Ask HN: How do you choose your online usernames/handles?
5 comments
It used to be excruciatingly hard. Now I just have a few themes I dip into and take a variation of.
what themes?
Pretty simple here: I'm a big Queensrÿche[0] fan, and have been ever since a friend introduced me to their absolutely mind-blowing Operation:Mindcrime[1][2] album.
The word "mindcrime" appears as a plot element in the OM story and it always stuck with me. When I got my first (dial up!) Internet account back in the mid 90's, I picked "mindcrime" as my username, and to this day I use it nearly everywhere. The few exceptions are places where somebody else had already grabbed the name. :-( In a few such cases (Slashdot, Reddit) I use a slight variation: "psykocrime".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensr%C3%BFche
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation:_Mindcrime
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLi46MAgxqc
The word "mindcrime" appears as a plot element in the OM story and it always stuck with me. When I got my first (dial up!) Internet account back in the mid 90's, I picked "mindcrime" as my username, and to this day I use it nearly everywhere. The few exceptions are places where somebody else had already grabbed the name. :-( In a few such cases (Slashdot, Reddit) I use a slight variation: "psykocrime".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensr%C3%BFche
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation:_Mindcrime
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLi46MAgxqc
Use any of a dozen random online name generators. Pick ones that have no connection to your life. Rotate regularly.
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/04/26/how-to-generate-unique-use...