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Something I've been asked a few times and I've asked others, yet I didn't see a topic for this when I searched, so here it is. I'll start:

I got the name Wintermoot from a minor NPC character in Digital: A Love Story, which is a great game that takes place entirely on 80s style BBSes that your character connects to through an old-style UI. In the game, Wintermoot owns one of the BBSes that you use. I like winter, and thought it was a really cool, and wanted a new name, so I took it up.

Cool Screenshot of Wintermoot's BBS

I've already explained this a couple times on the RMB and several times on Discord, but I don't believe I've explained it on the forums so here goes nothing. I originally created the name "Dawcreek" to be the name of my NS nation; the name is a portmanteau of "Dawson Creek" which is the name of the town I was originally born and raised in. (Not to be confused with the drama television series "Dawson's Creek").

Mine is rather simple. I had read a book many years ago wherein there was an island called Vroengard. I rather liked the sound of the name, so it became repressed in my subconsciousness until I needed to create a username one day, and I've used Vroendal ever since.

Mine are also surprisingly simple:

>My root username on here (Tredania) comes from one of my first NS-revival nations (meaning when I came back and originally forgotten my starting nation, this was the one I made), which in turn comes from the name of the world of a story that I've been working on for what feels like ages.

>My current username (Pengu) comes from my starting/main nation Penguin Dictators.  Despite joining 10000 Islands with the same root username as here, whenever I participated in TITO events with my main nation, people started calling me "Pengu."  So it's just stuck ever since, and is now my current permanent username on both here and 10KI.

>My Discord username (Michiru Kaioh) is the identity of Sailor Neptune, my favorite of all of the Sailor Scouts.  She's wise, intelligent, and has a type of beauty to her that if I were to go back into doing drag, she'd be one of the inspirations that I'd want to emulate much like I'd want to emulate Audrey Hepburn when it comes to style/grace since she's one of my icons.

Friend in middle school had a name online of Pi Lover, so I became Tau Lover.

WH40K connection came later on.

I don't have a fun story, sadly.

Ruguo (如果) literally translates to "if", which happens to be the type of sentence structure we were covering in my chinese class at the time of nation creation. Why yes, I did pick a random, vaguely important word that was rolling around my brain and run with it. The three other nations I created around the same time as Ruguo are just anagrams.

Silverfish is a name I can't remember how came around, other than it had something to do with me wanting to change my discord name to the most random thing I could think of to escape a different discord server less noticed, as they had a bot that announced coming and going. I really wish I could remember what the heck my Discord was before then, it's driven me up a wall a few times.
And I guess Silverfish just fit because I never changed it after that. In fact, it factored heavily into my online primary name change, and later into my IRL name change.

@Pengu: Why do you have so many usernames?

@Ruguo: That's really neat how your username played a role in your real-life name change. I know it's something you've posted about before, how Silv has come to reflect you over time, but it's still really neat.

Because I was young, boring, and had not inserted myself in tons of games and book fantasy worlds that I currently am into now, my username is just a combination of my last name and a bunch of numbers that I randomly generated from siri. Kind of sounds not as cool as everyone elses but.

My other username, Remile, is a weird contraction/misspelling of the angel name Ramiel which is a character in the show Supernatural.

@ogunbiyi6422: Your last name is Ogunbiyi? Now I'm doubly glad I took the time and effort to memorize it (even the numbers!)

You sound like you're not really into that username now though...is there one that you would prefer, or are you considering new usernames in the future?

I think I was looking at character names on UESP to use as inspiration when creating a character for Elder Scrolls Online. After searching for a while, I found Gerrick, which I was particularly satisfied with since it is in fact a portmanteau of my real first and last name.

My RP name, Gerion Burdock, came later. When trying come up with my house name, I at first tried to make another portmanteau using the other halves of my names, but I couldn't get anything that I was happy with (the best I could come up with were Aldman or Minauld, which are both kinda meh). I wanted something relatively simple and that had a sort of Hobbit feel to it (it was around my birthday, which is when my wife and I watch the Lord of the Rings series and cook themed food to eat while we watch). I was also on an Arctic Monkeys binge at the time, and one of the songs my wife and I consider "ours" is Suck It And See.

Suck It And See

The song starts, "Your love is like a studded leather headlock / Your kiss, it could put creases in the rain / You're rarer than a can of dandelion and burdock / And those other girls are just post-mix lemonade", and I just thought the word "burdock" sounded like a good name, especially as a reference to the song (and the drink is nice as well). Looking into the actual plant that is the burdock, it's a really useful plant (pretty much all of it can be eaten, it has medicinal properties, and it was the inspiration for Velcro), and it also supposedly is used in Turkish symbolism to ward off the "evil eye", which is interesting since my wife is a quarter Turkish and owns a couple evil eye amulets. It all just fit nicely.

So at first, my RP name was Gerrick Burdock, but that just sounds clunky since the first and last names are both two syllables and end with a "ck". But later I was reading Dante's Inferno when I came across a character named Geryon, which was a monster that helped Virgil and Dante fly further into Hell. I liked it since it started with "Ger" (as in Gerrick) and ended with "ion" (as in "dandelion and burdock"). I changed the name to Gerion, and then boom, got a first name. Double bonus that now "Gerrick" is also a portmanteau of my RP name "Gerion Burdock". :D

I have a lot of usernames and nicknames, but I'll explain the ones you may have seen around here.

Clifta, my Nationstates name, was actually my old Runescape name, which I chose because it sounded like a realistic medieval mononym that would've fit in with that "era". In hindsight, it was a D+D aesthetic that I was going for, but I hadn't been introduced to the game yet.

Barnes is just the name of a local artist I briefly researched as a kid. I thought it would be a good name for a leader, and it just kind of stuck as the name I go by here.

The name I go by most everywhere else online nowadays, Trainer James, was loosely inspired by my real-life name and James of Team Rocket (Pokémon) fame.

@Gerrick: Wow, what a journey...one of those things where it takes time to find the name you really want and you discover a lot of meaning along the way. I think so far you win the award for deepest username journey.

@Barnes: I watch ActionKid on Youtube...he's this guy that makes videos of himself walking or cycling around New York City, and lately I've been seeing a lot of posters on the side of rain shelters/benches advertising some guy named Barnes that's apparently a lawyer there. It always reminds me of you. So now I know of three Barnes's...the NYC lawyer, the local artist you just mentioned, and you.

So now I know of three Barnes's...the NYC lawyer, the local artist you just mentioned, and you.

Not to mention Barzai's ex-military mate.

Not to mention Barzai's ex-military mate.

Wow, suddenly there are Barnes's all around!

I use different names elsewhere. When I first looked around NS without having a nation, I stumbled upon Wintreath and liked the aesthetic vibes I got from the region. I then went to create a nation, and the thought process was something along the lines of...

"What's something to do with winter?" -> colour white

"What's something to do with a powerful country?" -> empire

"What makes those two words sound better?" -> German translation

Put them together, you have White Empire but written in German, who had that historical decade or so where they were all about the whole Aryan Race thing. Not my proudest moment.