I've been swampedddddd. Not getting enough sleep, doing a bunch of work...life's been hectic for me recently.

I've got a bunch of story work to do, because the number of stories to write for farn is officially increasing from two to three. And I'm actually working on expanding the roster of villains. (I've got a full roster of heroes, albeit heroes that I need to justify why they are doing what they do, but villains...I'm coming up short. So I've been working on fixing that. Mostly I need mooks since lead villains I mostly got covered.)

But like.

Just...need to survive the work week.

Today I spent $400 on clothes, which was all good clothes but the cost made me die inside a bit.

​Anyway, feeling sick to my stomach for some reason, so...gotta rest.

Today was largely a wasted day. I don't even remember what we wasted our time on (I think it might've been reading TVTropes?), but we weren't really productive.

We did download the audio for potentially adding alerts to our stream (altho we need to get that whole thing set up and currently don't have it), and we actually did work on the writing of our novel (rather than writing down notes and worldbuilding/character building), but even that was just editing.

We also got our laptop functioning again, which opens us up to potentially doing streams on it. Speaking of streams, we're nearly caught up on our youtube video uploads of them. I believe we're at 80/85? So like--at a couple uploads per day or so and accounting for extra streams, and we should in theory be caught up within a week.

We ended the night by indulging in Civ 3, playing a single turn all the way out.

We had planned to stream, but a few things got in the way. First was not wanting to not be part of the vibes for one particular stream (and even now, we're enjoying the vibes of a different stream that they raided in to). We could have done a stream, but we made the choice that the vibes of that stream were worth more.

After our parents came home at 4, we could've started stream, but right now, we're thinking it's best not to. We have a medication to pick up, and while we go to the pharmacy, we're hoping to pick up a few extras. (Lotions, tea, headphones, maybe a mic?

So like.

We could've done a lot more than we did.

It's not a nothingness day because if someone were to look at what we listed above, they'd say it was great, it was incredible, I did a ton, etc. But it's still disappointing, yaknow? We did basically nothing and wasted a golden opportunity to be productive. Tomorrow will be a short day (due to work on Monday), made shorter by a need to visit the pharmacist to get my medication.

Today was a day we could've done nearly 20 hours' of work, and instead, we did like...two, maybe? About half an hour for the laptop, about half an hour for the audio, about an hour for the novel, and then paltry amounts of time per video. (They take basically no time to put the info in, the rest is the upload/processing which is why we get a rate of like 1 video per 3 hours or so.)

So like--having two hours out of twenty means we were only at 1/10th of the productivity we should've been at.

Disappointing. Not shattering. But still a let-down.

Ah well.

​Is what it is.

We were up to 10:30 am yesterday, it's 7 am today.
We streamed more TFT in spite of not quite feeling it, under the belief we could maybe promote, and then ended up lower than we started.
But honestly, stupid as it sounds, the real tilting thing is the riot games client, after a game of tft finishes. They give an absurdly long wait time on the 'waiting for stats' menu, and if you skip that, you're booted out of the lobby, and if you're too fast to get back in, you're kicked from the party. (A party of one.) Causing delay after delay. (There's also no way to turn off the special executes that can't be skipped which also can delay things further.)

When I have a match end I want to be into the next immediately.

Bug I digress.

Point is, poor time management. We have it. We did a useless stream rather than a productive stream on, say, our novel.

Which has work we still have yet to do on it.

Like, the thing we want to do is quite literally just looking up terms and--*adhd kicked in and now different rant*
...And now instead of having done it, we learned why we didn't because instead of just two names to look up, we have like ten.

And it's now 8 am...

​Bed. Now. If we had thoughts, gone.

We had eight hours of sleep last night, not counting naps.
We've been keeping up on coffee drinking and tea drinking at normal times.
We're pretty sure our hydration levels are normal, and food intake regular, and workouts about normal.

What gives.

Why are we this badly tired?

We're still doing productive stuff, mind you! Today we did a little extra notes writing (nothing new in terms of worldbuilding, but writing down some notes we had kept in our head) and actually did a little bit of the revising we needed to do on the current chapter we're writing (I know the dangers of the eternal edit loop, but this edit is necessary because to tell the narrative we need, we need a specific tone and content within, and while we nailed it in the earlier sections of the chapter, the later seconds drifted away; we found the spot it drifted and are working on fixing it, which will be worth, trust me).

So not a lost day with nothing done at all.

But.

Still.

We're not supposed to be this exhausted all the time.

