Username

Every username has a story. Most people smash in a username, hit sign up, and move on with life. Mine refused to stay that simple. It turned into this tiny mystery everyone wanted to decode, while I sat back and watched the guesses pile up.

When I was in school, my tuition teacher Dinesh had this bizarre username: d7d77d7d77. It looked like something out of a hacker movie, all pattern and no explanation. I asked him about it once. He didn't really answer, just smiled and said, "Go on." So I opened an account somewhere and typed the first thing that felt similar: v8v88v8v88. V because my name starts with V and 8 because it naturally felt like a cool number.

Then I never stopped using it.

After a while, it stopped feeling like a random string and started feeling like mine. It followed me from site to site, and at some point I realised I'd basically painted this same tag all over the internet.

People, obviously, tried to decode it.

"You into cars? V8 engines?"

"Is it about the V8 JavaScript engine?"

The car theory was way off. The JavaScript one was actually kind of cool, so I never corrected anyone too hard. I liked how it accidentally lined up with speed and improvement and all that nerdy recursion energy, even though that wasn't why I picked it.

The number 8 just kept showing up anyway. Turn it sideways and it becomes infinity, that loop that never ends. Maybe that's why the name stuck around in people's heads. Then there's the kundli twist: apparently 8 is my lucky number. I don't exactly live by astrology or anything, but it still cracks me up that the username came first and the "8 is lucky for you" bit showed up years later. Total coincidence, but a neat one. nice.

Another thing: having a username this weird is super practical. It's free almost everywhere. I've got v8v88v8v88 on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, and even as my own domain, v8v88v8v88.com.

The way people pronounce it is a whole separate joke. I've heard versions that sound like "V8V8V8V8" and others that somehow end as "weate." Half the time it feels like their brain lagged mid-word. For the record, it's simple: just call me V8 and If we're close, V also works. Anything other than this is just straight up wrong.

When I first came up with this username, I wanted it to be a secret alias. Nothing dramatic, just a username that didn't directly pointed back to my real life. But once you start using something everywhere, it stops being secret pretty fast. It turned into my handle, then my pen name, then basically my default face online. I used to write under it too – posts, comments, short pieces that are probably buried or deleted now – but the name stayed.

At some point I realised a username isn't just a mask. It's more like a little flag you leave behind in different corners of the internet.

If I've learned anything from this, it's that names grow on you. You pick something in five seconds and, years later, it carries a whole timeline of versions of you. For me, that's v8v88v8v88. It hasn't been "just a username" for a long time. It's a small, oddly shaped part of who I am online.

Now I'm curious about yours. How did your username happen? Maybe you spent an hour perfecting it, maybe you stole it from some game character, or maybe you just mashed keys once and never changed it. If your username has even a half-decent story – stupid, serious, or somewhere in between – mail it to me at v8v88v8v88@protonmail.com.

- V8