The Fnrrf Ygm Schnish Wiki... not quite dead?

While doing some random Google searching, I stumbled across something which, at a glance, appears to be a backed-up copy of my Fnrrf Ygm Schnish wiki.  It's from sometime in mid-2013, so it wouldn't be an entirely up-to-date version of the wiki, but still... any backed-up copy at all is a whole hell of a lot better than nothing.  And I don't think I've done much with the wiki in 2014 anyway, since it's been having trouble loading this whole year (and then back in the spring it died altogether), so hopefully these backups will have at least the vast majority of the stuff I put up on there.

Unfortunately I can't check it out just yet, because the files are in 7zip format and I don't have my own computer at the moment (am using school computers, which won't let me install new programs like 7zip), but I have downloaded these files and copied them onto my USB drive just in case.

I'm not sure what I'll do with the FYS Wiki material now that I no longer have a wiki to put it on, but it'll be nice to have it around for reference at least--part of the reason why I was making the wiki in the first place was just to have all of my stuff in one place so I can keep track of little details and come up with backstory information and such and not lose track of it.

EDIT: Nevermind the above.  Turns out the so-called backup was actually more along the lines of a "worthless piece of shit"--the only pages it backed up were the main page, the "help" page, and the various categories.  In other words... the exact things I wouldn't ever actually need to back up because they contain little-to-no actual content.  But they were really good about making sure every single last image I had uploaded to the wiki was preserved... though I still have all of those (since they were, y'know, UPLOADED rather than written on-site) so that's pretty much "worthless piece of shit" too.  Ugh. >_<

...well, that really sucks...

It seems like, after all the work I've put into it, the FnrrfYgmSchnish wiki is dead--the site that was hosting it (wikkii.com) seems to be down, possibly for good, and it's taken all of its hosted wikis down with it.  This means that I've lost every last bit of information that was contained on the site, with only a few exceptions--the "Fnrrf Ygm Schnish timeline" page (which I saved a copy of on my computer a while back before the site went down) and my old Supernum stories from the elementary school days (which I had saved on my computer all along rather than only putting them on the wiki.)

That means that, aside from the stuff mentioned in the timeline, my memory is the only remaining record of a buttload of information that I'd put on there.  I'm guessing that I'll have to start writing down every last thing that I can remember about my characters into a file (or multiple files) on my computer and using that.  I probably should've done that first rather than putting it all on the wiki, honestly... maybe I'll make this stuff available in some way eventually (...maybe a Nummorro book or something? I know several people I've talked to in real life have suggested that people would buy such a thing), but for now the focus is getting it all down before years pass and I start to forget minor details, like what's happened with a lot of the stuff I was working on in elementary/middle/high school already.

Burijeoo and their names

The Burijeoo are an unusual species of humanoid creatures with gooey bodies, long hair, and razor-sharp claws. They are generally fairly tall in comparison to humans, though their height (like many things about their appearance) varies depending on their age and which stage they have reached.
The Burijeoo homeworld is Brijetoo, a world covered mainly by shallow oceans and small landmasses dotted with caves. Much of the planet was badly damaged in a war that took place 90,000 years ago, and to this day most surface water is unsafe to drink, forcing the Burijeoo to rely on underground springs and complex filtering devices just to survive. It is the condition of their planet that forces the Burijeoo to constantly search the nherbis for a new place to live, pushing certain extreme factions to attempt invasions of other worlds.

-- Burijeoo page, Fnrrf Ygm Schnish wiki

EDIT: Note that since the site hosting the FYS wiki has died, those wiki links above will no longer work.  I have replaced the links to pictures hosted on the wiki so this page is still mostly intact, though!

Yep... for some reason while I was randomly walking around in town today, I got an idea to write a blog post about the Burijeoo.  Specifically, their names, how I came up with them, and recurring word-fragments that show up in them.  I'm not sure why this particular topic popped into my head, but it did, so I figured "why not?" and went ahead and typed this up.

Anyway... for those of you who might not know, here's a bit of history on the Burijeoo so you won't be completely confused by this.  You could just read the wiki page I linked above, I guess, but I'll probably go into a lot more detail on some things here.  The Burijeoo are an alien species that I made up all the way back in 5th grade.  They weren't called "Burijeoo" at the time, of course; originally I called them "Bridgetoids" and they were basically made up as a spoof of one of my classmates at the time.  Shouldn't be hard to guess what her name was, considering the name I gave the alien species that she had unwillingly inspired.  The original Bridgetoids were kind of dumb, honestly--they basically just looked like a bunch of little clones of the person they were based on, with their only real defining features being "long, red hair" and "sharp claws."  It's probably not that surprising that I only had one actual Bridgetoid character who had a name back then (the queen of the entire species, who was based on... well, that should be pretty obvious by now.)

