> 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.
>

Well, lets see.....

I don't even really know the origins of this name. It seemed to come up while I was playing Descent (the first one, that runs on DOS). For some reason, when I went to log in, "Kaz" happened to be the default name. Don't ask me why, no one else who had Descent got that name and whenever I re-installed Descent after that I never got a default name. I know, I know, it's kinda weird, but after a while that name stuck somehow.

Of course, I've gone through a lot of names, of which " " (that's the whole thing, inside those quotes) and "[Spacebar]" are in this message forum. (After I had called myself " " for a while, Sam threatened to start calling me "Space" unless I thought up a nick for myself. I figured I'd beat him to the punch and call myself "Space", and I added the "Bar" so that we'd know I was referring to the computer key and not outer space.)

Anyway, from that Descent game, my screen name for all internet games was "Kaz", followed by "Dopefish" for a while (because I eat a lot), but I ended up going to "Kaz!" (note the expression mark).

I don't know where the expression mark came from. Maybe it came from the same abyss in the back of some celestial sock drawer from which the name "Kaz" itself appeared that fateful day on my computer. Now, "Kaz!" just doesn't seem correct to me without the addition of the "!", although most leave it out anyway, plus Rinkchat won't let me use it :-(

As for the name itself, it seems like an interesting combination of letters from the middle, beginning, and end of the alphabet. It's also not something that most people shorten up, which is another good quality about it. (One of the main reasons I dropped "Dopefish" was the overwheming number of people who shortened it to "Dope". I hated that.)

Oh yes, by the way, this "Kaz!" has absolutly nothing to do with the Minotaur in the Dragonlance books (of which I've never read as of yet).

-Ka"Now, where did I put my socks?"z!