I wanted to respond to that other thread, then I remembered "Hey, I'm a professor and I can post official threads!"

Someone just asked for advice on pony naming, and it turns out I have a tip: I use paint colors. The paint chips you find at hardware stores, or googling "paint colors" will bring up a bunch of brands, and they all name their colors things like "Rosedust" or "Leather Bound" or "Sky High" that make perfectly good pony names. You have to click through them, some of the more color-related ones don't work as well, but you can usually find a good list of names to pick from if you have a bit of time and look through a few companies.

Anyway, people can use this thread for other suggestions, too. This is just my trick.

Me: "We need to go to Home Depot to look at paint chips."

My Wife: "Why? Oh! Are we finally going to paint the guest room?"

Me: "No, I'm writing a fanfic."

Wife:

This, my friend, is genius

Renaming my oc to "chartreuse kisses"

I was going to comment a color like green, but then I remembered that I had a character named Blue.
Damn, it really does work.

4715298 Now this is a very good idea!

Thanks for the tip, BP!

4715301 Indeed!

4715298 Brilliant!

this will help me a lot on background characters creation (good amount of original character for my fan fiction; i was struggling enough that i can that was able to only create my protagonist, main casts, and villains; thank you bookplayer

4715298
This is a seriously good idea.

And if someone wants to shortcut the process of paging through physical paint cards, there's always sites like this one.

I went there just now and at total random got a pretty valid pony name!

And here I was, wrecking my brain on different names.

4715298
That is a cool idea, no more folks leaning on my downvote buttons because of my lousy pony names.

4715298 *squints* That's clever

*squints harder* You win this round

Genius.

I name all my OC based on food items and such. Just sharing.

4715487
I got "Violent Violet" on my third click on that.

Has anyone ever had a need for "Violent Violet" paint?

4715298

I like to link families together. Thunderlane/Thundercrash, Sapphire Shores/Distant Shores, Roseluck/Raspberry Rose (also a color). Or concepts related to the talent they have - like Showstopper.

I also use http://www.onelook.com/ to look for words related to another word. It's how I come up with names for, like, seaponies or changelings.

4715300 Did that seriously happen to you IRL?

4734681
Not yet... give it time,

4716094
I got "Violent Eggplant".