​What's wrong with us? Is it really the sickness?

We got decent sleep.
We got decent rest.
We took a nap. (More than one in fact.)
We felt less sick than before.
We rested.

And yet we have felt more tired than ever before.

​I don't know why.

​On the bright side, a nearly 7 hour stream of writing for our novel, but like. That didn't cause this tiredness.

Got some pretty good presents. Two rings, new fingerless gloves, a couple bracelets, a new mouse (no more disconnecting mouse in the middle of things!), another USB port expansion for my computer (tho that said, my computer bluescreened three out of five streams last week, so like--something badly broke and idk what to do to fix it), an Uninterruptible Power Supply (that my family will inevitably never set up, but which is an awesome gift if they did), and delicious food.

I managed to do a lot of work on farn, by better defining some of Lilith's aliases and titles. (I'm focusing on her a lot since she's one of the most important of the abundant argon, but technically speaking, the thing I'm doing for her I should be doing for all sixteen of the others who need it done.)

I also scheduled two youtube videos for release.

To-do:
-Need to clip my streams I didn't clip already.
-Need to figure out how to fix my computer bluescreening during streams.

​Anyway, should be wrapping up and heading to bed now.

We made small gains in our novel for the demons, and we're feeling extra-sick tonight, so likely the same for stream and for tft.

Buthey, we're still making gains in our novel, and as long as nothing goes wrong, we are going to stream tonight! (I think that marks like five in a week?)

Today we also learned about a new plurality thing applying to us. Apparently we're also a soulbound system? At least from what we can tell. We have people like Vee and Ruby in our head, actively talking and helping us make decisions, with their unique voices and suggestions and feedback.

So like. Stuff happening! Good stuff! But just the start of a journey.

We're also making huge progress on youtube video uploads.
We do need to upload clips to yt shorts, tiktok, and twitter, but beyond that we're doing great. We're almost fully caught up.

I suppose one of the next big steps is sifting through eight years' worth of blog material to tag things properly and put things up on the blog mirror. We have done a good job of copying every entry we make onto the wix mirror site (as a reminder, the weebly blog is the primary blog, the wix blog the mirror, altho if every entry goes up on both then they're basically both the main in a sense, but the weebly one is the original).

Anyway, shorter blog here. Just waiting for my father to finish his nightly eating of oatmeal. (Which, yes, he does eat literally EVERY night. Without fail. He'll say otherwise. He'll claim he only does it on nights he needs it to sleep. Well I've got news for you father, I've been up for every single night the entire week and seen you eat oatmeal every single night the entire week. It ain't something you do just as-needed, it's something you do literally every night without fail.)

Soyeah, Imma about to go live on twitch with more TFT gameplay! With luck we can climb to gold tonight, altho with my luck, not so much. xD
Teamfight Tactics is fun tho.
In the very unlikely chance that you see this blog shortly after I make it, as a reminder, this is my twitch stream:
www.twitch.tv/rbree2
See you there, maybe!

'Cause it's once again 7 am and I don't want to stay up until 8 am again like we did yesterday.

That said, it is once more a nearly identical day. We streamed, but unlike last stream which had frustrations, this one was almost nothing but positive. We managed to end higher than we started by a significant margin, and more than that, the big draw of the night:

We talked to another plural person on twitch! That was literally the thing we set out to do. No, seriously. We tweeted about it, we made a blog about it I think (if not, we meant to but I'm pretty sure we did), and like. The interaction tonight is precisely what we set out to build for interactions, what we set out to make for a community. To be the voice of change that we want to see.

​I realize that every plural person who streams on twitch likely has identical aspirations: they want to do the exact same thing we want to do. To build a safe space to gather the various plural folks across twitch and allow them to network, to chat, to discuss their plurality. Twitch has a lot of plural folk on it, but they're scattered, and can't network very well. They don't know about others, where to find them, etc. They don't have the ability to do what they want to do.

They can't freely talk in most streamers' chat about their plurality, and they need a chat which is relatively slow enough and a streamer open enough to allow it. Which, well, it exists, but in far fewer players than it should. And we want to make it readily available to everyone. To be the area we can gather. To give a voice, a community, to plural folk and to make it so that plurality is easier to talk about more openly on twitch.

Plurality is more open on youtube.
Plurality is more open on social media.
Plurality is more open on tiktok.

