It’s been an exciting couple of days! After years of wrestling with the massive namelists, I’ve finally come up with a solution that I think will work.
Give the Name Lists a gander and let me know if you like their new setup!
I basically tried to replicate the old, pre-database namelists. Actually, trying to do that made the website go down for a few hours yesterday and early this morning, so I gave up on making it exactly like the old pages. But, the way it is now is more organized, easier to browse, and should do the trick.
One of the new features is the Villain Names – a section for all of your original villainous characters. Here you’ll find all of the blood-stained oppressors you could possibly need.
Another new-ish feature, which is based on the old namelists, is that when you click on a word used to make a name, for example agarwaen, you’ll see a full list of all of the names that were made with that word. Since the names are links to their own pages, you can view the list of words used to make the name, for example: Mirdaniel. That list of words is also clickable, so you can find other names using the same words. This will make it easier to find themed names for families of characters.
Another big change is that I’ve cut the name-lists down in size by a LOT. There were several reasons for this. The gender balance was terrible, with far more female names than genderless or male names. So, I’ve cut out most of the names made with name-suffixes, leaving just 4 per a word-type. There was a lot of redundant words in the old namelists, so I’ve also cut out a lot of the noun-versions of adjectives, focusing on more descriptive names. I’ve cleared out a lot of names that I deemed to be “boring,” because I felt that too many of the names didn’t spark any interesting ideas about the characters they would be attached to. And lastly, at close to 30,000 names in the old lists, the namelists were almost impossible to manage. Every little change took forever to implement, and the load on the databases was too much. The result is: we’re down to 7800 names.
I hope that this makes the names easier to browse, funner to use, and easier for me to handle.
Márienna!