MetaFilter

What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

My username on MetaFilter is also the name of my original weblog. (I'd noticed while lurking that some other users were doing that, and thought it seemed like a cool idea.)

I originally wanted to call my weblog webmastery.com -- it struck me as a nice play on words, as a name that would convey gaining mastery over the skills a webmaster would need.

Of course, as with most clever ideas I come up with for domain names, someone else had already registered it, but they weren't actually doing anything with the domain -- they just have it available for sale. Okay, I thought -- I wonder how much they want for it? I sent them e-mail to ask.

I believe the price they quoted me was around $15,000.

I don't know about you, but I don't have $15,000 burning a hole in my pocket, so I decided to pass.

Instead, I thought about what I liked about the sound of the name -- the play on "webmaster". It also reminded me of Webmonkey, another site whose name I liked. Okay, I thought -- what I want here is web-m-something.

I scrolled through /usr/dict/words to the M's, and jotted down every word that caught my eye that might look good with "web" in front of it on a piece of paper. Then I went back through the list and scratched out the ones I didn't like after all, and left myself with a shortlist of about five candidates.

webmutant leapt out at me from that list -- irreverent, fun, techy, iconoclastic. I had my name.

Whole process, start to finish, took maybe twenty minutes, tops. And I didn't have to pay an identity firm over a million dollars to come up with it, either.

I also maintain Bloodletters, my showcase for my horror fiction and artwork.