My late partner and his college friends had a joke where they gave each other ridiculous fantasy titles like “The Illustrious Kyle of the Northern Winds”.
My partners joke name along those lines was “Mxxnsxxther”, and I know it’s weird but since his death I’ve kind of taken up that handle online in a few places because I like it for multiple reasons, yes, one of which being that it reminds me of him and I feel like I’m carrying it on in a “Dread Pirate Roberts” way.
When I registered to the forums I shortened it to “Moon” since I was an early adopter here and thought having a very simple single world name would be nice (not often you get to do that these days).
Moon was one of my first words. And for a while when I was very young I would call every round thing “Moon”. “Mxxnsxxthing” is what I like to imagine what dogs are doing when they howl at it, and I’ve developed a pre-sleep meditative exercise that involves visualizing a new moon (yes I know that’s black on black) reflected on the surface of a pool of water that becomes disturbed whenever I have an errant thought. I have a VERY hard time with onset insomnia so I’ve had to homebrew some remedies that work with my broken brain.
The icon is because I think the Tale of Tales people are generally brilliant and have been doing interesting internet stuff since the 90’s. I wish there were more interesting and unique online spaces like “the endless forest” so I guess I chose that avatar because I think of these forums as sort of a low-stakes hang out space similar to that? Sort of?
Anyway, there you go.