i chose mine because i wanted it to start with exe so that people in mmos would just call me exe and i wanted it to sound vaguely feminine so i played with every collection of syllables i could imagine until something stuck. now this has been my primary username/character name/blog name/whatever on basically everything for like 20 years. lol
we iterated through every morpheme we could think of for the ending, evaluating it on how we liked the sound of it, on how many people were using it per cursor searches of social media (preferring fewer), on whether it was diminutive (preferring not), and then we came up with one that has a hidden meaning that people with the appropriate background sometimes recognize but that typically goes unnoticed although its connotations may have subconscious effect.
so we went with that one, because we're all about that sort of thing.
I think of concepts I like and then look up words related to them that I think sound neat. Ring was actually a name I used for a while when I was younger, but naturally it's taken on most sites. Plasma Ring was kind of a happy accident because I started looking up stuff related to ionized air and ran across this. Trying not to get famous ever so my porn doesn't come up in search results for the people working on very normal stuff like fusion power.
I wanted something more unique than "Knuckles T15" so I sat down with my friend Polar Koala on AIM and we came up with "TechWolf" (because I like technology and wolves) but that was taken so he suggested using "okami" (Japanese for wolf) and it made for a unique handle
I really liked Shadow the Hedgehog in 2002.
Okay, okay, there's a bit more to it than that. I actually wanted to be "Shadowwing" at first, complete with my own, uh, fursona, let's say, of Shadow the Hedgehog but all the red stripes were GREEN (OC donut steel). The reason I was brainstorming such names was to join Sonic HQ's forum, having lurked there for a year or so before they made it so only registered users could even read the place (I don't know the context as to why they did that but they did), forcing the matter if I wanted to keep reading. They used ezBoards (later rebranded Yuku), which was a set of forum software that let you sign up an account with them and use the account on any forum using ezBoards software across the Internet (sort of like a less-centralized Reddit, I guess). You might see where this is going, given my username isn't Shadowwing: somebody else on the Internet had already laid claim to the name.
Having to come up with another idea in a jiffy, I had the idea that, since Sonic HQ also had a sister site run by mostly the same folks known as Mega Man HQ, and I was starting to get into Mega Man anyway (thanks to finding a sprite comic - debatably the original sprite comic - known as Bob and George, which sort of brought me up to speed on the core ideas), what I'd do was fuse Shadow the Hedgehog and Shadow Man (who in retrospect probably isn't my favorite Robot Master, but he is kind of cool) into yet another fursona (this time it's Shadow the Hedgehog wearing Shadow Man's outfit! Still not particularly original, but better than a damn recolor, at least) and go with a whole backstory about "oh I'm from a line of animal Robot Masters Dr. Wily was trial-running, but I'm the only one he actually made, because I rebelled, ahahaha I'm so evil" (what can I say, I was 13).
Now having a new persona in mind, settling on the actual name was next. "Shadow" being in there was obvious, but after that had to be a single syllable word - or so I surmised, anyway. This was pre-Splash Woman, so all you had was "Man" to work with, and while you could just go with "always ends in "Man"", which I know Archie did for its Sonic/Mega Man crossover series, that's boring. In the end, I abbreviated "Hedgehog" into just "Hog".
"Shadow Hog".
Name wasn't taken, account registered. A month later, so began my lengthy spell as a poster (and eventually moderator but 🤫) of Sonic HQ's Mobius Forum.
I quickly gave up on the fursona and roleplaying gimmicks - too much effort, too out-of-character for me, I'd rather just be my genuine self. The name stuck, however; I haven't seen any urgent reason to change it. At this point I figure I'm a known quantity in enough places that changing it would lose something anyway.
Would it be uncouth of me to say that I'm actually considering folks figuring out how I came to devise the name "Forneia" to be a bit of a game?
"wildweasel" is what I've gone by since 2000 or so. The "Wild Weasel" comes from USAF anti-radar operations; the Weasels' job was to run interference to suss out the locations of hidden SAM sites, by having one guy fly over and try to be detected on purpose, while the rest of the squad hone in on any resulting radar activity - basically, trick SAMs into trying to get a lock, then bomb the shit out of them before they can do anything else. Their jacket patch reads "YGBSM" - "You've gotta be shitting me."
If I ever use a variation, like appending the name of a CPU (wildweasel486, wildweasel68k, etc.), it's because the name's already taken - it's fairly common, online, given the number of US Air Force enthusiasts and G.I. Joe fans on the internet. But I wouldn't change it for anything.
Guess you could say I'm not gonna weasel out of this one so easily. ;)
I needed a quick name for the Counter-Strike matches my Visual Basic class in high school would often play, and I didn't want to use the edgy teen usernames I was using on forums of the era, so I came up with total gibberish.
Turns out said gibberish has a nice mouth feel to it according to a lot of people that have pointed out how much they like my username, something I agree with. I buried all my other usernames in favor of this one, given all the pleasant interactions I've had using this name since I came up with it. Probably one of the best decisions I've made on anything!
