"Butte" is the name of a rendering library I wrote ages ago while in grad school. I never distributed it outside of my own hands... and I probably can't even dig up the old code. If I recall correctly it was a retained-mode graphics API with some stuff like what wound up in VRML. That was back in the day when just getting triangle spans rendered in hardware was a big deal. "Mesa3D" was fairly new back then and "Butte" was a play on that.
"Tinsul" is the name I made up for a WoW character (gnome, warlock of course) my son played. Created from a few syllables I took from LoTR lore it means something like "sparkle wind." That it also sounds like "tinsel" makes it cute to me. Now, long ago when I was making ever more WoW characters for myself I named one "TinsulPop" for what should be almost obvious reasons: Tinsul's pop/dad, get it?
Later I just liked "Tinsul Pop!" so much that I am likely to use it as the nom-de-whatever in any media/software sales I attempt. I have a product/codebase under works which I am declaring will be the "Butte" I never released.
