My dog is a golden retriever and it looks yellowish so… 
5 Likes
I’m feeling old.
10 Likes
Me too. I’m of the pre-Woodstock kind…
6 Likes
For me was never difficult. Maybe because I have a lot of imagination, and, actually being versatile, I do not quite had an identity.
If you look up my username, you will find that is the name of a town in Africa. But I got the name from a fantasy novel. The full name is etjole ehomba. Now for sure you can find it. Journeys of the Catechist Series by Alan Dean Foster. I liked the hero, which is a simple man, just a shepherd, but a warrior too at need, and a little canibal, because his tribe used to eat the heart of worthy defeated enemies. And also, sort of magician, even he denied it.
But this is not the whole story, this is just my last username I fancied along years.
pimapis was first, which even was not mine, it belonged to my brother who bought our first computer in order to find clients online for bee venom. Right. PiM from his name, apis from apis melifica. Internet barely landed here, the email account was set by the ISP, so I used the same email and got stuck with the username too, ported through few ISPs, and later free mail services.
daneel olivaw came later when I felt the need of an identity closer to mine. You know who was daneel, or you can easy find it. I liked to idea of an pozitronic brain, and replacement parts for the broken ones.
I do not remember if it was before or after daneel, but one derived from something personal, was KoP789, letters derived from my name, and 789 being the number of days since I have met ”my child” till her mother broke my heart.
And since my name starts with Co, and the Ko is my favourite part in Go, Kostel was a nobrainer. The same, GoKostel, DoctorGoe are easy to guess where came from.
Once I fiddled with the letters of my name and I got to Loki. But as you may guess, it was really taken. This was a unique case where I had troubles, so I ended with lllokki after the appropriate number of tries.
I was present on many online games and servers, plus discussion groups (plenty of them founded by myself) and social networks, so I had a lot of usernames, sometime forced on me by admins. For example in secondlife I am ehomba gumbo. is the least unpleasant from the whole list of compulsory names.
Most of them I forgot since the servers vanished, or I quit them. The above are the few I remember. But there is one more. On a RPG game, drakensang, pissed of by being beaten in spite of wasting all day raising the levels, I created a new character named… Shitonfan. Surprisingly, I played better with that. Maybe was the anger packed in the name, or maybe mage was better for me than hunter. But in chat, for speed my team called me with only first 4 letters :)) Started to be no more fun so I changed to Shtonfan, to be close enough to be no change of identity, but to lose the fecal meaning. I kind of like it, but no new games or servers in last years, so it died there. Funny thing, in chat we used real names. But with new members joining team, sometimes names were forgotten. And in time to me stuck the name Stefan, :)) Somebody guessed it and used it.
And as you can see, Ehomba was my favorite, and I used it preferentially, especially because was never taken. Nor Ehomba nor Etjole. Just once when I decided to switch to google, i found that ehomba was taken. I sighed, and took etjole, only to find much later that ehomba was taken by me years earlier when few knew about google, and I forgot about my account :))
Now you have a lot of my identities so you can hunt me around to see what I have done online. 
9 Likes
RubyMinecraft
6 Likes
One of his famous works is Heart of Darkness which Apocalypse Now was loosely based on 
4 Likes
Fav.
3 Likes
“Ginger” was the name of a pet collie owned by two of my cousins (brothers, now deceased). We had a lot of fun playing with Ginger every time we visited them in New Jersey, some 55 years ago.
3 Likes
My first KGS name was goddess, just because.
I am a gentle go player, but once in a game someone forced me to fight. I fought really hard, and he ended up calling me Lady Buzzsaw.
I assumed I would eventually age out of the name goddess, so I switched to buzzsaw. I still have the goddess account over there too. It goes back to 2000. I am among the first 100 users on KGS. I have the hat to prove it too.
20 Likes
Mine was an old nickname from my brother. I use it on lots of games and usernames that I use. The underscores are just there because I usually can’t use spaces in usernames. I use it on almost all of them except for it isn’t my pokemon screen name because it was deemed inappropriate, probably due to drugs. I don’t use drugs so don’t ask me that. I actually didn’t know about it until after I had the nickname. You can’t always help things like that. I like the nickname, and if it relates to drugs, then so be it. I will still use it for stuff, even if I think drugs are bad for people and don’t really like them.
16 Likes
Curious if you are a professional gem hunter, or just a hobby?
