Keepass password generator set to passphrase and dialed down to two words. Hit refresh a bunch of times and then remove the space from the 2 words that seem somewhat normal.
And now it looks like every other bot on the internet.
Sometimes I get freaky with it and use the password generator set to lowercase and maybe numbers and 8 characters.
Whatever I happen to have eaten most recently.
I either use my cats’ names, cities I’ve lived in, or literary/film/game characters I found interesting. on occasion, I have used a pun based on those criteria.
Slightly unrelated: I name all of my computers/servers as well as their hard drives and attached devices after Greek and Roman gods of major and minor Arcana.
If it's just a login that isn't an identity I'll ever have to see then I'll usually just let my password manager generate something random. For something like Lemmy they're whatever name comes to me at the moment. My current one here is a Simpsons reference that happened to be on my mind.
They need to be unrelated and have no order to get the benefit of being different, so Alice3 or "all start with the same letter" are out.
Puns that make no sense for anybody but myself.
As for me, all my usernames are s(something). For the services that support it, the display name (or equivalent) is "sbird", because birds are awesome!
Most of my social related accounts, think Piefed and other Fediverse stuff, XMPP, etc., is themed around the moons of the Solar System! My Piefed account is scallisto (after Callisto, the outermost Galilean moon), but my Vernissage (cool Pixelfed basically) one is seuropa (after Europa, an icy world with a subsurface ocean). For GOG, my username is sbetelgeuse, not named after a moon but an awesome giant star!
For a lot of my non-social accounts, I instead name them after various birds or adjacent things. For instance, my itch.io account is spenguin, my Lichess account is srook_asinthebird (a pun on the chess piece), and speckypeckpeck for Steam (because speck was already taken)
I also have a few oddballs like scloud for my Nextcloud instance, and as well as sgcbird for RetroAchievements (gc meaning GameCube! sgbbird, spsbird, sgbabird, ssnesbird, swiibird, etc. do not work nearly as well)
A few of my accounts are just "sbird", mostly the general ones that are like my "core" services (email, Codeberg/Forgejo, Firefox Sync, and a few others)
a bit of nerding out about the Galilean moons mentioned
Callisto also has the oldest surface in the Solar System dating perhaps 4.5 billion years ago! Like Europa, it has a subsurface ocean (though less likely to contain life), and it could also be a good base for human exploration of the Jovian system, given its low levels of radiation, weak surface gravity, and minimal geological activity!
Europa is probably the most famous moon outside our own, the only outer Solar System moon whose Wikipedia is the top result when you search it by name (at least on Ecosia and Qwant). Europa could potentially contain microbial life in its salty subsurface ocean!
For accounts I care about: My usernames are pretty random, though that largely depends what’s allowed through the service. A lot of them are some version of my name because the site generates them (government stuff and whatever). Just whatever sounds good at the time is what I go with. Passwords are generated and stored by bitwarden, and I never really think about it.
For accounts I don’t care about, like shopping accounts I’ll use once, and never touch again after the 20 min use they got, they all get the same weak and pwned username and password combo so I can easily remember them. Don’t care if they get hacked. What are they gunna do with my shipping address? Send me stuff? Oh no.
Nice try!
Social Media: DeathByBigSad
Banking: DeathByBigDebt
FPS Games: DeathByPewPew
Heathcare Related: DeathByClaimDenied
(Not actual usernames that I use, but it would be very thematic)
For many years I used the same name. In spite of being short and pronounceable with no numbers it turned out to be quite unique. Even after all these years I can search that name and come up with some of my posts and comments. I stopped using it over ten years ago. As near as I can tell only one other person ever had it as a username.
Now I just pick something random when the question arises during registration. I only have three accounts so it's not hard to remember. Passwords are handled by a password manager.
My current name is actually a different spelling of the first name I had on Lemmy. But, I made a dumb mistake and lost the password, so I made this account.
Sometimes I go with the dumbledoor method.
I ran out of ideas and someone had made a Charlie the unicorn reference for this one.
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