I've talked about names I've used before as well as briefly mentioning some screennames I've used. I'd like to talk about names I've gone by on the internet a bit.

Yesterday, in my LARP chat, someone mentioned how everyone's screennames were these vaguely darker and edgier, kinda intimidating vampire-type names, whereas mine stood out as DarthKobold, this got a laugh out of everyone and I can appreciate the contrast. Part of me still carries it around all these years later as a reminder not to take myself too seriously.

So the first screenname I ever went by was my Dad's AOL screenname, Crowder451. I played a lot of games on AOL in the mid 90s, including Neverwinter Nights (1991) the world's first graphical MMO (not to be confused with the 2002 game) where people couldn't believe I had a level 10 ranger as a 9 year old. My Dad chose the number 451 being a fan of the novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury. If he could see what AI and mass streaming video was doing now, he'd either punch the air or scream.

When I started playing StarCraft on Battle.net at the end of the 90's I picked the name Red_Reaper, 'cause it sounded cool and my Dad had me read Masque of the Red Death (1842) by Edgar Allen Poe. I was pretty into Poe at the time, we'd been covering him in my literature classes and I felt a sort of cliche goth kinship with him.

What's funny is I wasn't goth at all. My Dad forbid it, fearing the subculture. There was a band of goths at my middle school who scared the hell out of me as a result. The times I talked to some of their individual members though, they were really nice and into the same nerdy things I was. But I was just too terrified to approach them, being convinced they were all drug dealers by the local DARE officer.

It's funny, the things you miss when you're afraid. I look back and they were obviously my people, which I could have used while navigating the warzone that was middle school.

Around April of 1999, I switched screennames. See, Star Wars: Episode I came out and I became obsessed with Darth Maul and the Sith in general. So I changed it to Sith_Lord. Kinda amazed nobody else grabbed it before me.

Around the time, my friend Gunsteel and I met in a clan I'd joined, and he got into it with the clan leader. We ended up leaving and starting a new clan called Alpha Force or something equally lame, so I added the clan tag (AF). Soon after, I ended up working as a news gatherer for the Infocepter, a very popular StarCraft fansite, a position I was supremely proud of and was hailed as one of the best (and got me some juicy perks at the time), so I adopted the tag (I) on top of my (AF). Believe me, it was hella cool at the time (it really wasn't).

Well, I ended up not keeping the job for as long as I'd've liked. My grades in 8th grade weren't great due to all the depression I'd had from the 7th grade, so my Dad beat the shit out of me again and took away my PC for the rest of the year, which magically did not improve my grades somehow. Didn't even have a chance to write anyone emails to tell them I'd be back. By the time I was back a couple months later, the world had moved on. It left me even more depressed than before, but I still had my friend Ceramic_Bull.

That summer, I got really into two things: DBZ/FF7 fanfiction, and Neopets. And also yuri but that's not important to this story. I needed a new handle, since Sith Lords were out of vogue, but something that would never die is Sephiroth.

If you don't know who that is somehow, he is the main villain of Final Fantasy 7, and was the embodiment of what cool looked like among nerds for a very long time. Since there were already a thousand Sephiroths online, I picked the incredibly not-cringe-at-all Sephirotto_ZER0.

Oh the nonsense I got up to with that name. I wrote a ton of DBZ fanfiction with my self insert being modeled on Sephiroth. I used to hang out in the RPGClassics IRC channel and write these long unhinged ramblings filled with creatively lewd death threats inspired by Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez.

Wow, this is turning into a tour of all the cringey things I was into, isn't it?

I was a pretty high energy kid. Very sociable, but not very good at socializing. My reactions to people disagreeing with me tended to be overwrought, but the folks I met online seemed to realize that I didn't actually feel that upset about anything. I was doing a bit before I realized I was doing a bit. It was nice to have people not immediately label me as weird- though make no mistake, I was unquestionably weird.

A few months later and I made some friends in the real world for the first time. I was nicknamed Stake Teriyake (yes I know I spelled it wrong) and I started using that as my online moniker.

I didn't get to use it for too long because soon after my folks couldn't afford the internet in the house anymore, and so I ended up spending most of my life in meatspace with my girlfriend and a bunch of wonderful friends who mostly just called me Jake.

