I don't know... but I can guess.
Sep. 5th, 2007 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
in_the_blueBecause I'm entirely crippled today by backache and no, the meds aren't working, dammit, and I have no ability to be creative or witty or interesting or even get my shit together to make comments on anyone else's journal (although I am compiling a list of random questions to ask Beck if I ever get the chance, and that should be a good f***ing hint at how crappy I'm feeling), tell me why you picked your LJ username and/or what it means.
I'll go first.
Mine's pure Bebop lyric ("no black and white in the blue"). You?
I'll go first.
Mine's pure Bebop lyric ("no black and white in the blue"). You?
no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 10:23 pm (UTC)To backtrack from that: back in 2000, I registered on a bulletin board that was my first internet community. I don't hang out too much there any more, but it's an awesome place, and is the source of a lot of my internet friends and my understanding of internet friendship -- and, in fact, some people there are the ones who persuaded me to get an LJ in the first place. Anyway, I was sitting there drumming my fingers on the desk trying to think of a username, and what I came up with was "genuine artificial."
It's a more-or-less-quote from a Robert Fulgham story; he buys a cuckoo clock, and finds that it comes unassembled and is made of "genuine simulated wood." That phrase tickled my fancy and stuck in my memory, and I just edited it a bit to make the oxymoron more concise.
Because genuine artificial is fairly long to type, it got shortened pretty quickly to GA; a year or so in, a friend of mine asked me if I had another nickname, because there were half a million of us that went by various two-initial nicknames and with GA and GL and DL and DA and so forth it got very confusing. I told him that, well, I'd shortened it into Genarti for an RP thread for which I wanted something more name-like, and if he wanted to use that he was welcome to. And he did, and it stuck.
And thence Genarti and then Gen, which is what I go by pretty much universally online now, and answer to in person from the right people.