Anyone have any interesting stories about how they came up with their BL username?
Mine was the name of my character in an online text-based multiplayer RPG game called Dragonrealms, it was basically my other life when I was in middle school and early high school. I loved that game so much, Xorkoth was an elven moon mage, a guild that specialized in esoteric knowledge, reading the stars and various kinds of magic including teleportation and enchanting of objects. Many moon mages were the ivory tower sort of folks, but Xorkoth always trained with weapons (heavy edged weapons) and armor and battle skills. There were two awesome spells in particular, telekinetic throw, where you could send items sailing towards something with your mind, and burn, where you focused the light of one of the 3 moons into a beam that would burn holes in things. The battle system was so cool, you controlled literally every movement explicitly, shifting stance, which type of move (jan, slice, swing, chop, draw... a bunch of others). Some moves would throw you off balance if followed by another move, you had to have a rhythm to it. Also it was very realistic, you didn't have hit points, you could battle with something for 10 minutes and everything was parried or dodged except for maybe some minor nicks, and then someone would fail to parry and get stabbed and be half-dead, off balance, and then next chop would decapitate them and they'd be dead. I tried playing other MMORPGs and none of them even come close to being as cool, they all seem extremely boring to me after Dragonrealms. And once you got used to the fact that everything was text (typing commands - though you'd develop macros for common stuff - and reading things), it stopped seeming like you were reading and typing at all and you'd just see it all in your mind's eye, so much better than a game with graphics.
My 7th grade brain came up with the name Xorkoth spontaneously when I was creating my character. Xorkoth became another version of myself, he/I had a life in that game, we got married to this empath chick (nonviolent healers who healed by taking the wounds from others into themselves and then casting spells to heal themselves, if they attacked something they would fall to the ground in shock and take the wounds they inflicted), she was 2 years older than me in real life and we almost met one time when I was 16 and she was 18. We'd do like softcore text-based sex, eventually we became friends/sort of something more in real life over the internet outside of the game. I had a bunch of friends in there, hunting partners, etc. I loved that game/world so much.
There were some skills that were just incredibly boring to gain ranks in when you were higher level, but had to be done to advance. So people would write scripts to execute commands over and over for hours. But you weren't allowed to turn on a script and be away from the keyboard for more than 10 minutes because it gave an unfair advantage, someone could just script endlessly and get powerful more quickly than was possible for those actually playing the game. Well, I had decided to make a website that was a database of all the magical devices that existed in the game. This was useful because there were a lot of events like invasions, one time a war even that was a big part of the storyline of the game (I got to be a general defending one of my home city's gates), and festivals, where items were sold or dropped that were never found again. There were even some unique magical devices. No one had ever compiled this information. So I was working on doing so and putting it into a website for the players to use. I was scripting and checking back every 10 minutes, talking to people in the room, etc. One day, they started checking on me evidently right after I turned back to the website, and I must have not looked back for slightly more than 10 minutes. I looked back like 30 seconds after they had removed Xorkoth from the game forever for violating the AFK scripting rule (I had done it like 2 years back from then too). I had been playing the game almost since the beginning, paying $30/month for most of the time too (it started as a free game on AOL - remember AOL?). They wouldn't budge, and Xorkoth had basically been ripped from my life. I was really upset about it. But then a few years later I decided to make my online identity into Xorkoth. So he lives on.
