I AM IRONMAN . . . I mean, STINGITE

So I've been getting some questions as to where the handle "Stingite" comes from. No, it doesn't come from some strange adoration of the singer Sting. Although, good on him for trying to take on the ballads of John Dowland. And, no, it is not some equally strange worship of Bilbo Baggin's knife named "Sting."

So, sit back and relax while I tell you of the origins of my handle Stingite.

Stingite originally is this fella.



That's Stingite standing tall in a place known as the Plane of Time in the game Everquest. Though there were a couple MMO's before Everquest (or EQ), EQ is the father of a lot of these MMO games, or sometimes called a first generation MMORPG.

Around the time Amber Deathsong was born (in real life) there was a fantastic expansion to the game of Everquest called, The Shadows of Luclin. I had played a cleric class up to that point, but I knew that I really wanted to play a new class that was released with the Luclin expansion called "The Beastlord."

Oh man, they were awesome. Everyone in my guild (that's a big group of people that hang together under a name and get a private channel between friends) was pretty irked that I had switched classes from a cleric to a beastlord, but they hadn't had to suffer the indignation of staring at their spellbook for a year while they all ran around hitting stuff. (you used to have to sit and stare at a really dumb spellbook graphic to regain your mana faster.)

I also knew that I wanted to be an iksar. I mean, who doesn't want to be a scaley lizardman character at least once in their life? Not only that, my favorite starting area of any Everquest land (and believe me, there were tons of starting areas) was the field of bone, which was dominated by iksars. The field of bone was overrun by tons of these guys, scorpions.



So, knowing that the land my character was birthed in had a lot of those scorpions, I called myself STING-ite . . . or "of the sting." And it just kind of stuck from there. The following four or five years that I played Everquest just kind of solidified that name for me. I mean, when every time you log in and say hello in guild chat and everyone says, "STINGER!" or "STINGI!" or "STING!" it just kind of becomes a big part of your online persona. I AM STINGITE!

Of course I took the name on to other games like World of Warcraft (hunter character with a spider pet named "rimshot").



or Guild Wars (ranger beastmaster build with a lizard pet named "shoes") . . .



Or Lord of the Rings (champion, dual wielder major aoe dps man)



And pretty much any save file I do on any console game . . .

It just kind of became my handle online, which reminds me . . . I need to go reserve that name in free realms. If only Wizard 101 would find a way to approve that name for me somehow. That would be awesome. I'd drop "Thomas Lionblood" in an instant.

So that, my friends, is where the name Stingite comes from . . . a lizard man character in the game of Everquest who grew up in a land of scorpions.

Happy Dueling!