After high school when I was able to get a laptop of my own and take advantage of the community college's wifi (which was scifi trippy to me since I hadn't kept up with the technology leap) I tried going back to RPGClassics, but discovered most of my friends were gone, and the people who remained I had recognized were some individuals who I guess I had been rather rude enough to that they still held a grudge some years later.

I decided to mostly live my life in meatspace, since I'd gotten good at making friends in real life.

Around that time, I was hanging out at a local game store in Santa Cruz County called Epic Adventure Games. They'd previously been a comic book shop I spent much of my middle school life at called Triple C (Cards, Comics, Collectibles). It was there I started collecting my Deathwing and Plague Marines.

They had an online forum, and so I signed up. They asked me what my screenname should be, and I didn't feel attached to Stake anymore. I certainly wasn't much into Sephiroth anymore, and it'd be a tad presumptuous to be Sith_Lord at this point. So I thought about the two things I was most into at the time.

I'd played a lot of the D20 Star Wars tabletop RPG, and it was one of my goals to eventually become a Sith Lord, complete with my own Darth title. On top of that, DnD had become one of the focal points of my life and I had adopted Kobolds as my favorite creatures in the game, having made my own Kobold adventurer character that my girlfriend occasionally ran (much to her stress since I was a *terrible* player).

And thus I chose DarthKobold. Since underscores were out of vogue by then.

There were a couple other things afterwards. On Myspace I went by The Traveller, which I thought sounded cool and mysterious and reflected how lost I felt, being so far from home for so long. My friend Animal in Tucson used to call me that. He was a cage fighter at the local casino and a pretty good Magic player. I wrote a blog for a while with that name called Tales from the Angst Theatre, but after my life started getting better, it felt silly to go by such serious names.

My girlfriend in Tucson got me onto Tumblr, and I picked the name MyReptilianMasters, to go along with a silly joke I told with her, in which I secretly served dinosaurs that lived deep beneath the surface. I have been asked if I was an antisemite at least once and I think Wil Wheaton blocked me over it. I keep meaning to meet him at a con one of these days to clear it up. Regardless, I am fond of the name and consider it something fun. David Icke and his ilk can get fucked I'm not surrendering shit to them.

I think it was around 2019 when my friendgroup opted to abandon Facebook chat for Discord. I was against it, saying how one corporation was going to be as crooked as the next, but I was overruled by majority. Of course when it turned out a short time later that Discord had some problems and it was suggested we jump ship elsewhere, my opinion had become the standard.

I needed to pick a username, and I wanted it to be something that reflected the nostalgia that I was wrapping myself in at the time. StakeTeriyake was a little too nostalgic. I'd done a lot of mean things as Stake, from petty vandalism to adolescent words that hurt for no reason. But also, I wasn't much for the edgy names I used in my youth, and my group mostly had a bunch of whimsical ones. So I picked DarthKobold, since I didn't want to take more than a couple minutes to think about it.

I'm not entirely sure why I stuck with it. I've never lost interest in DnD, and my love for Star Wars stayed strong up until the Rise of Skywalker. Maybe I didn't have a lot of time to reconsider the Darth before the Pandemic hit and my life was irreversibly shattered. I guess when I had to put myself back together, there wasn't a lot of energy to reinvent the details.

I sometimes thought about a new screenname. I've had other characters through the years that have meant a lot to me. From the frenzied misogynist Kurzon the Bloody, to the freakishly thoughtful Barabas, to the tragic prince of destruction Mordaine. I'm a lot more than just Star Wars and DnD now. You should hear what I want to call my metal band.

And yet, DarthKobold feels just right. Like a dusty old relic that holds so much history. Truth be told I didn't really inhabit any online spaces for a while. During my quest to become Great(tm) I mostly lived in the reality of college, doing my best to impress people twice my age into recommending me to be the person that followed in their wake.

These days I try not to get consumed by nostalgia, but DarthKobold is all I want to be. Maybe there's something more appropriate, especially if I ever want to get serious about art or writing, but nothing really ever comes to mind.

Sometimes I get rather envious of people with particularly cool screennames that reflect them. A friend of mine has a cool name that sounds like a warrior space princess inspired by her birthstone. Another just calls himself Drake and it's very appropriate.

Maybe I'm just a DarthKobold, and maybe that's all I have to be.