I'm pretty sure practically everyone who reads these blogposts are people who have known me on the internet for at least a little while, and probably remember the username I used for many years, something like 2016-2023. Most people probably also know that that username was also my real name, though it was kinda fun when people didn't realize it until told. It felt cool that because my name is so unique, I could just use it as username that was never taken by someone else on whatever online platform.

That's also kind of the problem, I only realized much later. Having no separation between your real life and online presence is something that, while some people deal with this fine, was a concern I didn't want to deal with. My name is so unique that a search of it would pull up my twitter, facebook, youtube channel, fighting game tournament VODs, twitch channel, etc. I was okay with this, for a long time, because I didn't particularly mind the possibility of someone pulling up my twitter and seeing my dumb little tweets or a tournament VOD of my bad Palutena losing in Smash at Combo Breaker.

And then I finished school and started job searching. Locking up your socials is common practice for a lot of people looking for work but with no obfuscation between the name on my resume and my twitter, it felt particularly vulnerable. I wasn't posting anything too crazy, but at the time I was retweeting a lot of anti-capitalist and anti-cop stuff, which I was worried would be disqualifying to some hiring managers. I also realized this could go the other way as well. It was not hard to find out a frankly uncomfortable amount of information on my real life if you just knew my online username. I'm not someone who's particularly in the public eye so I probably am not drawing anyone's ire all that often, but we've seen even normal people get swept up into hate campaigns in recent years and that problem only seems to be getting worse.

I actually had started to try to think of new usernames in 2021, but starting in 2022 I really committed to finding one. I wanna convey how much effort I put into this. I want you to know because it was too much effort. I made a mistake. I know most people did not have to work that hard to figure this out for themselves. I think people change their actual name with less effort. I had a list of what was absolutely necessary for what I wanted out of a username and that I couldn't budge on. I was paying a lot of attention to usernames I'd see online, trying to see which ones I liked and disliked about all of them.

Here's some things I like in usernames:

Here's some of the things I don't like:

This isn't an exhaustive list, but most of major ones. I don't know if it being listed out like this seems reasonable or ridiculous to other people, but I think it is a least a bit ridiculous. I did think a lot about how I wish I wasn't so picky. I had so many ideas that failed one of these checks that I would throw out, just like all this fruitless effort. I wanna list out some of the major paths I took to try to think of something.

I first started with the adjective-name format. I was racking my brain to try to think of words I liked to fit into this format and all the words I could think of were so bad. "oh you're fav words are melancholy and halcyon? that's cool, I take SSRIs too." This type of thinking is also insane. Why did I think like this? This is why it took me two years, I would talk myself out of anything I could think of for the dumbest reasons.

The next place I went was trying to think of something based on my name. I've been kinda awkwardly talking around my name in this post so far but for reasons I stated earlier, I am being paranoid and trying to avoid this blog being easily attached from my name. Apparently there are some html tags and css stylings to avoid text from being found on an indexed search, but I'm gonna just type it out in weird text and hope that's enough (it's 𝕨 𝕒 𝕒 𝕤 𝕚 𝕢).

As an aside, I think it's a good name, kinda. It's origin and meaning are kinda muddy, which I guess with my find-a-username saga being so weird, it feels like a weird meta form of nominative determinism. It's based on the Arabic word واثق (pronounced Wa- thiq) but since my parents speak Urdu, it got kinda bastardized into something they could pronounce. The short a became a long a, the th became an s sound, and the q can't really be pronounced in either Urdu or English so while it stayed in the text, it is pronounced as a kh or k sound. I'm not even really sure how it was chosen, because my parents didn't know the meaning of it when I asked as a kid, despite it having a pretty specific meaning when combined with my middle name. Did someone just tell them to use this name, and then they just agreed without asking many questions? Or did they just forget? Apparently they didn't really have the name picked for sure until they were in the hospital, which like, what? They chose a name at the last minute but also didn't know what it meant???

The word itself means something along the line of "confident" or "dead sure", and my middle name translates to faith. I get what the combination is going for and I can appreciate that. But since it's not a normal name, and combined with this Arabic to Urdu deformation, I have this extremely unique name. I've met a few people with very similar names, their names are usually the same Arabic word converted to Urdu transliterated to English slightly differently, but in the wild I've only ever seen one person with the exact same spelling. My friend was playing Overwatch and ran into someone with my exact spelling and instantly screenshot it to to show me. I hope whoever that is doing well and ideally playing a game better than Overwatch now. I actually did consider using Wathiq as a username, too. Unfortunately, this name was taken on Twitter and I didn't have any way to change it to something I liked that wasn't taken. Twitter is miserable now but at the time Twitter availability was a major gatekeeper of usernames for me. I did not want to add a suffix to the name I actually wanted. And uh, I also didn't want to hear wa-thick jokes.

