> I know there was a thread titled "Handles" about a year ago that concerned this topic; I just read that thread and found it very interesting. However, there were only a few folks who posted to that thread who are still current regulars today (Issachar, Howard, Darien among them). I am curious about where people's nicknames come from.
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> I'll tell about mine, and maybe some other folks wouldn't mind telling about theirs (thanks to Kiki, extirpator, and others who already answered this question in RinkChat.)
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> "Grishny" is a shortened form of "Grishnakh," which is the name of an orc in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Two Towers." I started using the nickname a few years ago in Prodigy Chat. I've tried several other nicknames, but Grishny is the one I've liked the best and used the most, for some reason. I originally came up with it as a place-name for a Warlords II Deluxe scenario I created. (For those who don't know, W2D is a war/strategy game from Strategic Studies Group) It was a ruin called "Grishny's Tower," where Grishny was suposed to be an orcish mage or wizard who cursed nearby small villages for a living. Goofy, huh?
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> Since I've started using RinkChat as Grishny, he has evolved into a somewhat more refined orc, who wears a monacle and enjoys tea and crumpets from time to time. Just ask Issachar.
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> Gri"The History of an Orcish Mage"shny

Mine's been explained, but in light of the confusion of many people after they found out I was female, here's some further explanation. When I arrived on this forum I was the only person here who'd seen the utterly silly and weird SF series Lexx, in which the Brunnen-G were an alien race. I picked my screen name more or less at random, because I liked the show, and because I wanted a name which didn't reflect gender. When The Speedball Formerly Known As Spider-Boy started up his infamous (and now-deleted) Kang, Ultron and DOOM threads, it seemed like a fun idea to use the Brunnen-G character from the show for the space battles therein -- I still didn't use any gender pronouns, however.

When Lexx started screening in the USA I seriously considered changing my screen name because everyone started associating the name with the character, who was male. But by then I'd got used to using it, and most people here thought I was a guy anyway due to my other interests and hobbies, so *shrug* what the heck. If people think I'm weird there's not a lot I can do about it. Besides, they're probably right. :-)

Brunnen-"and there you have it"G