Names are hard
Feb. 11th, 2012 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethAm trying to find names for the human form avatar that first meets people on their way in to the matrix.
He looks like David Tennant. Because. He has lots of interesting voices.
He/it chose the face out of the memory of the people that just plugged in, and will choose a name the same way. So that's one bloke from Scotland and one from England, called Aisha, which probably implies other sorts of names she could know. But I kind of don't want to give David Tennant an arabic name, especially just because it sounds pretty.
I went through all the unisex names on Behind the Name and ended up with Avery, Emery and Kiran before I closed them all and gave up. A very Matrix? Memory Matrix? Key ran Matrix. They all sound boring.
There were some names ending in Mat, like he made a squish name instead of calling himself Matrix. Hikmat, Ismat, Nimat. But there's the culture thing.
I thought about Bailey or Jess, for connotations of restrictions. Wiki says jess is a programming language as well as a thing to tie birds down, which would be a cheap pun but it's not like I resist those often. But both names sound American in my head.
It can't be something like Sage that does what it says because he's only choosing a name because the girl is being all 'that's not a name' at him.
I don't know, I'm not inspired. He's a bit protean to actually name.
I should probably not worry about naming him unless I actually write this stuff.
Have also been trying to name the planet. It has names of its own, but it has a bazillion of them, all the different characters have their own version. Thousands of years, tons of different languages, they call it different things.
I've been thinking they don't have the same alive/dead/inert distinction we do. Like, they look at a lump of rock and think of it as dead, because they don't have a category that would put it outside of the dead-alive cycle. Life transforms into other life until it goes wrong, and then it's dead.
So to them, their planet isn't earth or water, it's a living ecosystem.
Which makes Gaia the obvious comparison.
But there's quite a lot of Gaias already, including an online world, so I can't just use that.
Also it's just another goddess name exactly like Terra, it's all Mother Earth stuff.
The people that live there are aware their world was colonised, they're the descendants of terraformers.
Would they think of the Motherworld as being somewhere else, or is it more a Grandmotherworld, and theirs is the mother?
Probably though they don't want to gender it like that because they breed all their tech so they know how many it takes.
Ecology words would be useful, ecosphere or biosphere or something. Huh, wiki says ecology comes from that greek oikos word I read about in greek tragedy lessons, where an oikos was a family or household plus all the people working for them, and also a basic economic and agricultural unit. Big farms, sort of. Wiki says it has other more modern meanings too. Complicated word.
I'd decided that the farm was the planet's basic unit of organisation, and that population was fairly sparse because the planet was unfairly difficult. Oikos is relevant concept, but comes with much gender baggage.
I'd kind of like to write civilisations that dump the gender baggage. But if they're going to be diverse, that probably means a lot of them being gits in a wide variety of ways.
Ecosphere is a good word. I like the sound. It's not all religion and evocative, but it's an idea that covers how they think of their world.
... it is also trademarked. I probably need a different word then.
I also need a catchy name for the series. I'm tagging everything Rhodri because that's nice and searchable, but it isn't specifically about him.
The name needs to not have Star in it. Honestly, the number of different things with Star in the name. Plus they're not so much visiting the stars in general, just this one place.
Also it needs to avoid god names, mythology names, and numbers. Greek letters are right out.
And despite being about a lost city full of monsters I think Lost and Monster are words to avoid too.
I know that rules out practically everything I've already got on my shelves.
I don't know, calling it Lost City Of Monsters Reached Through A Stone Circle would mean it does what it says on the tin. One function of names is to make promises. Call something Explorers and you know what they're doing every week. I'm not sure what my lot do every week, which probably explains it being hard to name.
It can't be outland or otherworld. There's already lots of things called those.
They go to another planet with advanced biotech.
They find a lost city that looks like a 60s university, with ziggurats. Television has yet to have a show called Ziggurat as far as the internet knows, so there's a backup name right there. It doesn't tell you what it is at all, but you can at least search for it. No, wait, I found a film that's shown at film festivals. EVERYthing has been used somewhere!
Okay, to figure out the distinctive features that need to be conveyed by the name, actual story must be written.
So these are three names I need to make story on before I'll know what shape they need to be, and it don't matter much until I've got story.
That was a productive hour of pondering there then.
He looks like David Tennant. Because. He has lots of interesting voices.