So now, it's time for plurality to be more open on twitch, too. Which we need to be the ones to help make happen. It doesn't necessarily need to be our streams, mind you. We'd happily support a different plural streamer if we found them and could be a part of building their community. But we want to make it happen in one way shape or form. It need not be us, but lacking knowledge of anyone else, it may as well be us.

I'd rather have ten different plural folks be trying to build a community assuming nobody else is, rather than zero assuming someone else is. So like. It doesn't matter if others are doing what we are doing, that's explicitly a good thing!!! But if nobody else is doing what we are doing, then we doing it is a vital thing we absolutely must keep at.

​Tonight was a reminder of why we set out to stream with renewed vigor. (That said, we do need to clip our streams to help compile more clips. And we need to upload the clips from a few days ago to twitter and tiktok and yt shorts.) We saw a sneak peak of the success we are aiming for. We saw a sneak peak of us having done exactly what we set out to have done. We saw a sneak peak of the potential of our dream coming true.

We saw how it was possible. We saw how it was viable. We saw how it was doable. We can do it. We can succeed. Tonight was a proof of concept of it having worked. Tonight was evidence that, yes, our dreams and aspirations are not actually long-shots. We can build a community for plural folks on twitch.

We need to do better. We need to live up to the hype. We need to become as good at streaming as those we look up to are. The people whose chats we hang out in, we need to be just as good if not better. Because if we can manage to get in the groove, where we are doing streamer things as good as the streamers we are inspired by...then we can pull it off. It won't be easy. But it WILL be possible.

We just need to keep at it. We have the start we need. Now we just need to finish it.

Speaking of, tho (hate to ruin a perfect end to a blog but this doesn't fit in earlier and I don't want to neglect having said it), we continued the refining of the Abundant Argon today. We're actually within striking distance of having them finished!

We still have work to do on Lucifer, but we have a loose draft of where he fits, and how he became the head of the Abundant Argon.

We have both main characters defined. We have Mastemo defined. We haven't laid it out in our notes but we have Milodee and Trisairo defined.

​We have Bemoheth and Athaneva both more or less defined--they're not the most complex of characters, but they don't particularly need to be, as their impact on farn is more mythological than anything else. In the story, they're mostly footnotes, but obviously over the course of existence they have shaken the world and broken continents (literally, pretty sure Athaneva was involved in the sinking of Seidonia (the farn equivalent of the Atlantean continent).

We managed to define Belreach as well, and his relation with Luden.

Plus, we now know Rothasta.

We've managed to narrow down the demon character taking influences from Gort of Darken + Yuji Itadori/Ryumen Sukuna of Jujutsu Kaisen + Benimaru/Guy Crimson of Slime Time (yes we know it's not called Slime Time, but Slime Time is much shorter to write, you can still figure out the source material and know what we mean by it, so it's good convenient shorthand).
He's either Ebandon, The Commander,
Or Bothai, The False Chosen.

Whichever of Ebandon/Bothai he isn't, we know has a secondary title of "The Knight of Seidonia" (and, yes, was involved in the sinking thereof alongside Athaneva among others).
Currently kinda lean towards the Knight of Seidonia being Ebandon, The Commander, with Bothai, The False Chosen being the redhead taking influence from the above four sources. (Trust me, it'll make sense when you see their combinations. But the basic version is, he was a good person, who was a well-respected hero and smallscale commander, who in his heroics stopped a would-be-disastrous demonic summoning, but in the botched process, took up a quick-link to that demon. He got persecuted for it and hunted down, eventually slain, but not truly killed, resurrected before he had moved on by the demon; they form a link, a contract, he eventually brought that demon into the world, where he served as that demon's begrudged servant, and eventually grew to be his former-master's equal or superior.)

We've managed to narrow down the demon who corrupted the future-demon-commander as being either Belchevore or Belreach.

By my count, that's 12/18 defined, at least unofficially. (Officially, none of them are, because I've not written the full notes.)

Which is better than a couple of days ago when it was quite literally 5/18. (Two main characters + Mastemo + Milodee + Trisairo, and that was it.)

So we need to keep at it, and finish there. We're so close!
We just gotta keep pushing bit by bit until we get there.

It's all coming together.

​We just gotta keep our momentum going.

Technically on 12-22-2022 but that's what the Past Midnight tag (which tbh I don't really use much anymore since most entries are past midnight) is for, when I call attention to it.

So obviously, not me waking up--me needing to go to bed.

But, while today's stream went quite poorly, it was still a hugely productive day. One of the major accomplishments was working on my story. Mind you, I didn't actually write anything (I know! I know! I need to!), but I tackled an issue that has been bugging me for months.

