So while I've basically done nothing the entire day, I've done productive nothingness! By which, I mean, stuff. I obviously had work today, and I also knew I'd have to drive myself to dance today, forcing me to take a nap. (I overslept by 45 minutes, and my parents insisted I eat before leaving, making me rather late, given the long drive.) But while at work, I worked out a new character for the story I'm still not sure if I've referenced by name. (I should really begin reading the archives of my own blog to figure out what I have and haven't said, since I legitimately have no clue over half the time if what I say is new information or not, and whether it was personal information I was reluctant to divulge or not.)

I also began writing a new song, though I didn't finish it.

At dance, I managed to doodle out all the guys in my webcomic save Davos and Argus who I did doodles of on Wednesday. (I mentioned that, right? Pretty sure that should have been mentioned, how I went to draw to show that I could, and that I do more than just sleep.) Some looked fairly decent, albeit with some obvious flaws. Others I absolutely butchered. But I feel like it was a learning experience for me as an artist all the same, so time well-spent.

And since I was awake the entire drive, I'd say the nap was time well spent as well, though given how dry my eyes felt the entire drive (not heaviness like tired, and my mind wasn't wandering off like tired, just dry and, frankly, dim making it hard to see), that might be a bit debatable.

So, not nearly the day I was hoping for, but at least a semi-productive one. And, hey! I got this entry in before midnight!

It was a long day, that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it!

*cough*

Anyway, thought I'd let you know that yesterday was movie night, as I think I mentioned. Oddly enough, for the first time since I've been a semi-regular, there, there wasn't a third movie lined up. So, we were browsing the selection, just talking about movies, a feeling that was VERY familiar to my own family...including how we went off-topic and ended up discussing things not related to movies at all!

The first movie, I missed most of (only catching the ending--Jude Law and whatshisname mutually killed each other), but I remember the second movie which started after we had the discussion, and it was A History of Violence. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality. Viggo Mortesen made a very solid performance in the film, proving his diversity. (He's not just Aragorn! And also not just the guy from Hidalgo.) Definitely was a nice movie. Before it began, there was an intermission of a short, though. Too Many Cooks, made by adult swim, with predictable results. Did like a lot more of it than I didn't! And then, we finished with the suggestion we ultimately went with, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (The American remake, featuring whatshisname, the latest James Bond.)

It was looooooooooooooong. I was multitasking, and mainly had it on audio, so a lot of the plot passed by me, and I think that if I had been paying attention the movie wouldn't have surprised me anyway (instead of because of multitasking, being thanks to my ability to figure stuff out), yet at the same time, I feel like it was an incredibly well-made film. It's not exactly in my taste, but I'd definitely watch it again anyway in spite of that because I'd still enjoy it. (Sadly, the group had been reduced to basically just me by the end.)

A consequence of the above, though, is that I didn't get to take a shower yesterday, meaning I had to take one today...meaning one less hour of sleep...meaning I got less than two hours of sleep today. (Ouch.) Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeahhh...that went about as well as you'd expect. Actually, on my end, I'd say it went better than you'd expect, but still SUCKS, since I've been exhausted the entirety of today. 

I figured out the problem I had at work last week, yet encountered a different problem. (Which I may have a solution for.) During work, I also did a sketch of Sasha (well, doodle), and yet, in spite of having some very obvious problems...given the nature of the drawing (being done with pen, from memory), I loved it. 

I then went home and basically (after a brief stunt on HotR) crashed, setting an alarm for the absolutely latest time I could leave for the second bit of work I have today (that takes the place of dancing this week). I figured I'd sleep for half an hour, maybe an hour, yet set the alarm for two hours (the amount I had free) just in case.

Next thing I know, I wake up dazed and disoriented, thinking, "Why'd I set an alarm to wake up this early in the morning?" And only after a moment of confusion did I realize what the timer going off actual was, as my memory returned to me slowly, and then I said out loud, "Uh-oh." And had to rush out the door. Still dead-tired, in spite of over doubling the amount of sleep I had gotten in the night, mind you.

