#I have a lil Sawk keychain on my bag :3

[sawkinator]

can I ask where your username comes from?

hi anon I have literally no idea how long this has been sitting in my inbox because regrettably the Dashboard Unfucker does not display the inbox um. at all.

Anyways my username has a surprisingly convoluted backstory that has nothing to do with Sawk the Pokemon!

It starts with me being like, 11 or 12 on Neopets dot com ca. 2005-2006. As with most of the internet even back in Ye Olden Days, most people would go by some kind of nickname rather than their actual usernames because this was the era of shit like 'xXx_inuyashaluvr1995_xXx'. Sometimes said nickname would be derived from the username, but not always.

Now my username was basically impossible to make a decent nickname out of so I went elsewhere for inspiration. One of my hyperfixations at the time was dragons in any way shape or form. 'Dragona' crossed my mind, basic as it was... but there was a member of Neopets staff who went by Dragona and I couldn't just steal her nickname, right? Tacky.

HOWEVER, one of Dragona's schticks was hoarding socks much like a dragon would. Given that this was also the peak 'lol rAnDom' humor my tween brain was like "haha socks are random and funny, I can do something with that!" So I considered 'Socky'.

No. Not quite random or quirky enough. What if we bastardized the 'sock' part? I landed on 'sawk' - and then 'Sawkie' (because -ie looked better than -y I guess). So that's what I went by on Neopets.

Fast-forward like a year and I decide to get a deviantArt account. Whoops, the username Sawkie is taken! What else can I use instead??

Ok well let's add something to the end. How about '-inator'? Yeah that's good, 'Sawkinator' it is. (Before anyone assumes so - I had not ever heard of or watched Phineas and Ferb at this point. In fact the show had just barely started when I signed up under the username 'Sawkinator')

Aaand I've been using that username across various platforms ever since. I go by 'Sawk' for short because of the Homestuck/MSPA forums because that's what people shortened my username to there (likely because they erroneously assumed it was derived from the Pokemon, even though I've been using 'sawkinator' since before Sawk was a thing), and I never bothered to correct people and tell them I typically went by 'Sawkie'. Plus I was 18 by then and Sawkie sounded a little juvenile anyways so whatever.

So that's how Sawk the human and Sawk the Pokemon convergently evolved the same name thanks for coming to my TED talk