Basically, months ago, I made a list of 18, at the time, called "Demon Lords", also called "Demon Gods", later officially deemed the Abundant ARGON (technically doesn't need to be allcaps there, can even be fully lowercase, but my phone's autocorrect suggested it and I found it funny so I tend to keep the allcaps even when not needed; Abundant Argon works just fine).

Now I later went on to define more clearly demons (they're inherently "divine" beings so even the weakest demon is akin to the strongest mortal, and being inherently divine beings, their perception of reality is different than that of a mortal, with many transcending realities in some way shape or form), Demon Lords (basically, demons that are powerful enough and influential enough to rule over something, but not necessarily any stronger than a powerful human, although most are stronger than any mortal), Demon Gods (basically, demons that have gone through ascension to become full realized/awakened/etc. true demons, usually some of the most powerful), and how the Abundant ARGON are basically just the 18 individuals who are the combination of both, both ruling over lands and having gone through Demonic Ascension.

But something was bugging me, and holding me back.

When I first did the work on demons months ago, I named the Abundant ARGON, all 18 of them. Yet I didn't leave notes as to what those names meant. A fair number were obvious. "Luden, The First Fallen (loosely, pride) (light)", doesn't take a genius to realize 'oh that was Lucifer'.

"Trisairo, The Exiled Fae", I obviously knew was based on Ramiris (well, actually, a combination of Ramiris from Slime Time, and her demon assistant Beretta, and largely, Glaistig Uaine from Worm while also taking cues from the fourth wall breaking fae in Keychain of Creation and fae in general), so that was fine.

"Milodee, The Dragon Reject" I obviously knew was based on a combination of Milim from Slime Time and also Hera from our own work of Phyrra and Cyrus. So that was easy.

"Mastemo, The Forsaken Scholar" was named later because I actually forgot to name one of the Abundant ARGON and he was the one that I did later, so he was good.

​"Bemoheth, The First Beast", and "Athaneva, The First Chaos" I could identify as Behemoth and Leviathan because I paired them together, their epithets were fairly obvious, and autocorrect wanted to make Bemoheth be Behemoth anyway, so that I could figure out.

And two demon lords are impossible for me to forget, as both are main characters.

​That's 8/18 I had easily figured.

And a full ten that I had no notes on. Just their name, and the epithets.
Who was "Zeboel, The Striker (loosely, envy)"? Well I don't know for sure, but I have a fairly good educated guess that's farn's equivalent of Beelzebub. (Beelzebub is often either gluttony or envy.)

Who's "Deumos, The Deceiver (loosely, despair)"? Well, I'm guessing it's the farn equivalent of Asmodeus, reassigned away from lust because that's a position held by a different demon, a main character.

​What about "Sanatas, The Destroyer (loosely, wrath)"? Well from what I can gather, the most likely answer is Satan.

Who's "Ebandon, The Commander (loosely, sloth)"? As far as I can tell, the farn equivalent of Abadon/Abbadon.

Then there's "Rarma, The Ensarer (loosely, greed)". I don't know how I got from point A to point B with that name, but from what I am guessing, that's somehow the farn equivalent of Mammon.

Of course, "Belchevore, The Consumer (loosely, gluttony)", I also had to guess at. It seemed reasonable to assume I made that name from Belphegor, who is traditionally either gluttony or sloth, and me assigning the former instead of the latter.

See, when I originally did the naming, I spent like ten minutes on it (estimate, is anywhere from 5-120 actually), basically just searching "demon hierarchy" or some term like that, and got the wikipedia article on Classification of Demons, and one of the first lists looked plausibly like my own. The six names above, paired with Luden/Lucifer, are the first on the list, and in that order by and large, with Asmodeus moved by virtue of not being Lust and being a different sin.

But that still left mysteries for me.

​Where did I get the name "Bothai, The False Chosen"? In my three hours of research to find the same process my past self did, I couldn't locate anything remotely looking like this. Maybe, maybe, maybe it was combined with the below and separated out for convenience, but I don't know.

How the heck did I get "Belreach, The First Damned"? Like Bothai, it baffles me, nothing is a full match. I'm guessing​ that 'first damned' along with vague loose name similarities means that this is what I came up with for a combination of the lore behind Samael and Belial/Beliel, in being basically one of the strongest, oldest, demons, akin to Lucifer/Satan and often combined with them, as sometimes a first/prime servant of God, sometimes God Himself, and often a fallen angel who used to be a servant of God, and/or a demon rivaling God.
But I couldn't lock it down for sure.

