Ickster's profile (website)
Info
Joined: March 25, 2005
About
What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
Looking at my profile statistics gives you a pretty good idea about how I react to the world; I'm a solid introvert who prefers to digest ideas over telling people about things I find interesting. Of course, given the chance to lecture (rather than discuss), I can be quite loquacious.
My nickname is the legacy of my high school days. One of the school's science (chemistry, geology, astronomy) teachers (he was Stormin' Norman to us several years before the Gulf War made that a household name) was a real character who had a whole host of verbal mannerisms. For example, multiples of ten were universally pronounced "tenny", so a list of the numbers 10, 20 and 30 was read as "tenny, tenny and tenny." Another of his oddities was that he dropped the first syllable of Erik, Eric and Erick. My first day in one of his classes, he was assigning seats, and it took me (and the rest of the class) a while to figure out who this "Ick" person was. Anyway, given my science geek status (as well as that of my friends), the nickname stuck (it helps that there's a science geek with the same nickname in Real Genius). To this day, all of my friends from that time period still call me Ick.
Once the internet came along, I discovered that Ick was a little too common to be reliably available, but Ickster worked nicely in most situations, particularly since the couple of other people who use that nickname on the web have interests that are very different than mine.
So, ummm, that's about it.
On preview, I feel I should mention one other detail about myself: I like parenthetical asides even more than I realized.
Looking at my profile statistics gives you a pretty good idea about how I react to the world; I'm a solid introvert who prefers to digest ideas over telling people about things I find interesting. Of course, given the chance to lecture (rather than discuss), I can be quite loquacious.
My nickname is the legacy of my high school days. One of the school's science (chemistry, geology, astronomy) teachers (he was Stormin' Norman to us several years before the Gulf War made that a household name) was a real character who had a whole host of verbal mannerisms. For example, multiples of ten were universally pronounced "tenny", so a list of the numbers 10, 20 and 30 was read as "tenny, tenny and tenny." Another of his oddities was that he dropped the first syllable of Erik, Eric and Erick. My first day in one of his classes, he was assigning seats, and it took me (and the rest of the class) a while to figure out who this "Ick" person was. Anyway, given my science geek status (as well as that of my friends), the nickname stuck (it helps that there's a science geek with the same nickname in Real Genius). To this day, all of my friends from that time period still call me Ick.
Once the internet came along, I discovered that Ick was a little too common to be reliably available, but Ickster worked nicely in most situations, particularly since the couple of other people who use that nickname on the web have interests that are very different than mine.
So, ummm, that's about it.
On preview, I feel I should mention one other detail about myself: I like parenthetical asides even more than I realized.