Anyway, so I think the uniqueness of the name has some value when used as a basis of a username. A few people reading this will know of my even older username, Xaqwais, where I did the Kingdom Hearts thing and anagram'd my name with an x. X, q, and w all in the same name looked so cool to my 13 year old self. It also didn't look initially like a Kingdom Hearts Nobody name because even to people who knew the Kingdom Hearts naming convention would not really see a normal name from that combination of letters. And people mostly just called me Xaq (pronounced like Zach), which was just a simple and clean nickname that worked well both in text and out loud. I eventually moved off this username to my real name because of Kingdom Hearts shame but maybe I had it right back then after all.

The way I approached the name based approach first was the Waa part of the name. It could be used inside a normal word without changing the pronunciation but be distinctly mine. As an example, though this broke the rule about being related to a specific media property, I would have otherwise liked the name WaadleDoo. I looked at a list of every english word and looked for any word that started with wa that I liked the meaning/sound/look of. I legitimately did this three or four times before giving up on this. I even broadened my search to all words with wa in any position instead of just the start. It took forever and amounted to nothing.

The next thing I went for was the consonants in my name, w, s, and q. I tried to find something that worked with these as a focal point. I thought maybe, what about something like wasQ____? I went back to the list of words and tried to find a Q word that fit here, but again, nothing. I wasn't anything Q. One word did stick out though, a word I liked even though it didn't fit after the word was.

Qualms. I kinda like it? I like how it sounds, I like how it looks, I do like the meaning. I worked backwards to fit in the w and the s. It worked, I figured it out, I found my username. I generally have a least a few qualms at any point so I can just be

withsomequalms

It has all the things I want. w, s, and q. I like the meaning. I think it represents me. It can be shortened to wsq or maybe to qualms. It was available everywhere and didn't break any other of my stupid rules. Two years of effort later, I had my username.

Turns out it's a bad username!

I tried my best to think of everything and of course there was too much to consider. Did you know that Xbox usernames can only be 12 characters long? withsomequalms is 14. Also, if you saw withsomequalms for the first time with no context, how would you say it out loud? I got a lot of weird ones! One streamer I watch started calling me double-U S Q which is just more syllables than name itself. It also led to a lot of messy communication when trying to play in fighting game tournaments too, just like annoying headaches I didn't think would happen.

Most importantly, it just didn't feel right. I can't explain this one. There's no rule. It just didn't work.

There's an exact moment that changed my mind. At Frosty Faustings 2024, I was pulled to play on stream for the first match of the event for Granblue.

Screenshot of a fighting game tournament broadcast for Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising. The name on the overlay for player two is WITHSOMEQUA
I got my ass beat in this set so I took two L's at once.

It's the length problem again. I didn't focus on it immediately, since I lost that match and had to go through the rest of my pool in losers. Once that was over, I thought about it and decided withsomequalms was a failure. I needed to start again, and find a new username.

wubbiq was actually something I had considered before, so it wasn't completely out of nowhere. It comes from a nickname from one of my friends uses for me, where we call each other nonsense derivatives of each other's names. I always liked this one, but the issue was that wubbiq was taken on Twitter. But something had to give, so I decided that I had to give up on that requirement and it helped that Twitter was in the middle of its nosedive at that point anyway. I decided I could just be @realwubbiq on Twitter and wubbiq everywhere else, since my friend would often say "real wubbiq?" when I would show up in the Discord server. I decided on this that same day. I couldn't afford to do this for another two years. Later that day, I told my friend that I'm gonna use wubbiq as a new username and got his blessing. I swapped a few days later.

I don't have too much to say about it other than I really like it. It fills out my dumb checklist of requirements but more important it just works. It feels right. I thankfully have been able to use my obsession with usernames for good, too. It turns out it's really fun to think up usernames for fictional characters, which is what I did in my short story, sunset pictures. Other than that, I don't really have any good takeaways or lessons learned. Maybe I can help others not make the same mistakes as me. So if you want advice on a new username, hit me up. Turnaround time of around two years.