For "Rothasta, The First Accused" (I later renamed her to Rothasta, The First Inquisitor), her epithet is that of Samael, but her name was fairly clearly me making a farn equivalent of Astaroth.

And then I got "Dabadon, The Trickster", which also seems like it's Abadon/Abaddon. It's possible I accidentally got the same demon twice due to Abadon and Abaddon and assuming that in spite of it being just one single letter that it was a different demon, but for the life of me I can't figure out how I got everything I did.

​Granted, this does potentially free me up to add in different names of different demons that I know I didn't use but which could be useful to have. Ahriman / Angra Mainyu, Amon, Mephistopheles, Moloch, Obizuth / Obyzouth / Abyzou / Abizou / Obizu / Obizuth / Obyzouth / Byzou / Apsu / Abzu / Gyllou / Gylou, / Gello / Amorphous / Karkhous / Briane / Bardellous / Aigyptiane / Barna / Kharkhanistrea / Adikia / Myia / Petomene / Anabardalea / Auntara / Alabasandria (uhhh she has a lot of names for some reason), all are good options.

Then there's also the ones that I'm baffled about because I would've sworn past-me would use them, but I can't tell for sure.
I swore I would've used Azazel, but I can't figure out where.
I swore I would've used Azrael, but I can't figure out where.
​
Beleth / Bilet / Bileth / Byleth / Bilith, Balam, and Bael / Viné / Baall / Boal / Boall / Ba'al / Baal all feel like I could've used them.

Ditto for Amaymon / Amaimon / Amoymon.

I can see me not using Python/Pythia, and assuming Mahazael was too niche (needing the element assigned but not the name), and maybe similar for Merihem.

But there's a lot of holes in my tapestry.

​And I spent the majority of today plugging most, to make it workable.

Mind you, I'm not plugging in demonic figures of earth's various mythologies into farn as demons with them being such. There's a reason I deliberately renamed them. It's because most of them have actual origin stories in the form of most of them having once been mortals, having undergone demonic ascensions. So, no fallen angels here. No servants of god here. No offspring of monsters here. No opposite of god, here.

I have set the backstory for Milodee, Trisairo, Mastemo, both the main characters (obviously), and most recently Rothasta once I decided that, yes, she would be one.

And I know the backstory of two others, too, just awaiting final sorting.

But that's only 8/18 demons.

Some of them don't particularly need much. I'm thinking that Luden, Belreach (okay so he might have backstory anyway if he's one of the two above), and both Bemoheth and Athaneva don't really need backstories if they're basically primordial forces, things that have essentially always been.

But while the oldest demons don't need backstories.

​All of the newer generations do, as to what caused their origin.

And better defining who they are--which is what I did today--gets me close to doing exactly that.

So I made huge progress.

There's still a lot more to get done. But it was good. (Also, gotta go to bed now for real, took over an hour to write this blog and it is freezing cold. As in, in the teens outside and 63 inside, COLD.)

So. Productive day.
Frustrating, didn't go great.
​But productive all the same.

Yesterday's lack of blog was due to us being way too tired.

Today, it's due to the day being too short; we had only 8 hours of usable time and we're on hour ten of that. (See also, title of blog.)

But, it was at least somewhat productive. We knocked out some of the basic basics behind farn and spent almost all of it on background information. Basically, we know a lot of what happened.
How Lilith became a demon, the way Milodee became a demon, the way Mastemo became a demon, the way a different demon became a demon, the backstory of Bairn, the importance of Bairn, the basic geology of the land Bairn and Gardoni are in, the fall of three archangels, the fighting of two different pantheons of gods, and a lot of information that is important to the story.

But while I can cut a lot of corners, I still need to give at least some idea of timeline.

My current story is basically an anime (a shonen, mostly) in story form--the thing about anime though is that they usually show maps and in order to have a good map, I need to have mapped out the basic layout of every country referenced. The entire continent the setting takes place on is mentioned, a neighboring continent is mentioned, and most (or even all?) of the demons ascending as well as the majority of gods coming into power, came into power in various parts of "the old world".

But there are also gods prominently in power in the continent in countries other than Gardon and Bairn, and they need when they were established at least loosely done as well.

So like.

I have a lot of work to do, yet.

I got eight hours' worth done today tho, which gets me close to striking distance of done!