Blaugust Prompt #24 – The username question

Blaugust is here! But what’s this? This isn’t the usual Blaugust? It’s a special Promptapalooza with a prompt hosted by me! Welcome in! If you have no clue about all of this… then check out the two links in the box below the post… and if you’re here from Beej or other bloggers, welcome in! Nice to meet you! Grab some tea, soda, coffee, or your beverage of choice and let’s have a cosy time today! I hope you’ll enjoy this post of mine. :)

So, let’s see… I’m currently at my parents’ and enjoying my time off… and in the evenings before giving in to slumber, I try to read my way through some of these awesome blogs here while thinking about my own prompts… and I still need to catch up to the last ten or so prompts… So those prompts will come out soon and then I’ll change the date in hindsight… but I’ll have to host this one, so this one is coming out before all of the other prompts. I’m sorry for the confusion that that may cause you. I hope it’s somewhat understandable that I may be dead… but I still am human.

Before I explain that last sentence and today’s prompt, I’d like to give a shoutout to Beej from Geek to Geek Media! They hosted a very well-written and amazing post yesterday about their fears and how it affects their content production and consumption. Their very real fears are very similar to some of mine and hence, I can really recommend checking that post out! If you’ve read it already, do it again! Beej also was super adorable at the end with their shoutout to me… really made my day. Thanks a lot for that!

Now… what’s today’s prompt? 

“How did you get the name that you regularly go by online, and what if anything does it mean?”

Tadaa! A very cool prompt! Really like this one! Hope you enjoy it!

As far as me goes… it’s somewhat tied to my character over here that I mentioned in my mascot-post! Uh, it’s a bit of a silly story and I think I mentioned it somewhere before in some post… but essentially, I’m from Germany and I love mages and magic and wizards and that kinda stuff in games and movies and other media. The German word for “mage” is “Magier” but when I typed that word into the character-name-box of some game at the age of three or four… only four letters were allowed. Hence, I went with Magi without knowing why exactly it didn’t allow the “-er”. I was young at the time. I knew the word from some show and just remembered what these letters looked like and all of that… and in the end, my name was “Magi” at the time. 

Later on, I had these toys from all kinds of sets… there were toy soldiers, different figurines, a barn set and cars and pirates and animals and dinosaurs and whatever… I jumbled up everything much to my siblings’ liking who all would believe the stories I told them about all of the different characters and adventures and stuff… I don’t know… back then, I really enjoyed doing that and my siblings and I were a lot closer. Anyways, there was this black mouse with red eyes that I had there and I essentially claimed that mouse figure as my character “Magimos”. I combined “Magi” with the very “cool”-sounding suffix “-mos” because I liked that name… I imagined it to be some sort of dark undead mage who has been trapped in that body while still being incredibly evil and dangerous.

Eventually, I moved on from toys and – as we had our first ever PC – I started playing online video games… like Dark Orbit and Minecraft. I even played stuff like NeoPets or social games on Facebook… “Magimos” always was my username of choice and for the longest part, it even followed me to Spotify, League of Legends and Twitter, until I eventually started to not feel attached to the name anymore. The “mos”-part really bothered me all the time and most people would call me “Magi” anyway… so, whenever possible, I would end up using Magi… which was essentially never. Magi is quite the popular name, it seems, and hence “Magi” is taken… more often than not. Alas, I used that name on Twitch and Minecraft and League of Legends (after I had enough BE for the name change) and eventually rebranded my whole character to that persona of the lich/necromancer “Magi”.

I always liked the idea of a necromancer or summoner type. Summoning minions to fight by your side in your stead is really cool after all. And as far as the “lich” or “undead” part goes: I quite often enjoy playing the “bad guy” more than the actual heroes in games. Games that leave you the option to wreak havoc and sacrifice humans and stuff are lovely. I really enjoy those. 

That mouse character in the past eventually got freed and took the form of a recoloured black mage from FF1 that was supposed to be a necromancer instead. The darkness that is enveloping the face, the pale hands, and the red eyes are something that I use in most of my character-iterations. My character has that as a feature and I really like how it turned out in the end.

Now, while “MagiWasTaken” is quite cool for a name… I also go for some other names every now and then. In some MMOs, the male character model sucks and I create a female one since they’re cuter… “Magimos” never worked for those and “MagiWasTaken” is to username-ish for those… so I ended up using “Lizz Winterfield” in BDO and GW2. It’s another name that I use whenever I see it fitting. It’s my name on Spotify… I have a Facebook account with that name (unless I deactivated it already?)… I use that in Minecraft since I like that one a lot as well. Overall, “MagiWasTaken” and “Lizz_Winterfield” are my go-to-names. “Lizz” is a lovely name after all while “Winterfield” is the most human-sounding name I know. 

Where are your usernames from? What did you use in the past? How did your name evolve over time if at all? Why do you stick to it? 

I personally feel like I can identify with this mage character quite often in games when I use a name like “MagiWasTaken” or “Magi”. Meanwhile “Lizz Winterfield” really works for me when I play female characters and when I’m trying to roleplay or play a different class instead of my usual stuff.

That was it for today’s post. Hope you enjoyed this one. The next post in line is by Joar from WoW Alt Addiction! Join them and their prompt for more blogging-awesomeness! I can really recommend checking them out and again, check out all the other bloggers who have participated so far and are participating in the next few days. :)

Cheers!