Many moons ago, I used a variety of aliases online (back in the dark ages before everyone had access to the ‘Net, in the days of local BBS’ and the national networks like Compuserve, Prodigy, et al having their own networks that didn’t connect to each other). For those tech savvy youngsters out there, the ‘Net as you know it – that has probably been there as long as you can remember – is a fairly recent thing. I first encountered the Internet in about ‘93 in college. And it wasn’t the Web. No, this was text… aw, I still remember the joys of ‘raw’ telnet.

Somewhere around junior high, I discovered this wonderful book – Neuromancer. It was sci-fi, which was (and still is) cool. But this was a different beast. This was cyberpunk. Neuromancer is often credited with starting the cyberpunk genre, which isn’t 100% true. Other authors had written stories that covered the same territory, but they had just been viewed as sci-fi. What Neuromancer did was create the genre… and make it popular.

Fast forward a ‘few’ years to the burgeoning ‘Net communities that I was introduced to in college (thanks, Fuzzy!). I realized that my old BBS handles were somewhat childish and I needed a new one. I wracked my brain and finally decided on Wintermute – a character from Neuromancer. (If you haven’t read the book, shame on you… track down a copy and read it. It’s by William Gibson.)

The problem was that many, many of the tech geeks that comprise the ‘Net (and I don’t mean that as a negative, after all, I count myself amongst your ranks) had also read the book. And several million decided that Wintermute would be a cool alias for the ‘Net. So, unless I was either very lucky, the site was very small or I got there within picoseconds of a site opening up – I usually got to be some silly variation of Wintermute, like Wintermute592301 or Wyntermute or something. I’m sure you’ve all been there.

So on one site (I forget where) several years ago, I grew frustrated as every reasonable Wintermute variation I came up with was already taken. Through sarcasm, or a lucky typo, I registered as Wintermutt. It was a great offshoot of my cyberpunk roots, with enough of a twist that I have never encountered a site where it is not available. Avatars are easy to find in the public domain. Also, it seemed a natural fit, what with my lycanthropic tendencies and all. It was a win-win. Thus, Wintermutt was born.