I am a geologist in real life, and am curious if there is a lot of business is selling minerals? I see them in shops all the time, but I kind of developed a snobby streak through university and cannot ever consider adding a mineral to my collection unless i found it myself
8 Likes
Just a hobby. However, like many hobbyists, I did sell minerals at an annual show for 20 years (recently stopped for lack of time). I sold low-end specmens (mostly self-collected, which I supplemented with flats that I would buy at auction or swaps—but the swap meets have largely disappeared today). I have had some great supplemental stock over the years, such as large double-terminated epidote crystals from Africa, great malachite from Democratic Republic of Congo, and rare phosphates from Indian Mtn, Alabama (cacoxenite, strengite, and kidwellite), among others. Best thing I ever found myself, I suppose, was bizarre, rare, tubular quartz from Blomidon in Nova Scotia (today they call it Houston’s beach). I was such a novice, I picked up just a few pieces, though the whole beach was littered with it (and satin spar gypsum, both washed out of a sandstone cliff). Went back two years later, and not a trace could be found, all washed away or buried by the Minas Basin tides. The rock hobby is in serious decline, and the number of professional retailers (selling mid- to high-end specimens) who are rockhounds themselves is fairly small. Most rock shops have closed up in the past 20 years. Had things been different, I might have been a geologist myself; I appreciate your profession.
10 Likes
Would you be able to post some of your more favourite pieces for us?
8 Likes
First time I made someone nerd rage over a video game was ninja turtles on nintendo. I stole the pizza when he was low on health. I don’t troll often but when I do it warms my heart for a long time.
11 Likes
My username for this account is basically my Chinese name and a 2
I have a account called B2BVagabond YT B2B stands for Born2brawl
Vagabond is my brawl stars username and YT is for YouTube
11 Likes
When I needed a username for League of Legends, I used rinkworks.com/namegen and got “Samraku”. I started using it in more places, and by the time I joined OGS, it was my default go-to.
13 Likes
A long time ago a dan player teaching me commented that I was always playing too aggressive, like I want to fill the whole board with my color only, and that’s unreasonable.
It just so happens that I like my electronic devices (computer/phone etc) purely black and I was playing black at the time, so being weak as I was I thought “what’s wrong with that”?
Some years later I was learning mahjong rule with friends and there’s this a winning hand named Chinitsu meaning “purely one colored” and it reminded me of the comment before. It was kind of a bittersweat memory because then I realized how naive my thought was. So the Chinitsu name kind of stick on my mind.
I use the nickname to warn my opponent that I didn’t come to negotiate peace to remind myself that I shouldn’t be too aggressive.
31 Likes
What an interesting thread. ty @RubyMineshaft
Story Behind ‘Kosh’…
Kosh is an enigmatic character from the Sci-Fi series ‘Babylon 5’ of which I am obviously a fan, though Kosh is not my favorite character. So why ‘Kosh’…
Very, very early in my Go journey I came across the famous quote by Edward Lasker:
and the idea of Aliens playing Go appealed to me enormously. I find beauty in the idea of crossing interstellar space in generational ships or years of cryo and then sharing a game of Go at the other end with a complete stranger completely alien being. 
The day may come when we need to reach for the stars simply to survive but what’s the point of that without something to appreciate in life.
If the Vogons had played Go maybe they wouldn’t have destroyed the Earth. If the Formics played Go maybe we would have spared them. I like to think so.
Still, there are many aliens that would make sense as a Go playing avatar, not least this guy: Go Memes! 🧐 - #1505 by Kosh and I’m sure Emperor Palpatine honed his political skills on the Goban. So why ‘Kosh’? Simple; Kosh is already an avatar, a mask for the being within which is never fully revealed throughout the series. Using the name of Kosh reminds me daily to be thoughtful in what I post or comment. I say much more than Kosh would and I fear I play much worse than Kosh would but the use of the name allows me to aspire. 
16 Likes
This an OGS Forums exclusive. Many a time I’ve been asked, many a time I’ve refused to tell:
Back in my first years of High School I did something quite embarrassing.
Perhaps I was rather awkward and silent at the time—not that I’m no longer either of those things to some degree—but I hardly spoke, even to friends, let alone discuss anything that was of my interest.
So I created an email for a fictional person and talked to one of my friends through it. It was a foolish thing to do, obviously, and got discovered pretty quickly (an event that was never to be spoken of again). I’m guessing that friend has already forgotten about it.
Anyway, I had chosen the name ‘Ariel’ for its androgynous nature: you cannot really tell the gender of the person by that name alone. It also sounded kind of mystical, like an angel’s name (I may have been watching Evangelion at the time), thus their surname was ‘Saints’.
Several years later, when choosing my KGS account, my go-to usernames were more than 10 characters long, and Ariel Saints popped into my head. I was still rather fond of my little creation, so they were resurrected in a way. It became ‘Leira’ by palindromic reversal.
Nowadays, I’m merely amused by how often I get misgendered, and the dismay some feel if they find out. Maybe I chose that name too well, but it’s probably not really misgendering if you do not mind. I will make no effort to prevent this.
EPILOGE: Ariel Saints canon has shifted over the years. Their surname in particular is a matter of much revision. Currently, they would go by ‘Ariel Mont’; I wonder if someone will realize why.
19 Likes
If your kids grew up with The Little Mermaid, “Ariel” is female, for sure.
9 Likes