I first went online in August of 1992, as a college frosh. I quickly came to enjoy Bitnet Relay (a precursor to IRC), but I could never get my own name as a handle. Some guy named Kevin was already calling himself Dante.

I started playing with different handles. Then one day I was thinking about the annoying part of being born with the name Dante: everyone wants to make the Inferno joke. It became a litmus: every new person that made this joke was likely to be boring.

Then again it left me to think about the Devil versus Lucifer versus Satan, especially after reading the Book of Job. Macbeth has a character in act V named Seyton, which caught my ear. I decided to go as Shavian as I could with it:

  Satan;
  Seyton, as previous established;
  Pseyton -- Ps, as in the Greek letter psi;
  Pseydton, as in the 'dt' at the end of German words;
  Pseydtonne -- make it female in French.

This worked really well online, because no one ever had a handle that started with 'Ps'. It also suited my idea for the opposite of a traditional graffiti tag -- a clearly written "Pseydtonne hwuz heare." that has to be read aloud to be meaningful.

I was taking Ancient Greek back in spring of 1994, so I've had this handle for two decades. I'm still annoyed that my usual server and employee login isn't available on Gmail.

-sound it out