Periodically one of y'all asks me about this whole "underscorebleach" bit, so I thought I'd put together this page to explain it.
Way back in the day, in 8th grade, I got onto IRC for the first time (Internet Relay Chat, Efnet, if you must know) and needed a nickname. This was right around the time when O.J. Simpson had gone through the "white Bronco" chase and all that bit, so I picked the nickname oj and started hassling people. As you might imagine, that nickname didn't go over so well, so I had to pick a new one.
My nickname became oxyMoron. I figured the intentional capitalization was a cute little pun and the word "oxymoron" sort of fit me. I had that nick for a while—maybe a year and a half or two years—but then I decided a change was in order.
I came home one day from school and decided on the nickname bleach. I didn't pick it for the Nirvana album, nor did I pick it for the Britrock band (or the Christian group, for that matter). Nah, I just thought the chemical bleach was nifty, and I chose my handle for that reason that. Stupid reason, but what the hell.
Problem is, given the hordes of rabid Nirvana fans out there, "bleach" happens to be quite the common name on the Internet. I experimented with variations on bleach yogurt (including an AOL screen name of bleachYgt), but it was cumbersome, and at the time, a lot of places limited usernames to 8 chracters. I then began to prepend an underscore (the ASCII character), which allowed me to get the username of _bleach at sites. It worked—consistently.
When it came time for a domain name, www._bleach.net was not an option—the underscore is not an allowed character. Instead, I registered www.underscorebleach.net. Since then, I've also started using underscorebleach as my default nickname.
Yeah. And that's the story.