My internet names were many, once upon a time. Back when I trolled people's BBS chatrooms (I was 11 or so), I called myself "Beaver," because one of my brothers convinced me that they were hilarious (although I realize now that he was just trying to get me to repeat a synonym for "vagina").
So later I read Shlonglor's (now he is GFrazier) website and it was great and I played WarCraft II and was terrible at it but anyway through that website I found Blizzard's StarCraft Suggestion Forums and a story-writing group called "CWAL" and they were really funny so I just sort of interjected myself into their community, calling myself The Infamous Beaver, and writing truly terrible stories. Other people abbreviated it to "TiB" but I never did, instead preferring my annoyingly long nick.
One day, I wrote The Infamous Beaver's origin story, about a military company of chainsaw-wielding beavers waddling around destroying stuff, and in it my character's CO addressed him as "Lt. Kazz." I didn't think too much about the name at the time, thinking it was just a cool combination of K's and Z's (the two most badass letters in the Roman alphabet), but after the story other people in CWAL started addressing me as "Kazz" instead of "TiB" (so strong was our community's connection to its self-insert characters). It annoyed me a bit, because I liked posting as The Infamous Beaver, but soon I just started posting as Kazz instead.
The surname that accompanies Kazz (on my AIM name, for instance) is "Tawdal," which, when asked, I often claimed was just a silly word with no real origin (because I was foolish enough to have "Tawdal" sown onto my backpack for high school and I didn't care to describe what an enormous dork I was). In truth (if I remember any of this correctly), near the end of my tenure with CWAL, I joined a Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri forum and started writing fiction for them as well. This wasn't in the script-format of my CWAL stories, but actual prose, and I think it was at least a little better. It centered around a sly young man who wore a black T-shirt and black pants (which is really a hideous style) and called himself The Anonymous World Domination Association Leader. I don't recall much about the WDA except that Tawdal apparently commanded a tremendous wealth of resources, because he was always flying around on black starships loaded with black tanks and black-uniformed soldiers obeying his every whim, while he walked around being an overconfident smarmy cockbag.
I adopted this smarmy cockbag persona myself, on both the SMAC and CWAL forums, because I had this strange idea that that is how awesome people act. Around this time, I found Sharkey's website.
