Chinese Internet Username Sense

[Takeshi]

One thing I have always wondered is how people think up of usernames for internet games or qq or whatnot. Yea, half the people will use English letters, and these sorts of names are usually simple enough to understand, but Chinese Internet Naming Sense makes no sense to me. (pun not intended)

I swear, it's like the fashion for people to make names using the strangest looking characters that I've never seen before period (sometimes they get real creative and will have random non-hanzi characters... I'll assume these are just random?). Others sound like the names out of characters from a Chinese Period drama (maybe they are? or are they originally made up), and then others sound like cool phrases that were made out of complicated classical chinese elements. Or even if they aren't made up of classical chinese elements and I know all the characters in the name, 90% of the time I wouldn't understand the compound meaning, and within the other 10%, I'd have no clue why they'd pick such a name.

(I have omitted the last type of Chinese username, that is someone's real name, nickname, or random alternation of either; these usually make some sense to me.)

Right now my qq username is 阿甘 (pretty simple, my nickname), and weibo username is 阿甘系甘 (that's my attempt at making a Cantonese pun).

For the most part these suffice for me, but especially if I play online games I want to have more ability in Chinese Internet Naming Sense, or even if I don't, to sort of make sense of other peoples' names.

(In general actually I find weibo names easier to understand because they may be longer sentences; but they still can have a lot of random in them.)

I'd give examples of my friends' names, but privacy is sort of a problem, so oh well.

[WestTexas]

plenty of usernames on English websites don't seem to make sense. Even moreso if you think back to say, the late 90's. People were just using all sorts of random, weird names. A lot of Chinese have somewhat generic real names. I've had students with the same name in the same class. So I think some of them are trying to be unique or unusual with their online names to make a more distinctive identity.

Edit:

yeah, maybe you have a point. I just looked down my QQ list and noticed a girl whose username contains two random Chinese characters, an asterisk, something that looks like a curvy letter E (set inclusion symbol?), and a greater than or equal to sign. Also, like 3 spaces in the middle of these.