Biography

Real life

Nerd42 is very secretive about his offline counterpart, but has revealed/claimed the following information to be true:

He is a United States citizen.
He is a white male in his mid twenties.
He is a member of an RLDS Restoration Branch.
He has earned the Eagle Scout award in the Boy Scouts of America.

Online history

For an outdated list of some of Nerd42's user pages, see Meta.

Nerd42 has a registered name on many sites, too numerous to mention. Some he visits on a daily basis, some weekly and some monthly.

The first instance of Nerd42 may have been on a discussion board at CoolReading.com, now closed down. Soon after that, and after reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the first time, he joined h2g2, a collaboratively written encyclopedia project and online community founded by Douglas Adams where Nerd42's original homepage existed for a long time.

Other screen names

For a list of Nerd42's nicknames on h2g2, see this page

"Nerd42" is Nerd42's primary screen name.

"nerd4242" is Nerd42's screen name on Twitter, Yahoo Messenger and AIM.
"Dr. Nerd42" is an alternate screen name for Nerd42 when he is pretending to be a psychologist, usually on IRC channels. This is usually commenced with an announcement, in allcaps, that "THE DOCTOR IS IN." (a Charlie Brown / Lucy van Pelt reference) He will then proceed to ask questions and give (sometimes comical) answers attempting to find the "root of the problem" even when it turns out that there is no problem to solve. This behavior is inspired by and supposed to parody Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Dr. Nerd42 says his partner is ELIZA, and often protests, "I am a good doctor!"
"DJ_Nerd42" is Nerd42's name as a musical performer.

"Gandark Underhill" is the name of Nerd42's main RPG character. For more information, see Tripod.

"Gandark42" is Nerd42's screen name on RuneScape.

"Patriot" is the name of a serial killer from Jefferson Scott's techno-thriller novel "Virtu@lly Eliminated" - and is a secondary alias sometimes used by Nerd42. (such as on MatrixMania.com)
- "Randall Stevens" is a ficticious name from The Shawshank Redemption of a man "who only exists on paper." This name was used as the real name of the main character "Patriot" in Nerd42's Matrix fanfic, and has been adopted by Nerd42 at different times as his "real" name, while he does not claim that it actually is. It may or may not actually be Nerd42's real name.
"Pyro" is Nerd42's screen name on ifMUD.
"Mr. Fixit" is an alternate screen name used by Nerd42 in some first-person shooters such as Starsiege Tribes He often functions as an engineer, repairing and maintaining others health and battle equipment. "Mr. Fixit" often advocates/supports any coordinated strategy his team plans during FPS games.

Screen name translations

"Nerd43" is sometimes adopted by Nerd42 on special occasions, such as when people bother him about changing his nickname and on April Fools Day.
"24dreN" is Nerd42's user name spelled backwards. Dren ("Nerd" spelled backwards) is also the name of a NPC in Nerd42's "Silver Sword" RPG universe.
|\|3rd42 is Nerd42's screen name written in leet, which then translates back into Engrish as Nerda2.
"Areq42" is Nerd42's screen name written in ROT13.
"4e 65 72 64 34 32" is Nerd42's screen name converted to hexidecimal.
"01001110 01100101 01110010 01100100 00110100 00110010" is Nerd42's screen name written in binary code.
"-. . .-. -.. ....- ..---" is Nerd42's screen name in morse code.

Screen name copycats

Several people including these individuals are alleged by the "real" Nerd42 to have stolen/copied Nerd42's screen name at one time or another.