One of the most integral, but most basic, forms of browsing the internet- the screen name. For some, the screen name can be just that- a simple name, a by-product of browsing the web. For others, it’s something to laugh at- who doesn’t like seeing a darklord69, hotchikzorz1095, or the infinite others that thinks adding a bunch of crappy ASCII and L337 and random numbers makes a good screen name? Some think a screen name is just stupid and not needed. But, for me, my screen name, the one I always use, is a sort of history of what got me into the internet in the first place.
It’s your basic story, really. Young kid, fascinated by computers. Begged and pleaded (quite literally) until I got one. After some brief setting up and a bit of troubleshooting, my first computer was ready to go online. And, like every other young n00b, I had no idea what I was doing. None at all. And, of course, I just had to join an online forum. I decided on Pojo’s online forum. Pojo was the name of a series of magazines- you had Pojo’s magazine, Pojo’s Ultimate Guide to Pokemon, Pojo’s Ultimate Guide to Dragonball Z, etc. Their website is still available today, but their magazines aren’t. It’s a shame, really, because while they weren’t exactly top-tier reading material, they at least entertained me. More on that later, though.
So, like a stereotypical n00b of the worst kind, my first experiment with the internet ended up as such: me seeing how many people I could piss off. I was banned from their forums numerous times, under a variety of stupid names. One was cooldude77017. I kid you not; since I’d never claim a screen name as mind-numbingly newbish as that one unless it actually happened. But that’s besides the point, since no matter what moronic screen name I chose to go under , I kept floundering back for more punishment- more flames, more bannings, everything your average troll and flamer gets when he trolls and flames for a bit too long. And, unlike most of the internet trolls and flamers still seen today, I finally got tired of being banned, mostly because the forum was a nice place, even with me trying my best to screw up sections of it. So, for the last time, I went to make a new screen name, confident that I’d do my best to be an upstanding citizen of an internet forum. Surprisingly, it would actually last.
But what to call myself? What new internet name to christen my avatar and online persona? I didn’t know, really- I was at a complete loss. But, like just about the entire sum of immature kids at that time, I too was washed up in the flood of the Pokemon and Digimon fads. I decided on giving myself a name that clearly showed how much of a fanboy I was. So, and this is where it all started- I chose the name PokeDigiWiz, short for Pokemon Digimon Wiz. I’ve reminisced several times that the “Wiz” stood for “Wizard”, and since I have a shoddy memory at best, I usually take this to heart. But, after a bit of memory-searching, I definitely remember that the “Wiz” was just “Wiz”, and wasn’t a shortening of a longer term like the “Poke” and “Digi” were.
What happens next is pretty much filler. I bounced around several sections of the forum, never really knowing what to do. Everyone seemed stuck in their little communities, plus I wasn’t exactly scrounging for the latest news on any of my interests, so I really couldn’t contribute to any one board. Until, that is, I found out that Pojo’s Message Board had opened up a Pro Wrestling Board, something that was also catching fire very quickly at that time.
So, I joined up and became a part of that community, which was still very new at the time. I became a big part of that group, too- I started a very long line of trivia topics, about wrestling in general. The funny thing is that half of the time the “trivia” amounted to me pulling random questions and answers out of my ass or swiping them from any website I passed by, but no one seemed to mind, as it was all in good fun, and most weren’t that experienced in wrestling anyway, just like me at the time. Eventually, this even led to a fad of trivia topics; to the point where a moderator actually had to sticky a topic that basically said only two trivia topics would be allowed.
With my current internet home being the massive mega-site that is GameFAQs, that seems a bit unnecessary, but just remember that this wasn’t something huge. This was just a small community, many of whom were the fanbase of the magazine the message boards were originally designed for, which meant it was mostly full of 12-year-olds. And as a board regular of Pojo’s Wrestling Board, people simply chose to shorten my name. PokeDigiWiz became PDW. That’s honestly how the PDW name came about. But it was a bit more than that. It showed me that the internet wasn’t a bad place full of identity thieves, people trying to lure me into a meeting, viruses, and naughty images. Were it not for that forum, I doubt I’d have as much of an interest in computers and everything dealing with computers as I do now. But all good things come to an end.
Right when I had settled into an internet niche of sorts, it was announced that Pojo’s line of magazines weren’t selling all that well, and they were pretty much cancelled except for the occasional gargantuan “Pojo’s Ultimate Guide to ____”. This, of course, meant that their message board had to be trimmed, and they even started a “donation” sort of thing. Since this was around 2002-early 2003, and wrestling had pretty much died off to the mainstream at that point, it was one of the first boards to go.
And that’s pretty much the end of my stay in Pojo, which had lasted from probably all the way back in ’97. After the Pro Wrestling Board got axed, I floundered around the boards again, but, just like the first time, I couldn’t really contribute to anybody’s discussion of, well, anything. So I left the board, and my interest in the internet waned at that point. It would be almost two years, around early 2005, when I finally went back to Pojo’s website. As one might guess, it had lost most of its luster, and the message board regulars I came to know as friends were long-gone. I’ve never rejoined their message boards, even though I get very nostalgic whenever I pull up the forums. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
By the time I left Pojo’s, I had discovered computer games, especially online games, and my interest immediately spiked back up after an initial down period of around four months. Add to that my recently acquired console systems, and the internet was back to being a priority of mine. Plus, this was right around when I first discovered e-feds and had my very first personal computer (since the previous ones were all “family” computers anyone could use). This led me to explore the internet in a much broader sense of the word. And, of course, I discovered GameFAQs.
What led to my current name, which I’ve held without an alternate of any kind all throughout my stay there, is pretty much self-explanatory. First, the PDW name was an absolute must. Second, I liked how, in an issue of Game Informer, a developer of Resident Evil 4 alluded that the game would come out in “20XX”, meaning they weren’t able to determine when, if ever, the game would come out. So, “20XX” became “2KX”, and since “PDW” fell short of the minimum character requirement of GameFAQs and I tHoUgHt aLtErNaTiNg cApS wAs cOoL (at the time), the name “PdW2kX” was formed.
Even though it may seem a bit weird, I actually take great pride in my screen name- it’s a sort of symbol, if you will, of my history on the internet- basically what got me interested and what kept me hooked. I know that sounds overly nerdish, but that’s how it is. And I’ll be all too glad to stomach a bruised internet ego if those that wonder what my screen name stands for realize that there’s a lot of history behind it, history I value and will likely always remember.
So, in a way, the origins of PDW were one of those life-lessons where you eventually become a better person through a mixture of both good and bad events. That sounds even more nerdish than before, but in reality, there isn’t any other way I’d prefer that to sound. I take pride in everything I do, especially the “PdW2kX” screen name. Nerdishness be damned.
