@Willow (using my alt account because i'm still very much in the closet): mine wasn't really chosen. I signed up for a videogame beta (the online part of URU: Ages beyond Myst) around summer 2003, was rejected because my specs were a bit low. Since I was a HUGE Myst fan I didn't care if it worked like shit, I wanted to see it, so I applied again saying i had more ram, as "my sister" and just wrote the first name that came to my mind, the name from a girl I knew from an IRC channel.

So I kinda found myself after a caffeine trip into a (virtual) desert with Peter Gabriel music playing (he wrote a song for it), a very 90s cliché I guess. Kinda appropiate also that one of the game's taglines during the beta was "a game where you are you" as a play on URU.

I'm currently looking into how to mod something in the game to honor this.

It's a shame it took me until 2019 to understand that creating a separate persona as a girl and basically my entire online identity becoming that persona wasn't a very cis thing to do.