talking to yourself again, let me explain. A moniker is an appellation. A handle. A designation, an alias, a pseudonym. Perhaps an epithet, or a label. Eloquently put it is a sobriquet. And most certainly and simply put, a name.
My story begins 7+ years ago when we first got a Juno disc from my cousin. We fired it up on the old green dinosaur Acer and I needed to make up a login name. Not a day earlier I had read through "Tales From The Empire", a collection of Star Wars short stories. My favorite had been a story about a dark Jedi named Aladric Brandl. It had also mentioned his son Jaalib Brandl, and I took an immediate liking to the name. Thus I became JaalibBrandl@juno.com.
As time progressed I continued to use the name for everything from my AIM screen to the name of my alien at AAA. It got to the point where seeing that name triggered the exact same feeling you get when you see your real name in print. A disconcerting familiarity and inexplicable caring for a collection of letters. Needless to say I also gobbled up any information on Jaalib, and collected the Star Wars Journals he was in (4,8,12).
One of the coolest occurrences was when Patricia A. Jackson, the author who created Aladric and Jaalib, contacted me on AIM to ask where I had gotten my handle. It was neat, and it was her who pointed me to more of her work. To this day they are some of my favorite characters from any genre or work.
Since then I've moved on to a new handle, but I still respond to the old ones. My current moniker is PineSolPirate, for no reason other than it's positively unique. Go Google it, when I did (ack! ego-surfer) the first two pages of results were solely me. I didn't check the rest.
I also used the AIM name "IEatKitties4Fun" for a short time, but it was to disturbing.
So where does that leave my moniker-philia now? (Just watch as I make-up hyphenated-words at-will.) Well, now I've been collecting names for computers. So far I've been looking for strange/unusual and fitting ladies names for the computers.
"Lame."
Yeah, I know.
Regardless, it's where I stand and I have far more names then machines. They aren't all strange though. Also, almost all of them have stories, but this post is meandering and not resolving so I'll just close with a my five favorites. I seem to like "A" names it seems. Feel free to steal them to name your computers. Or your firstborn. Whatever.
Cadence, Asuka, Adalia, Aria, Urd