I play against people sometimes and wonder why they chose the name that they did. I thought it would be a great 'Light Reading' thread. 

For example I like to drink Royal Crown soda. That's why I chose my name.

If you have a story behind your username please share.

it's a  A-BOMB !!! FROM  J-BOMB!!! 

Back when the world wide web was just a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye I was using Ozymandias as my nickname in games like Ultima and Wing Commander and on BBSs.  I continued using it on the internets, but as they became more popular, I started running into more and more other Ozymandias', so I shortened it to Ozyman to give it a bit more distinction.  Note that this was years before I read Watchmen, so I was drawn to it because of the themes in Shelley's poem of impermanence, futility and anti-ambition, not because I thought I was the 'World's Smartest Man'.

Years ago when I joined Axis and Allies World Club (AAWC) online, the username I wanted was not available.  So I used the random username generator on the site and it came back with "SquintGnome"

I am a Messier Object.

When I started playing online risk, it occurred to me that the old MtG card, Keldon Warlord, was a pretty appropriate symbol -- the game function of the card gets stronger the more minions the controlling player has in play, which seemed about right for risk, too (plus he's got a huge honking sword in the card's artwork). At the time, I misrembered the name as "Kjeldon warlord" (probably due to another card by the name of Kjeldoran Dead), and so I came up with Kjeld with a 'j' instead of a just Keld. However, I think the 'j' adds a nice distinction of unprounceability  so I've left it as is.

I'm half Hungarian and my uncle's name is Attila.  Attila the Hun seemed like an appropriate username both from the cultural aspect as well as the ferocity of his conquest.

I like to think I have better manners, though.

Lol, Attila, how do you explain the Tshizzle...from WF?

For me, it's pretty simple as I'm a huge JRR Tolkien fan - Thingol (aka Elwe Singollo, aka Elu Thingol) from the Silmarillion, King of the Sindarin elves of Doriath. I'm generally pretty wise, but occasionally do or say something rash. ;)

Fun thread RC.

J-bomb...Yankee fan, I gather?

for sure! but not a A- Rod fan. i think we all know what A stands for.

Get comfortable; it's story time:

When I was quite a youngster in church, my mother would give me a pen and paper to keep myself occupied instead of causing mischief with my brother.  As I grew, I continued my doodling in church because it's hard to pay attention to anything when you're 14 and "too cool for everything."  Fortunately, I had a friend at church who also liked to draw stupid random crap and so we would compare masterpieces during Sunday School.

One day whilst drawing at church, I decided that I wanted to demonstrate how placing slanted eyebrows on anything will make it "angry."  After a minute or two of deep contemplation, I decided that I needed to draw a toaster and put some "angry" eyebrows on it.  Thus, the "AngryToaster" was born.  My drawing looked so awesome (to me, anyway) that I decided to hang on to it instead of tossing it in the circular file (or lint trap when I forgot it in my pocket) like most of my weekly paper & pen adventures.

A short time later, I was watching some sort of Saturday-afternoon low-budget gameshow and at the end when they rolled the production credits the name of the production company was "Divine Hammer."  The company had a logo that was a cartoon hammer with some angel wings, and it seemed awesome.  I then drew the obvious conclusion that if you want to make a production company with a cool name you just have to pick a random adjective and noun and put them together.

I'm sure some of you can put those two anecdotes together and realize that my high school dream was to start a company called AngryToaster Productions.  As such, I began adopting "AngryToaster" as my handle for all the magic of the interweb.  For the most part, I still use it today but have eased a bit because some other people started using it as well, and it sort of clashes with a professional image.

I was using AngryToaster over on Warfish in my games, but quickly found that people like to shorten other players' monikers when addressing them.  There were far too many conversations where I was referred to as "Angry," which just doesn't sound like my style.  I started going by "Toaster" to force the proper truncation of AngryToaster.

So, now that's me.  I like "Toaster," I think it has just the right amount of whimsy and awesome.

When I was first invited to a game on ToS, I had recently done the early-retirement thing.  As my tee-shirt says, I used up all my sick days so I called in dead...