Now, I can't tell you the details of work to be on the safe side. (It'd probably be harmless, but it is theoretically possible it could get me in trouble.) Yet I will say that it was an incredibly fun meeting, even for most staff gatherings. The staff there might constantly come and go, shifting as the months drag on, yet in spite of that, the community in my workplace almost feels like family to me. Just like CF and the other site I go to do. (Movie night being an extension of CF, by the way.)

Side-note, but the other noteworthy thing from yesterday was the test. I remembered a detail from there I was going to mention. I wasn't testing. And honestly, as terrible as it sounds to say, I didn't really care for the testers. If you're testing, you're basically guaranteed to pass since the instructor wouldn't let you take the test unless you are ready, and me knowing this, I could stand there without worry, watching them. But more than that, I really actually truly didn't fully care for them, heartless monster as that might make me. One girl I didn't know. One guy, I barely know. Another guy, I only recently got to know. The other two guys testing, I know their older brothers better than I know them. So as horrible as it sounds, I didn't truly have investment in whether they would pass or not.

...And yet, in spite of that, I was anxious the whole test time myself. Why was that? Well, in my Interpersonal Relations class, we just studied about emotional contagion, and I'm pretty dang certain it had to do with that: I by myself wouldn't have been concerned. But the parents watching the test were. The testees certainly were. Heck, it's possible the teacher would be nervous for them as an instructor that they not mess up. With all that tension in the air, of course it's going to bleed over into me.

Soyeah, there's my weekend.

Now if you don't mind...I need to sleep.

So as I was driving home (read: being driven home by my dad; I typically prefer others to drive me even when I can drive myself because it offers me the luxury of escape), I decided that I might as well talk about my characters from my webcomic, about their backstories name-wise in-universe and out-of-universe. I'd do this on ComicFury, but until I actually return, I can't, meaning that I need somewhere to put it and in a blog is as good a place as any. (Of course, by doing so, I'm basically removing any ambiguity remaining as to who I am, there. Not that it really matters, given that I haven't exactly been subtle about it.)

When it comes to Argus, I named him thinking that he would primarily use magic, and Argus is a name I associate with "powerful magic user". I don't know why I do, but I do. If I had to venture a guess, it'd be that a combination of archmage and magus (or even archmagus) can become Argus, but the fact is, there was a time when Argus was his name, with nothing else aside from that. I knew I needed to expand it, though I faced a problem in that Argus didn't seem like there was much synergy possible with any other names in any order that I could think of. Argus by itself didn't feel like enough, but what would Argus be a name with?

So instead of trying to figure out first, middle, and last, I instead took the easy way out and made Argus his nickname. With Argus as his nickname, though...what would cause him to use it? Well, my initial plan was to make a name that sounded vaguely similar, so I came up with a middle name of Argo. And I knew I wanted the last name to have the u and the s in it, and argo has some rather obvious follow-through in the form of Argonauts, so I decided his last name would be Maustrat. With his middle and last name effectively making Argonaut (with an added flair of 'str' and replacing the n with m), I decided his real first name might as well be Jason, and then there he was. Jason Argo Maustrat, AKA, Argus.

The in-universe reason is...far, far more complex than that. You have to understand it has changed a bit over the years, but the basics are practically the same. First off, you have to understand that Argus's lineage is...complicated. His family has a Secret Legacy: each generation of Strat (not Maustrat--it's complicated; just listen) thinks themselves to be the first generation of adventurers, and that their family has been nothing but farmers before-hand. In short, the kids are raised up to tales of adventure in the outside world, but all they know is the simple life their parents insist they have lived their entire lives, and the locals seem to back that up, with them having known each other for years and all.

