Since when did I move to the Twilight Zone?

For practically forever, I thought my handle was pretty much unique.

It's a pun on my real name and a certain historical personage, and it's not the sort of thing that's a common, much less popular choice.

In fact, if you google for the individual components, unquoted, what you get is pretty much me, alongside some other people who just happened to get some combination of “Alexander” and “Drake” as part of their presumably real names, not necessarily in that order.

So I'm pretty much the only “Alexander the Drake” everywhere I go which accepts 17 characters and spaces for usernames. For those places which don't, I can usually be found as “ATDrake” if the accept capitalization, or “atdrake” if they don't or it's a url/email account.

Now, I'm not “atdrake” everywhere. On popular services where lots of people are bound to use some variant of their initials and last name, it tends to be taken by the time I sign up, and while it's a little annoying not to be able to use the abbreviated form of my handle, I'm used to it, though I still occasionally curse whoever got it before me.

So imagine my surprise when I idly check if “atdrake” is taken on YouTube (it is, no surprise there), check if “alexanderthedrake” is free, and discover that lo and behold, instead of getting the usual “username does not exist” error message, it leads to an active profile signed up for several months ago.

Given the time frame and depending on how generously YouTube counts their "months" (i.e., if a week into things is rounded up to "1 month ago"), I'd suspect someone of doing or encouraging it as a malicious prank, but there's also a Yahoo profile for an account which doesn't seem to be mine which hasn't been updated since late 2005.

So, I'm right now wondering just who in hell this other “alexanderthedrake” is and why he chose to be known as such.

Also, must plan a creative campaign to reclaim my name, now that I've got competition for it.

This is either the annoying crown to a incredibly bad year, or an unpromising start to what looks like might be an even worse one, depending on which calender one goes by.

Sometimes I think I should ask why God hates me in this manner, but it's probably because I'm an atheist due to crap like this.