Lol, and here I thought toaster was your moniker because you 'toasted' your opponents? 

And I figured Kjeld had some Norwegian blood.  I guess it's never right to assume.  

When I was about 12 I spent a whole summer in a chat-room, trying to get the attention of a girl "Fairy-girl" and often I would log in just after dinner, chat for a few hours and go to bed.  I owned a real rat at the time and figured I had to let it out and get some exercise everyday, so I'd always be playing with my rat and chatting to my girl.  She started calling me Ratsy cause she thought it was cute and it bugged me. Eventually I changed my e-mail address to ratsy@... that e-mail hung around for a long time after fairy-girl.  Almost a decade; until the real world stepped in and said get a more professional e-mail address, at which point I did, but the moniker stuck, and I've used it for all kinds of things since.  Company names, bumper stickers, WarGear login... 

Reminds me a good memory: everytime. 

My friends and I used to play the actual board game Risk around a table and then get distracted by shiney objects and the game would go on for weeks with us trying to get together to play to take our turns.  When I first got invited to ToS and became addicted I invited all of them to a game on Ye Ol Beta Board and entitled the game "I'm Bringing Risky Back" and just took that as my gamename.

My real Internet Screenname is fairly well known in some circles and I really like being able to take a break and just be RiskyBack.  So if you are ever trolling other blogs or sites and some of the posts seem sort of familiar it just may be Risky in disguise!

I always thought riskyback was some kind of gorilla to be honest. 

I took it years ago from Kindergarten Cop

I'm a teacher, and at one point I was having horrible headaches so actually had my brain scanned to see if it was a tumor. Itsnot.

It's been an evolution.

I've been a long-time Tolkien fan - reading the books at least yearly from the time i was in 7th grade. Treebeard was my favorite character at the time, and during rainy days or other times I'd play Oregon Trail in the library. My login for O.T. was 'errt' as it was quick to type and reminded me of tree backwards. i used that for my online/gaming moniker (ERT fit really well on those arcade games when i had the money to spend) for the longest time. That remained the case until once i tried to get an email addy and 'ertt' was too short; seriously too short of a name?!. I then grabbed a longer name that was meaningful to me from Tolkien, 'weathertop'. I've had that name claimed since the mid-late 90's now. You know how PISSED i was when i started expanding to other email domains and that was already taken? One of the few drawbacks of the movies making so many 'new' Tolkien fans.

Kona Crush was a wrestler in the then-WWF, and me and my posee were big wreslting fans back in he day.   Kona Crush was a pretty lame character. 

One day I called home and my brother answered and when someone asked who it was he just said "It's Kona Chris" as a way to needle me.  And it stuck for a while, so I used it for on-line screen names (after changing the K to a C becuase it looks better IMO).

The orange shorts in my logo comes from when I played Attacktix (battle figure game - I'm just a big kid you know).  at the first local tournament, wore these brand new orange shorts.   Months later, we all met up again to play and someone said "Remember last time when that dork showed up in he orang shorts" (everyone else remembered it was me and then just turned to me and laughed their heads off).  The orange shorts became a badge of honor for me after that.

Mad Bomber wrote: i shoot deep 3's

Note: you said that you shoot them, but you didn't say that you actually make them.

When I was in college, the group of us that lived together were all a fans of the movie Snatch.  One of my roommates (on a particular night that included a large quantity of cocktails) decided that he was going to use the nickname of one of the characters from the movie (Boris "The Blade") because he thought it sounded cool/tough.  The roommate ended up using that name as a character name in one of the random video games we played at the time:  Tony "The Blade" G...   To make fun of him, I created a character of my own, modifying the original "Boris The Blade" name into something that was as non-threatening as I could come up with, hence: BorisTheFrugal.

About a year later or so, I was playing online poker and decided to resurrect the name, because people (whether they should or not) use your username to make assumptions about what kind of player you are. Since then, I have (like many people have apparently) used that same name for many other places on the interwebs.