...So when the kids set out to go on adventure, they think that they're basically violating the family's traditions. They think themselves to have broken the mold, to have separated from what their parents have done their entire lives. (This is, in fact, what I had in the original draft, without the twist.) But after they have gone on their adventures, and either ascend to godhood or settle down back into their lives before and have children of their own, they realize the truth: they, when settled down (or becoming gods), have no intention of returning to that life, so try to remove evidence of it and deny it having existed, but to satisfy their adventuring spirit, will still tell the stories of their exploits as if they're from other people, and that's the moment things click into place and they realize their family has been in the adventuring tradition for a long time, with a huge family history of adventuring, with literally nearly every single family member having once done adventuring. (This is, in fact, what I had on another, later draft. The backstory you see above is a merging of the two, which I grew to really like as it began to make sense.)

This might seem a bit unlikely; how can the Strat family have had so many adventurers and not a single one leaked out? Well, that's because the Strat family has a couple of unusual traditions. The first son of a Strat inherits the last name of Strat. The second son of a Strat will inherit the last name, but with something in front of it to make a new last name. (Which means that Argus is the second son of a Strat.) The third son will have a last name similar to the second son's typically (though this is not necessarily true), yet also different, and the pattern continues.

This means that when those sons start their own families, there aren't hundreds upon hundreds of people with just 'Strat' as their last name; you have variety so that you can better track who is who, and who belongs to what family. And, by the way, it does run the other way as well: an offshoot of the Strat family like Argus would be if he started a family can, if they have at least one son continuing the offshoot name, name a son simply 'Strat', if they intend that to be their last child.

So it's not like there's only one person with the last name of 'Strat'. It's just that there aren't hundreds upon hundreds of people with the last name of Strat. Thus, it can become slightly easier for the names to be hidden; Maustrat is harder to spot as a Strat than just Strat would be. However, even that seems unlikely, until you see the second Strat tradition: their pattern of nicknaming, off of their initials. First name, 1-2 letters; middle name, 1-2 letters, if applicable, 0-2 letters of their prefix name, and then the S for Strat. So, Argus's birth name of Jason Argo Maustrat could be: Jarmas, Jarms, his embarrassing nickname of Jams (which is a nickname that he actually had), or simply (albeit a bit unusually) Jas. The last one is what he used as an adventurer (rather than as a kid or by those who he was vitriolic with), because in addition to filling the pattern, it if you added an e is "Jase", the shortened form of Jason. So, his original nickname was Jas, and recordings of him as an adventurer before the story are going to be either Jason or Jas, never his full name.

Now apply this to other Strats, with similar results. If a name for an adventurer who only goes by one name (rather than a full name) ends in S, there is a fairly good chance that they are a Strat of some form or another. Yet because they're often known by just that name, in legends about them, nobody would think anything about them. For instance, instead of asking the question of "So what's Jas's middle and last name?", people would probably instead ask, "So what would you best describe Jas as?", with responses of typical naming things: The Great, The Magnificent, The Kind, Orcslayer, Of *famous battle they were key in the victory of, e.g. Of Ardan*, etc. Said, Jas The Great, Jas Orcslayer, Jas of Ardan, and so on.

That's just the kind of world they live on. People aren't interested in where the adventurers come from when listening to the stories. People are interested in what the adventurers are famous for doing. And that is how the Strat line's familial secret legacy has remained hidden. Strats in some form or another have been in virtually every known famous adventuring group throughout history, because there are a lot of Strats (they have big families) and adventuring (and after retiring, keeping their adventuring a secret) is quite literally in their blood.

So why is Argus going by Argus, now? Well, remember how he's the second son of a Strat? The first son was Arthur Guy Strat. Argus. Arthur died of old age about the time that Argus began adventuring the second time around. (Adventurers have a limited form of immortality: their lifespan is extended by their level, so someone who's L5 has a life expectancy of 85 [it's not an exact science], and someone who's L20 has a life expectancy of 100, and someone who is L500 has a life expectancy of 580. Argus adventured for practically 80 years and got to be level 900 at the end, the point where adventurers become gods and lose their mortality altogether. But when he lost his godhood, it reset his age to be at the prime of the human body's natural age, around the 30s, give or take 5 years. His brother, however, never became an adventurer, and by then was a very old man, having lived an entirely natural life.)

So in honor of his brother, Argus took on his name, with the blessing of Arthur's son, J.C. Strat. (J.C., though, still calls Argus Jason.)


