January 17: Username (Journaling)

July Storyteller

 

I invented my username, sakura-panda when I was thinking to join an online discussion board, way back when it was common to pick a name that was unrelated to your real name (late 1990’s). It was an anime board, so I wanted something related to anime that could be used other places too. I wanted it to be a little silly, to lessen the chance that I would run into someone else using the same name.

Eventually, I settled on “panda”; when I was in high school, I thought it would be nice if I collected something, so that I could tell people I collect it, and I settled on giant pandas because I still had my very first stuffed animal (gifted to me on my first birthday) and it was a giant panda.

For the next part, I decided to use the first name common to two of my favorite anime characters, Sakura Shinguji from Sakura Wars and Sakura Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura. I liked that “sakura” could be either a girl’s name or a flower.

Once I settled on “sakura-panda”, I searched the internet to see if it was being used by anyone else. I came up empty, and decided that was the way to go. I signed up for email, two anime forums, several scrapbooking forums, and few other boards with that name. For a long time, a search would always call up my posts on those forums.

It is not like that anymore; a quick google search calls up many hits that are not me; the last time I checked, I didn’t show up until the third page of results. I don’t use “sakura-panda” anymore for new registrations since it is now more common to use real names and it often seems like this one isn’t really me anymore.

(303 Words)