i need a new username.
This has been sitting as a draft since Jan 2009! This week I ran into more real life friends on Flickr and Twitter and it brought this all up again. Ugh, leftover old username. I think I’d been working around this problem by avoiding places where I had a username at all. Maybe that is the right solution anyway, to just use my real name everywhere. But, as drafted two years ago, something about having no nicknames makes me sad. And something about being renamed seems timely right now.
i’ve been “ookpik” online since 1997, when i took the name from a kids’ poem that i liked. it’s an inuit word for owl. it’s also the name of a kind of furry owl doll made for tourists. i thought that was ok for a long time, but now i think it’s too much appropriation and colonial weirdness. so i need a new username.
i’m posting about it here to ask for help. i have a common first name, a last name i don’t like, and no nicknames. ookpik was unusual enough as a name, and i’ve usually been early enough to register on sites i use, that i have no backup names at all.
something about having no nicknames make me sad.
So. Ideas?

Well, obviously, I have my nickname for you (which I will keep private for now). So that is a possibility if you wanted to use your already existing nickname. And that may also cause a productive confusion, since we call each other the same nickname and have the same first name. I like confusion! But at the same time…other names may be out there waiting to be uncovered. Is there an inner nickname calling to you in your dreams? Should we do a card reading around this question?
— fancy · 27 March 2011, 21:48