Explain your Username and Icon!

I see war as a place to give characters extreme experiences. A setting to explore human behavior, rather than being about the war.

And I tend to pick anything other than run of the mill characters and circumstances. Like a Soviet woman combat medic, or a Ukrainian partisan having to decide whether to fight the Nazis or the Soviets.

I'm afraid that's still overdone to me. I'm not just talking about the outright military and Nazi aspects that everyone knows about. I mean all of it. History is one of my passions (I moderate a history forum) - I've seen it all many, many times.
 
I'm afraid that's still overdone to me. I'm not just talking about the outright military and Nazi aspects that everyone knows about. I mean all of it. History is one of my passions (I moderate a history forum) - I've seen it all many, many times.

That argument can be made about all forms of literature, every genre, every plot. Literary fiction, commercial fiction all of it.
It is a complaint made by critics for generations. I am not that interested in it.

That you are bored with a particular subset of fiction, contributes little to a conversation.

Meanwhile I am having fun writing.
 
A traffic division in the town watch! That has me chuckling.

I mostly write material set in WWII, but I manage the history by having my characters be very small cogs in vast machine.

Why shouldn't be a traffic division in the Rome "police"? They could try to "police" unruly farm-cart drivers, and uppity senators in quadrigas ... and stuff like that. ;) It's fun ... but like I said, it's not the majority of the book. :)
 
My turn now:

"JLT" is an initialism for "John LaTorre." It became my nickname when I was a foreman in a sail loft. When I was needed downstairs, it wouldn't do for somebody to go to the factory floor and yell out "John" because there were already two other people with that name. They also tried "Johnny" but that didn't work because the boss's nickname "Jean-Mi" (short for Jean-Michel) sounded too close to that. So they settled on "JLT" and that's been my nickname ever since.

The avatar is taken from a picture of me with a bottle of cheap red wine labeled... I'm not kidding... "Cheap Red Wine." Sadly, it's no longer made, and I wish I'd kept the bottle. The VW bus behind me with the raised top is "George," the centerpiece of my book On The Bus: Four Buses, Forty Years, and 400,000 Miles.

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My username is a character name I thought of and never used, and when I started doing stuff online I thought it sounded like a cool pen name.

My icon is a reworking of Nyan Cat using a LibreOffice Calc icon for the body and a stream of wordcounts instead of the rainbow trail. The character's name is The Silver Spreadsheet, and it's the result of one of those 'what would your superhero identity be?' discussions.
 
I used a raven with glasses to show how I have an interest in the spirit world and in literature. The church steeple is not really related to religion, but speaks to an interest in the battle between escapism and existentialism. The brooding apocalyptic sky is symbolic of an impending trouble that I usually like to hide behind happy and pretty things in my writing.

What I also like about the raven is its ability to escape in flight, gaining perspective on its problems and reprieve from its challenges. Wish I could do that myself sometimes haha.
 
I used a raven with glasses to show how I have an interest in the spirit world and in literature. The church steeple is not really related to religion, but speaks to an interest in the battle between escapism and existentialism. The brooding apocalyptic sky is symbolic of an impending trouble that I usually like to hide behind happy and pretty things in my writing.

What I also like about the raven is its ability to escape in flight, gaining perspective on its problems and reprieve from its challenges. Wish I could do that myself sometimes haha.
I love it.

It gives me the excuse to casually use "Quoth the Raven" in discussion

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Hammer was a great, great, great uncle. He was the captain of a whaling ship but has a name which lends itself very well to a a forum username

The avatar is a duck. He has no significance, but was just sitting in my garden one day watching me (proving that I don't suffer from Anatidaephobia, the duck was watching me...)
Did I ever mention that I had a great-great grandmother whose maiden name was Hammer?
 
GlitterRain is carried over from the old site and also my 17 year old self. I’m not really sure at this point why I chose it. Probably because I like glitter and rain. I could’ve chose something that more accurately sounds like me now, but I kept GlitterRain because it’s just who I am on here.

I don’t have access to my old profile picture anymore, and I don’t think the character creator I made it on exists anymore, so I decided to go with something new. My interest and care for cool cars developed a lot since I was last on the old site, so I’ve designated my car to be my profile picture (for now, at least). For anyone wondering, it’s an s197 Mustang. It’s getting closer and closer to 20 years old and 200K miles, and it’s a v6 (sometimes wrongly considered “not cool” in the car community). Other than it being very clean for its age, there is nothing special about it. But it’s my car and I love it and short of something horrible happening to it, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
 
Lewis is the Welsh family name that's come down for generations either as a surname or as a middle name. Turns out Welsh is a rather small percentage of my DNA, but I've always identified with it. Catrin is the Welsh version of one of my given names. Together, they're my pen name.

My old icon on S.org was a drawing my grandfather did around 1917 of my grandmother as Rebekah at the Well, but like a lot of us here, I've adopted a new one for the new site. It's the woodstove of the Airbnb cottage in north Wales where I spent five days a year ago. The house has been around since the 1540s, and has been the home of at least two famous bards, including the poet T. Gwynn Jones. The owner told me Bishop Morgan, the translator of the Welsh Bible (Y Beibl) also spent time there. If that's so, it's when the cottage was quite new.

I was hoping to soak up the atmosphere and get a lot of writing done during my stay, but I got distracted by tech issues, like a GPS with a dead battery. Still, it was a lovely place, and I wish I could have stayed a lot longer.

My banner is the sea at Pensarn.
 
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Mine is pretty boring. As a young man I was way into Warhammer 40.000, which is a huge Sci-Fi universe, and quite a few of my early writing experiences was doing fanfiction within that universe. In that setting there's something called Space Marines/Adeptus Astartes, genetically modified super soldiers who are organized into chapters, a fighting force consisting of (usually) 1000 dudes. I created a bunch of fan chapters during that era, one of which is the Night Heralds, and that's where I took my username from. Yeah, it's that boring, and not at all what I'd choose to go by these days, but I made my choice in olden times and this is the brand.

My profile picture is also from 40K, the Adeptus Mechanicus AKA Priesthood of Mars. I'm repping 40K pretty hard for someone who isn't really into the fandom anymore, but again, that is the brand.
 
Mine is pretty boring. As a young man I was way into Warhammer 40.000, which is a huge Sci-Fi universe, and quite a few of my early writing experiences was doing fanfiction within that universe. In that setting there's something called Space Marines/Adeptus Astartes, genetically modified super soldiers who are organized into chapters, a fighting force consisting of (usually) 1000 dudes. I created a bunch of fan chapters during that era, one of which is the Night Heralds, and that's where I took my username from. Yeah, it's that boring, and not at all what I'd choose to go by these days, but I made my choice in olden times and this is the brand.

My profile picture is also from 40K, the Adeptus Mechanicus AKA Priesthood of Mars. I'm repping 40K pretty hard for someone who isn't really into the fandom anymore, but again, that is the brand.
You're not alone @Night Herald :)

I've written some bad 40k and 30k fanfiction myself in the past. (Even dabbled with a touch of 'geneseed' slash fiction. The less said about that, the better.)

Personally I think that reading the entire HH series should be mandatory for anyone desiring to use the 'grimdark' label.
 
The photo of the perfect pink rose in my avatar was taken several years ago at Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, Arkansas. My daughter, granddaughter and I were visiting, and it brings back happy memories. My garden includes around two dozen roses, so it's appropriate in other ways, too. Catriona Grace was the name we chose for the twin we thought was going to arrive with my daughter. She turned out to be a single 10.5 pound baby, so I use the extra name myself.
 
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