My first online name was Marc430 back when I was on AOL, back when AOL was a thing. It's my name and my birthday, easy to remember for me and my family. As the internet became bigger and more ubiquitous I kept hearing more and more about not sharing personal information. Although nothing bad ever happened to me, I was convinced that having my birthday in my handle (as AOL called it) was a bad idea. So I started thinking of a new handle.
I wanted the new handle to represent me, not by using vital statistics, but by acknowledging my interests. Like PhillyNerd or something like that (but not that). So what were my interests? I liked movies and TV, comic books, science fiction, art and design, and technology. So I compiled a list of names that expressed some or all of those traits, whittled it down and settled on... Crillee.Crillee is the name of the font that was used for the credits of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It covered the gamut. Movies and TV? It was a favorite TV show (and movie series). Science fiction? It's Star Trek! Art and design? It's a typeface. Technology? It's a font. One word, no numbers, easy to remember. It ticked a lot of boxes and I was very happy with it. Until the Dude Bros™ found me.
The Dude Bros™ (who do not share my interests) saw Crillee and immediately thought it was a girl's name. I got hit on a lot. A lot, a lot. (It made me appreciate women having to deal with this kind of crap all the time.) I would summarize the previous paragraph to explain my name, and that worked most of the time, but word of mouth wasn't gonna happen and I started feeling like a Top 10 radio station... the hits kept on coming. I had to pick a new name.
I went over the list of candidates I had compiled, but nothing really struck me as much as Crillee. I almost went back to my old name, scammers be damned, just to keep it simple. Luckily fate intervened. The timing was such that I was looking to leave AOL on dialup and get an ISP on DSL. When I found a good deal I created an account with every intention of going back to Marc430. As I was filling out the survey for new users they asked what platform I was on and as I was typing Macintosh I was looking at my name several questions back and it clicked.
I've been marcintosh ever since.