Aria's name was much simpler. Aria L. creates "aerial" in sound, and Fulor is basically an accented "Floor". So her name's a pun; She's above the floor. It gets worse when you realize that her middle name is Levi. There's nothing fancy about that name, but in-universe, there's a background to her last name. She never knew this, because her parents both died at a young age, leaving her orphaned before she learned it. She took on the class of her mother and alignment of her father, but didn't realize that her father choosing to be an adventurer (warrior, more specifically) was done for some rather specific reasons: he was the younger brother of a King. Said King didn't have a family, so her father was next in line, but the younger brother still felt inadequate and chose the humble life of adventuring. Aria, of course, finds this out when encountering the new king (though by 'new', I mean 'replacement', not 'recently-inaugurated'; he's actually middle-aged because Aria has been dead for some time), King Brandon DuLor...Aria's long-lost baby brother. Because unknown to Aria, technically, her last name isn't Fulor, but actually FuLor, with Fu being given to princesses and queens and Du being given to princes and kings. (I have more specific notes on the circumstances in a notebook of mine, but I'm too lazy to pull that up, since this conveys the basics. Trust the notes I have there over the notes I'm posting here, since I gave it rather extensive thought as to how it'd work and what I have here is me reciting it from memory, but I believe that what I'm saying here is just a simplification of the notes.)


Davos's name was chosen because I wanted something that sounded vampiric. There was just something slightly menacing, dark, gloomy, and overall "of the night" about the name Davos to me, and it had some of the letters for 'Dracula' in it, making it appropriate. That continues into the T. and the Veidmir; I think it should be obvious that I was incorporating Tepez and Vladimir into those two. (I forgot what the T. originally stood for. It might currently stand for 'Tristan', his middle name being the first name of his father, but I'm not sure. It's something that I never settled down on 100%.) Unlike most characters, there's nothing particularly special about his name in-universe.


Sasha's first name was chosen just because I thought it was a nice name for a character, and it seemed appropriate for her, somehow, but her middle and last names, there's stories behind. Her middle/last name become G. Oblong, which if you replace the second o with an i, I think you can see the meaning of. Another punny name, made on a whim. It was Oblong because I decided that her entire name would be "things that spellcheck doesn't hate", so not even really caring what Oblong meant, I decided to stick with it for the pun. Her middle name became Gold following that same logic, and in that case, it refers to the color of her light magic, and...that was really the extent of thought I put into it.

However, her name has in-universe meaning. Goblin family names tend to do with their roles in society. In particular, it has to do with the difference between hunters/warriors/etc., elders/shamen/etc., and gatherers/farmers/scouts/etc. Hunters/warriors/etc. tend to be 'sharp', angular, direct, and pointy. They are blunt, they are sometimes aggressive, they are passionate. Elders/shamen/etc. tend to be the mediators between sides, mediating debates and keeping them short and simple, yet respectful. They are sometimes a bit forceful, though, and often can be indecisive and not nearly as helpful as they could be. On the brighter side, they serve very well to fill the gaps in goblin society, willing and able to perform most miscellaneous labors.

And then, there are the gatherers/farmers/etc. They are generally eloquent, polite, respectful, passive, and logical. They are also rather stubborn, and hold unusual beliefs compared to the more angular warriors/hunters/etc. While not fast to make decisions, once made they tend to execute their decisions rather precisely, having spent a long time smoothing out the surface details of their planned action.

And names tend to reflect where a person is most comfortable being. Hunters/warriors have acute, sharp, brief, aggressive names typically. They may dress them up to show accomplishment (e.g. Aks-->Axgrinder), and these names often change over generations as a result, but the trend is there. Elders/shamen have more neutral names, though they tend to shift towards the side the village most favors. (More on that in a bit. And if the village sides most with the elders/shamen, then imagine their names being very, very, VERY loosely Nordic sounding, like, say, Jorgun, Alric, Golrun, Mehtis, etc. Think the TVTropes term, "As Long As It Sounds Foreign"; that's how loosely I mean.)