He/it chose the face out of the memory of the people that just plugged in, and will choose a name the same way. So that's one bloke from Scotland and one from England, called Aisha, which probably implies other sorts of names she could know. But I kind of don't want to give David Tennant an arabic name, especially just because it sounds pretty.
I went through all the unisex names on Behind the Name and ended up with Avery, Emery and Kiran before I closed them all and gave up. A very Matrix? Memory Matrix? Key ran Matrix. They all sound boring.
There were some names ending in Mat, like he made a squish name instead of calling himself Matrix. Hikmat, Ismat, Nimat. But there's the culture thing.
I thought about Bailey or Jess, for connotations of restrictions. Wiki says jess is a programming language as well as a thing to tie birds down, which would be a cheap pun but it's not like I resist those often. But both names sound American in my head.
It can't be something like Sage that does what it says because he's only choosing a name because the girl is being all 'that's not a name' at him.
I don't know, I'm not inspired. He's a bit protean to actually name.
I should probably not worry about naming him unless I actually write this stuff.
Have also been trying to name the planet. It has names of its own, but it has a bazillion of them, all the different characters have their own version. Thousands of years, tons of different languages, they call it different things.
I've been thinking they don't have the same alive/dead/inert distinction we do. Like, they look at a lump of rock and think of it as dead, because they don't have a category that would put it outside of the dead-alive cycle. Life transforms into other life until it goes wrong, and then it's dead.
So to them, their planet isn't earth or water, it's a living ecosystem.
Which makes Gaia the obvious comparison.
But there's quite a lot of Gaias already, including an online world, so I can't just use that.
Also it's just another goddess name exactly like Terra, it's all Mother Earth stuff.
The people that live there are aware their world was colonised, they're the descendants of terraformers.
Would they think of the Motherworld as being somewhere else, or is it more a Grandmotherworld, and theirs is the mother?
Probably though they don't want to gender it like that because they breed all their tech so they know how many it takes.
Ecology words would be useful, ecosphere or biosphere or something. Huh, wiki says ecology comes from that greek oikos word I read about in greek tragedy lessons, where an oikos was a family or household plus all the people working for them, and also a basic economic and agricultural unit. Big farms, sort of. Wiki says it has other more modern meanings too. Complicated word.
I'd decided that the farm was the planet's basic unit of organisation, and that population was fairly sparse because the planet was unfairly difficult. Oikos is relevant concept, but comes with much gender baggage.
I'd kind of like to write civilisations that dump the gender baggage. But if they're going to be diverse, that probably means a lot of them being gits in a wide variety of ways.
Ecosphere is a good word. I like the sound. It's not all religion and evocative, but it's an idea that covers how they think of their world.
... it is also trademarked. I probably need a different word then.
I also need a catchy name for the series. I'm tagging everything Rhodri because that's nice and searchable, but it isn't specifically about him.
The name needs to not have Star in it. Honestly, the number of different things with Star in the name. Plus they're not so much visiting the stars in general, just this one place.
Also it needs to avoid god names, mythology names, and numbers. Greek letters are right out.
And despite being about a lost city full of monsters I think Lost and Monster are words to avoid too.
I know that rules out practically everything I've already got on my shelves.
I don't know, calling it Lost City Of Monsters Reached Through A Stone Circle would mean it does what it says on the tin. One function of names is to make promises. Call something Explorers and you know what they're doing every week. I'm not sure what my lot do every week, which probably explains it being hard to name.
It can't be outland or otherworld. There's already lots of things called those.
They go to another planet with advanced biotech.
They find a lost city that looks like a 60s university, with ziggurats. Television has yet to have a show called Ziggurat as far as the internet knows, so there's a backup name right there. It doesn't tell you what it is at all, but you can at least search for it. No, wait, I found a film that's shown at film festivals. EVERYthing has been used somewhere!
Okay, to figure out the distinctive features that need to be conveyed by the name, actual story must be written.
So these are three names I need to make story on before I'll know what shape they need to be, and it don't matter much until I've got story.
That was a productive hour of pondering there then.
OT
Date: 2012-02-11 11:10 am (UTC)"Residents of Ara are complaining their village is being neglected by the municipal authority which was united with the nearby town Ar’ara. The residents are asking to cancel the unification with Ar’ara. There is no garbage collection in the village, the roads are in a bad condition, the school is unsafe, unemployment rates are high and the village looks neglected."
haha
Date: 2012-02-12 01:16 am (UTC)and now to something completely different
Date: 2012-02-12 11:00 am (UTC)