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Notes -
So what's the story behind everyone's usernames?
I'll start, mine is derived from crow-stepped gables, a common feature of the architecture in my city.
Duplex is a general technical term for processes which double back on themselves. At the time I was a blueprint scanner/copyist; lettersize documents are scanned double-sided by a duplexer built into the feeder tray, and printed double-sided by a duplexer which feeds printed paper back into the uptake path to have the backside printed.
Fields is part of an obfuscation of my real name. I mistook one translation for another when finding the etymology of my last name, it doesn’t even mean fields. (Ironically, some of my ancestors were in fact named Fields, along with some Millers, Mathers, Brewsters, and Kings.)
When I was watching My Little Pony and writing short fanfics for 4chan, Greene “Duplex” Fields was my “ponysona”, the name of a unicorn pony representing me. He was working at a bookbindery in Ponyville, and his “cutie mark talent” was document duplication: with a single spell and some ink, he could copy an entire scroll or a double-sided codex leaf (pair of book pages, basically) to another blank paper. He could also prep a page of movable type for a printing press at high speeds without typos on the first try, which is how he earned his “cutie mark” in the first place: two golden quills in a single inkpot.
Overall, the name represents my pride at being able to format documents in aesthetically pleasing ways, my ability to get a good printout on the first try even on unfamiliar computers/printers, the process improvements I innovated at the print shop which increased all the workers’ productivity, and my love of the scribal arts throughout history, from clay tablets to laser xerography.
My ponysona, Greene Fields, can be seen on my userpage being fitted for a formal suit for the storybook Canterlot wedding of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, orphaned heir to the throne of the Crystal Empire, and Shining Armor, Captain of the Guard. (The official MLP page for the wedding episode, a season finale, had a tool for creating original characters.)
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