The farmers/gatherers/etc. therefore have names that are generally longer, more eloquent, soft, smooth, and typically unchanging throughout the generations. They hold a heavy emphasis on that familial tradition, in fact. So when Sasha's surname is Oblong, you can envision what type of mold her family fit into. (At least, you should; I specifically looked at the dictionary when making the terms so you could see contrast between sharp/angular, compact/short, and oblong.)

Each goblin village has a focus on one of the sides, typically either hunter/warrior (these ones are generally more nomadic) or on gatherer/farmer (these ones are generally more grounded). Sasha's village had a focus on the latter, which means that as far as her village goes, being an Oblong means that she is nobility. (She's entirely unaware of this, of course, thanks to the fate of her village.) In a different village with, say, a hunter/warrior focus, being an Oblong would get her teased, and even in her own village, it did to some extent happen, but she was raised well, and had good friends, so she saw very little of that and mostly had fair treatment. She wasn't from a particularly noteworthy family, even though traditionally, her family held importance. 

This is one of the reasons why she's the inheritor of her tribe's legacy. Even before they were wiped out, she was in the line of succession for possible candidates, and very easily could have been a leader. So in a sense, though distantly in line, it could be said that Sasha was the goblin equivalent of a princess in her own village, even though she was totally unaware of it.


Sanik A. Ronado-->Sonic Archer (his original class) Tornado; that's basically it.
Tyra is not, as you'd expect, directly from Terra; it's from Nira, the name from her character's inspiration...and then made with a T to bring it closer to Terra.
Sarge = basically, Sergeant; Spark = obvious. Last name, I just made up as far as I know.
M = based on water (there's a water word--I think from Latin--that begins with M), but gender-neutral.
Kinas Z. Ronado-->Sanik backwards, Z at the opposite end of the alphabet from A (And it being Zachary because it's a cool name), Ronado because he's Sanik's brother.
Sinaer Da(ugh)tira-->Sinner, (because of her original class and element) Daughter of Tira.
Nathan Betrax-->Ninja Berserker.
Enlecar Hovan Craftsman-->Energy Lightning Arc, who is a Craftsman of Hovercrafts.

None of them have particularly special stories except for Sinaer and Tyra (okay, so does Nathan, but not directly so), but those go into spoilers.

Soyeah. Very long post. Gives you a good insight into my mind, and also tells you more about my world.

Just remembered another noteworthy thing. Last night, I forgot to take my medication, and I woke up with a thought of, "Ooh, crud. I'm gonna be feeling that throughout the day."

The medication is, of course, for my bipolar disorder, so missing a dosage is not exactly a good thing, but honestly, it's not the end of the world. To be frank, I think that missing a single dose (no more than that, though) in a period of a month or so (the time since my last dosage lapse) probably has no physical effect; the drug is still going to be reasonably strong in my system. However, psychologically (even if on a subconscious level), I think it does.

I didn't exactly get much done today, at least not as much as I would've preferred, so I certainly felt the basics of that psychological effect. That said, though, I did manage to get a fair amount done. Tinkering here obviously, but I also downloaded DAZ studio and went through some rudimentary crude experiments with the program, which was nice. I also got some decent references for Davos, and began laying out a sketch on paper. Not sure if I'll make the sketch be more (I feel like I don't quite have the details of Davos's outfit nailed down in my head, which makes bringing them to picture impossible) than what it is, but I at least laid down the beginnings of it, and it did help me get a better feeling for his character.

Still, though, a ton of work to do. Visualizing his exact hair style, his exact facial expression (right now for this drawing, I'm thinking scary-mode Davos, instead of child-mode Davos, his default), his pose (got a basic idea in mind), the camera angle (I think it's basically from the front, with a slight tilt to the side), and the layers on his body (how his clothes interact with his armor--for instance, is his scarf over or under the shoulderpads, and if under, is the scarf over or under the armor itself) is all quite difficult.

I know I have it in me, but it's going to take effort to get my mind on that plane, where I have the ability to keep a consistent vision in my head and bring it 100% (rather than, say, 50%) to paper.