I was young, maybe 12 or so, and I wanted a menacing name so I went thesaurus hunting. I could of sworn Shoal meant something along the lines of a bringer of doom or something, but it's also a school of fish or basically a sand bar (the common interpretation). Not too menacing...

Shoal was started as a GURPS character name and then stuck with me when I went into "real" PnP gaming with Heroes Unlimited and then RIFTS (he's always been my "main"). Oddly enough, when I went to make an AOL name back in '91 or '92, Shoal was already taken, so I went with Shoal07 and here I am. In forums and such you'll see me as Shoal07, but I always in-game as just Shoal.

It's a palindrome!

Mine has a totally uninteresting history, and since I love nothing more than boring folks, I'll share it with you.

My first name is, if you haven't guessed, Michael, and everyone, without asking whether I like it, calls me "Mike." I prefer Michael, since everyone named Michael gets called Mike, but alas, that's just the way it is. The "NS" prefix comes from something else. A friend of mine in college made and ran his own site, called "Nerdy South." It was essentially a pre-cursor to digg, reddit, and the like, without the Web 2.0 features. That is, user-powered voting. Whatever he came across, he linked, and that was that. He wrote an article on rare occasions (the most famous one being a declaration of why Maddox sucks) but otherwise, it was just a list of links. You could comment on the site if you wanted to, but you had to register a name. "Mike" was already taken, so I just appended the initials for Nerdy South onto my name, and there you have it. I needed a user name for some other service later on, and just used NSMike for that as well, and it has stuck.

I always get asked, "What does Tkyl mean?" The short answer... nothing. The long answer, I used to play D&D with my brothers when I was young. For one campaign that my brother ran, I made a Thrikreen (think Praying Mantis). While looking for names, I found a premade character of the same race that had the name Tk'kyl. I thought it was cool so I used it. Then I started using it for everything else. However, a problem arose when switching to online profiles. Most sites will no allow you to use the apostrophe. So I had to drop it. However Tkkyl looked wrong, so I dropped one of the 'k's and now I just have Tkyl.

The funny thing is, no one can seem to spell it or say it correctly. The "correct" pronunciation is "To kill", but without the 'o'. Of course, people end up just calling me whatever theyfeel like. Most of the time it's Tickle.... sigh.

*Word of warning: When making a name for yourself, don't make a name that starts with "Tk". I have been kicked a number of times from servers immediately after joining a server because the admins think I'm going to Team Kill people. No joke. Its happened before.

Outstanding Coldstream! You honor your Grandfather's service in one of the most honorable regiments in all of history.

My father is a retired US Marine. He saw the end of WWII in the pacific (Iwo Jima and on) and all of Korea.

Wow, mine is so dull compared to everyone else's...

I was just making my character for FF11 and chose a Mithra for various reasons. When it came to making a name I couldn't decide so I just started using every FF female name I could fine with no success, and was not surprised. My father then dropped off my d&d players hand book so I looked for names in there. One die roll later on the elven female names charts, and I had a name. Since it is not normally used, I tend to use it for things now.

As a side note, I read the name wrong at first as Silveran, and being a thief thought silver in the name was great, re-read the name again and used the correct spelling. Also, I have no idea how to pronounce it myself, so don't ask.

A FridgeGremlin is the little guy who lives in your fridge that turns on and off the light when you open the door.

Thats it. I saw it in an old cartoon about the homes of the future and it stuck.

Mine would be after the character Henry Stauf from The 7th Guest. I've mentioned this video game numerous times on this site, as it was incredibly influential to me at the time of its release.. and perhaps still is.

Back in the day I believe I attempted to create an account on the internet (Geocities maybe?) and was surprised to see that "stauf" was taken. So I just added a number, and made a note to myself to remain consistent with my online presence.

PS: I'm getting tired of having every capital i and b dropping html code on me.

I lost my initial Tkyl gamertag on Xbox Live because they decided to charge me for something I didn't want, and I refused to pay. I wasn't really upset at losing all my gamerpoints, it was the loss of my identity that had me the most pissed off.

And the "thumbs-up" apparently.

Exactly...for some reason to me its like permanently misspelling my real name. It kind of irritates me.

Several years ago, I used Phase_, but I found that some form of it would always be taken whenever I needed to register for something new.
So now I follow a naming convention for basically everything that I am involved with (that requires some sort of name). Yes it's boring and not creative, just my first name followed by remaining initials, but it's served me well over time. I like to think that in a sea of creative, exotic names, I can be just myself. It's comforting, like how Baskin Robbins may have 31 different flavors, but one of them is always vanilla.

I eat great quantities of iron, which upon internal processing, I deposit as great mountains of steel. My gut's foundry is indestructable, unless I drench the iron I consume in ungodly amounts of habernero sauce, or a supplier sabotages the Mt Doom-like fires within my gut by sneaking some sea urchin into the smelting recipe. In those rare instances, my iron gut instead produces explosive rivulets of molten metal that rain down on all below.

(No that's not the real story, but that freight train of avatar destruction could not be stopped.)

Irongut was my first MMO character years ago, a grizzled dwarf warrior from the Butcherblok Mtns.

I'll chime in here just because I'm at work and bored....

Mine simply comes from a necromancer toon I created for some DnD type game game, although I forget exactly which one. I was looking through a Latin dictionary and came up with the idea of a hot-ass magician raising the dead. It means simply: Dark Desire. Yes, I know the Latin for dark/black is Nyx, but I added the 's' at the end because I thought it looked better.

I do have to hand it to Sithcundman from this site. I've had that name for more than 5 years online now, and of everyone I've ever met, he has been the first and only person to decipher it, or at least he was the first to mention it.

Cheers!
Nyxs

Must this thread, arising from the ashes repeatedly, be the profoundly pedestrian cliche of every internet forum in existence ?

Apparently, yes, it must.