My nation name is actually kind of old. It actually started when I joined a Starfox forum (it’s a Super Nintendo game) and couldn’t think of any other name, and didn’t want to use my older forum name of UrbanFox, so I came up with Todd McCloud and it stuck since. I thought about using UrbanFox on NS, but that name is pretty popular now, so I stuck with TMC.
My oldest surviving nation, Cavask, is based on the largest city in a series of novels I wrote in high school.
Well, Haor Chall is my main nation name (despite actually being the third nation I created) and its a fairly obscure Star Wars reference. Haor Chall is the name of the company that designed some of the Trade Federation droids. AquinasNet comes from Deus Ex, where the Aquinas Protocols are the communication systems which the AI Helios links to.
Other that I use are also sci-fi linked. The ApostleCorp is stolen from Deus Ex 2, Kuat Industries is another one that borrows from Star Wars and Weyland and Yutani is from the Alien films.
Mine has some very old roots. When my friends and I played GTA3, we noticed, that the host of a radio station called Chatterbox or something like that was called Lazlow. The interesting in it was, that it sounds like Laszló, a hungarian first name, which is incidentally my first name too. Even one of the callers in the game asks him, that is he a hungarian, which he denies. Lazlow appeared in GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas too.
Later, when I made an e-mail address, my friend suggested that I use this name. When I first met NS, I couldn’t think of any realistic country name, so I took an easy route and named it after my name in the e-mail address as Lazlowia. Later I made a stupid mistake and registered here simply as Lazlow, so I had to make a plausible explanation. So I came up with the idea, that Lazlowia was called differently and Lazlow renamed the country after himself. This just made things worse, as people are still confused about my nations name. Some call it simply Lazlow, but you can read the proper name of the country under my avatar.
When I was in the process of creating my current TEP nation, I was drinking a cup of take-away coffe. On the cup I read “Tingstad”. I believe it was the name of the company making the cups. I didn’t want to be a complete thief, so I dropped the end and just named it “Tingst”. A couple of weeks later when I was working on the geography and history of the nation, my morals concerning theft had obviously gone down the drain, seeing as I named the nations second biggest city “Tingstad”.
Well…I wanted something realish, so I tired many and EM just stuck. Tho at times I wish I had picked something far fetched. Lol. Oh well. Four years later, here I am. o.o
I’m from the Pacific Northwest and wanted something Cascadian. Several variations of Cascadia and Oregon were reserved, so I gave up. A couple days later, while checking out hotels to possibly take my wife to for our anniversary, I found the Grand Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia. The rest is history.
Well On January 25th 2003 Fark.com Linked NationStates.net, and I made 2 nations, Cupertino the founder of Farkistan, and 1 Infinite Loop.
both named for Apple related things, the home town of Apple and the street address, other than that it is all the diseased black puss inside the thing sitting atop my neck.
My brother made this character called Giggy, and used it to create games and an internet mask. So I made one called Bell (these are now both of our nicknames). When he needed placesin his game for all of these characters to live in, we decided Bell should live in Cloudous, as her characterisation was that her head was up in the clouds. Thus, the name stuck.
I had a couple other nations before Darkesia. “TryThisGame” comes to mind. lol
When I had decided to stick with NS, I wanted to use the name I had become known for in some political debate forums where I participated. However, “InTheDark” was taken. I tried some variations and finally came up with something that sounded like a nation name… sorta. Dar-kess-ia, Darkesia (not dar-key-sha as many people pronounce it)was born.
I still have one person in my dossier from those first days of migrating from the debate forums to NS. Everyone else is long gone.
Four years later, here I am. o.o