#username: By the late 2000s I was deciding it was probably a better idea to have a less-personally-recogniseable than more-personally-recogniseable handle, at least for some purposes.
There's always the question "what to choose". I'm something of a fan of "Forbidden Planet", and a run-together form of "Dr. Edward Morbius" produced "dredmorbius", which seemed suitably 1337. So I began using it.
When G+ made clear it was trying to create an "identity network", it was time to scrub Old Me.
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One of those was a cat wearing glasses with an alternating set of astronomy images. It grew on me with time, and eventually I swapped out the animation for my own inserted image (the Crab Nebula, /not/ the Cat's Eye, as that didn't appear as well within the glasses).
Some time later I researched and wrote up a bit on G+ user activity numbers, as best I could tell. Wanting to note caveates and conflicts of interests, I noted I was a space alien cat of questionable pedigree.