Alright, I'm copy/pasting an old story I've also used on several other boards, so if there are any references within you've never heard of, ignore them.
Okay, I will about the "history" of my two usernames, Marsplm (used at BGDungeon) and Grojlach.
When I was still very young - about 7, 8 years old, I did nothing rather than drawing, especially copying pictures from my favourite comic books. One of those characters was - surprise surprise - the Marsupilami. I used that character for some "comics" of my own, but in my subconscience I propably already foresaw troubles with the marketing rights of the Marsipulami, so I actually changed it by dropping a few of the vowels; voilą, Marsplm was born. Not that I used that name really often, though.
Anyway, when I got to secondary school, I decided to write some nonsense stories for the schoolpaper, and I needed a pseudonym, so I used Marsplm. For years, it went well, I wrote a lot of semi-quality articles and nonsense stories (to the dutchies: I also wrote dull Monty Python-like "Nijntje" stories
, and emphasize dull), until I ended up in 4th grade. That's when I started a serie of articles I wasn't particularly proud of, looking at it now: a "competition", where the blunders of teachers were discussed and judged. But at the moment, it seemed very "cool", ah well, you know how distorted a mind of a bored 15-year old grammar-school student could be; besides, I even had the support of the schoolpaper editorship, including a few teachers, so I didn't think it could cause any trouble.
Anyway - it went totally wrong. I received a letter wherein one of the stupidities of one of the teachers was discussed. I discussed it in the article, and actually ended up defending the teacher in person in it, but even mentioning his mistake caused a lot of trouble; he ended up at home for three months, totally spanned. Even more, the School Board personally banned the entire "article" forever and the teachers in the schoolpaper editorship were actually put under pressure by them to name the real author of the article, but luckily for me they defended me - I used my pseudonym Marsplm, of course. But they did put me on half-pay for the rest of the year, to cool down a little.
A year later, there came a new schoolpaper editorship, with new teachers leading it, and they decided to completely scratch out every form of anonimity, but I found out about that a little too late - I had already handed in my article, signed by Marsplm, of course. And as a result, both my real name and my pseudonym were printed in the school paper. Ouch. I guess it served me right And besides, there was also a lot of censorship going on those days (probably also because of my "misstep" ), so there was also no humour in it, I was the only one who dared to put it in my articles, one of thirty pages... imagine. For a 16-year old, it was probably the most boring school paper we've ever seen in all those years. So a big part of our class decided to make a schoolpaper of our own, with lots of humour in it, more up to date news about the situation at school, etc. All anonymous, of course.
Since it was called The Underground, and since Marsplm was completely besmirched and exposed
, I needed a new one, one that had a little "underground-like" atmosphere around it. And that's why I made up the name Grojlach. (btw my first choice was ol'Granny, since that was my Duke Nukem Multiplayer username, but it didn't seem to be the best choice ) Like most of all good initiatives, the Underground died after 5 or 6 issues, and I got back to the "official" school paper writing probably the best humor-oriented articles of my life (got a lot of positive responses, even from teachers), all without using pseudonymia. But anyway, Marsplm died, Grojlach still lived on. I've been using it ever since, for most of my activities. And when I first signed up to BGDungeon, I preferred Grojlach over Marsplm. Ah well, and to get to the (almost) commonly known part: some bored hacker at the University here in Eindhoven decided it was cool to hack into my hotmail account and used my username at BGDungeon to post some humiliating things about me, I made a mistake with changing e-mail adresses, and exit Grojlach, enter Marsplm. But that's not interesting any more, hardly anyone over here even
knows what BGDungeon was or what it looked like.
But this is actually the true story about the circumstances around the birth of Grojlach. I still haven't figured out if it really means something useful, but to my knowledge, the answer is no. And having a unique username on the Internet could be useful, of course.