Online Nics

Atratus is Latin for "all dressed in black" or "mourning clothes". It's used in biology a lot for black animals. For example a black swan is a cygnus atratus, a black vulture is coragyps atratus, a shingle urchin, which is black, is colobocentrotus atratus, etc...

 

I used to go by "Araneus" which is a masculinized version of the word aranea, which means "spider", and still have a the domain "araneum.bc.ca". Araneum is "web". But I got kidded about the similarity to "anus" so I dropped the "Araneus" nic.

 

A long time ago - were talking early 90's - I used to use "Renato" or more fully "Renato the Gondolier". Renato is a variation of my real middle name, René, and the gondolier thing comes from a "La Bohème"-ish story I wrote in 1989 for a friend about a gondolier and a waitress that lived above a café in Venice.

 

And a looooong time ago - in the 80's - I used to use "Emperor Commodus". I was a Commodore PET/C-64 hack (6502/6510 machine code, anyone?) at the time. It seemed an appropriate name given the hardware I played with, but I later discovered the Commodus was one of the all time crappiest Roman emperors and his only claim to fame was the record for most deaths in a single non-stop session in the Colosseum (80,000 people). Lovely.

So there you have it. A long standing fixation on Latin/Italian names. Funny that the company I work for now has a Latin name. How fitting .