online monikers

My friend asks, “How did you come up with your LJ name?” which seemed like a good question/meme thing to participate in, so I thought I’d answer!

Kit was a character I played on an X-Men MUSH about twenty years ago. She was a comic-book me, though I always imagined her physically a bit more like Linda Hamilton. She was a photographer with a kid, and I’ve always sort of regarded her as having a life of her own: she’s one of the other paths I could have taken. (Curiously, if I took a Myers-Briggs test as Kit, it came out ENTJ, whereas if I take one as me I’m an ENFP. Kit, it appears, manifests as the part of me you really don’t want to rile up.)

Anyway, very early on, my long-time roleplay partner Sarah, in a scene where she was playing Sabretooth, referred to Kit as “Miz Kit”. I *loved* it. Fred, who later picked up Sabes as the full-time player, also picked up the nickname. I was using it all over the net by the end of 1994, having by then permanently abandoned the other names I’d gone through in the previous four years.

(In fact, starting to use ce_murphy on things really kinda bothered me at first, because I was so tied to the mizkit moniker. That’s a lot of why I separated out mizkit.com and cemurphy.net; mizkit was always very personal to me, and cemurphy was (and is) a business name.)

I also used “Kit” on our online social MUSH, which led to people calling me Kit. Even though it was an online name, I became so accustomed to it referring to me that I periodically got confused and offended if I was somewhere with someone also named Kit, because that was MY name, dammit! (This apparently has something to do with the visual of seeing myself referred to as Kit in typing all the time, and of the third-person nature of writing in MUSHes, which emphasizes possession of the name to me.) Anyway, in time the name spilled into real life as I met more of my online friends in real life.

Though I’ve never become entirely accustomed to being called Kit *Murphy*: Kit’s last name is Ellis. And I’ve never gotten good at introducing myself as Kit, which is kind of a shame in Ireland, because the accent here often turns “Catie” into something that sounds like “Cathy” to my ears, and I haaaaaaaaate being called Cathy. So I learned to introduce myself as Cate, which I also don’t like, but which is better than Cathy. And now it’s habit, so it’s hard to remember to try to introduce myself as Kit here instead.

So that’s where Miz Kit comes from, and perhaps that helps to explain my emotional trauma over losing the site name, and the depths of my gratitude toward Fred and Laura for rescuing it for me. <3