My name is, what? The SteemIt Name Challenge - @yabapmatt

It would appear that I have been nominated by @themarkymark for the SteemIt Name Challenge! I apologize to my followers that I haven’t posted anything in a while, but this seems like a nice, fun way to get back into it.

Tell us in a post how you chose the current Steemit username you have. The story behind it.

In my first witness post I had a little contest to see who could figure out what my username was. It’s not too difficult to figure out and as I expected someone got it rather quickly and I gave them the biggest vote I could at the time (about $1 unfortunately). But in any case, here is the full story behind it…

When I was a young lad we had dial-up internet through Prodigy, which I hated because all of my friends had AOL, which included such revolutionary things at the time like AOL instant messenger, which I sadly could not use.

Finally, after many months of being annoying about it, my parents switched over to AOL and it came time for me to choose a username! All of the good names were taken by this point since we were behind the times, but I still wanted something unique that incorporated my name and I really didn’t want to have numbers at the end like “matt123” or whatever.

It had been about a week since we signed up for AOL and I still had not created my account because I couldn’t decide on a good name to use. Then one night my father was watching football (he’s a Giants fan since he grew up in NY and despite that we lived in Philadelphia). Anyway the Giants were playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

For most of my life, that I can remember at least, up to and including today, I have really liked palindromes - which are words or phrases that are spelled the same backwards as they are forwards, such as “race car”, for example. So I have a habit of reading everything backwards to see if it might lend itself to a new palindrome.

This particular evening, while my dad was watching the football game, I read "Tampa Bay" backwards - which spells “yabapmat”. It was quite unique, it incorporated my name, Matt, at the end (though I had to add an extra “T”), and I decided then and there that “yabapmatt” would be my username on AOL Instant Messenger.

Since AIM was the primary method of communication among teens for many years that’s how most all of my friends came to know me, all the way up through college.

I realize that the name sounds quite strange, is hard to pronounce, and difficult to spell, and for those reasons it was not my first choice of username on Steem. But, since I had no idea at the time how involved I would later become on the platform, and the name I wanted was taken, I ended up going with “yabapmatt” since I knew it would be available and I didn’t want to spend another week trying to think up a better name to use!

So there you have it - the full story behind “yabapmatt”. Let’s move on…

Tell us your real name!

My real name is Matt Rosen. It is not a very unique name and I have met a lot of other Matt Rosens throughout my life. I once even made a Facebook group called Matt Rosen Nation and invited every other Matt Rosen to it.

About 40 or so of us joined and it was quite entertaining (for a while at least) to see the same name on everything that was posted - Matt Rosen replying to Matt Rosen replying to Matt Rosen. It was a bit like the scene in Being John Malkovich where he goes into his own portal and all he sees are other John Malkoviches.

If you could change your current username, which name would you choose and why? If you have a possible usernames list, mention it!

I mentioned above that @yabapmatt was not my first choice of username. My first choice was actually @mattyice which was a nickname I acquired in college. It’s a play off the name of the very cheap and crappy beer which is popular among college students called Natural Ice and known as Natty Ice for short.

This nickname was also subsequently adopted by Atlanta Falcons quarterback, Matt Ryan, who is, admittedly, much cooler than I am. Nevertheless, the name was already taken about one month before I joined and it has never been used.

Is it owned by the quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons? By some dude named Matt? By someone not even named Matt who just picked a random name that sounded cool like @themarkymark did? Alas, I fear we will never know.

Use the tag #steemitnamechallenge so that the creator of the challenge can track all the posts and check them out

Aye Aye, Cap’n!

Nominate 5 people for this challenge

I have not been keeping up with all of the other name challenge posts, so I apologize if I nominate people who have already been nominated! In any case, here’s 5 people whose usernames seem like they might have an interesting story behind them:

@jesta
@fyrstikken
@transisto
@dragosroua
@spiritualmax

In Conclusion

There are many good reasons to vote for someone for Steem witness, but liking the story behind their username probably isn’t one of them. If you happen to feel differently, though, then knock yourself out!