Sometime after that point, I decided to actually expand on them a bit and ended up with the idea that their "looks like a human girl but with claws" form was actually a disguise, and that their true forms were different.  I had already drawn the slug-with-a-girl-head infant Bridgetoids (and already named them "Snuzzoos") by this point, so when I started coming up with the other Bridgetoid stages the earlier ones ended up kind of similar--their heads still looked about the same (except that their eyes were now glowing yellow and they had no other visible features most of the time--even their mouths were only sometimes drawn), but they now had green, gooey bodies which could melt into goo so they could fit into small spaces or slip under doors, with even longer claws than before.  For some reason, I randomly based their Stage 3, Stage 4, and Stage 5 forms on toys that I had around the time--Stage 3 ended up being some kind of crab monster, Stage 4 was a baby Godzilla, and Stage 5 was one of the dinosaur-things from the arcade game Primal Rage.  Stage 6, however, was an original design--the picture above has a Stage 6 Burijeoo in the back, the one with the really dark red hair and layer of nearly black, super-strong exoskeleton over her entire body.  The design for Stage 6 hasn't really changed much since then, aside from being drawn a lot better now than it was back in... 1996 or 1997 or whenever it was that I first drew that form.  Of course, I have gone back and redesigned Stages 3, 4, and 5 to better fit as "in-between" points between the gooey, mostly-harmless Stage 2 and scary, armored Stage 6 rather than randomly changing into entirely different creatures three times in a row.  If I'm remembering right, those redesigns happened sometime around the year 2000 or maybe 2001; whenever it was, I do know that by the time I was working on some of my old OHRRPGCE games I had already switched over to something that was much closer to the current designs.  Speaking of that, here's the current designs in order, from Snuzzoo all the way up to Stage 6:

Now on to what I wanted to write about in the first place: Burijeoo names, how I came up with them, some very "how names tend to work"-ish patterns I've noticed in them even though at first I pretty much was just making up whatever rather than thinking about making them work as part of a whole language, and even how you can "Burijeoo-ify" your own name! Well, okay, no guarantees on that last one (I haven't come up with official "Burijeoo versions" of every name, after all... and if you're male, it may be harder since there hasn't been much need for male Burijeoo names for most of the past 90,000 years or so.)

Okay then.  Burijeoo names! First of all, "Burijeoo" isn't really the Burijeoo word for themselves, or at least it wasn't what they called themselves originally; that's actually a Khurbyish term, literally meaning "red-haired ones" (buri = red, je = hair, oo = general term for people or living things of any sort), which was what Khurbyish-speakers called them after first encountering the species.  Though hair colors other than red are possible for Burijeoo (blonde being pretty common, brown being somewhat rare, and more unusual colors showing up occasionally), presumably the first Khurbyish-speakers who bumped into them saw a lot of red hair and decided that was one of their most notable features.  The Burijeoo originally called themselves "Brijuo" (also the name of their ancient language), though they have adopted "Burijeoo" and the Khurbyish language it came from since then.

As mentioned above, originally I only had one actual named Burijeoo character.  And she was just named... well, Bridget.  She did have a brief a name-change in 2004 (becoming "Burije" instead), until I decided just a few years later that having a species called "Burijeoo" with a queen named "Burije" was only slightly less cheesy than having a species named "Bridgetoids" with a queen named "Bridget"... since then, the character has been Bridget (though technically, as a name of Brijuo origin, it should be "Brijet"... she spells it the human way to better blend in here on Earth) and her species has been the Burijeoo.

In the early 2000s, I started to come up with more Burijeoo characters.  At first, I for some reason decided to just give them all human names; this was before the "Bridget to Burije" change I mentioned a couple sentences ago, of course. The second Burijeoo character added to my stories/games/etc. was based on my younger sister and just called "Julia." (I still have a character based on my sister, but she is no longer a Burijeoo as of my most recent games/stories/etc.)  At some point I finally realized it was kind of silly for my species of scary, clawed alien invaders to randomly have normal human girl's names, though (at least if those were their real names, anyway, and not just aliases they were going by in order to blend in with the human population!), and I started to change things around a bit.

The method for making new Burijeoo names, at least in cases of Burijeoo based on real people, was basically "take a real name, distort it around a little bit, and make it end in AI."  I'm not sure why "ai" ended up being the favorite name-ending syllable for the Burijeoo, but that "rule" has pretty much stuck--there are a lot of Burijeoo names that end with some variation, including plain "-ai" names as well as "-jai," "-zai," and even "-juai."  That last one was probably the first one I actually thought of, as the earliest "real Burijeoo names" that I remember having made up were Lojuai and Mejuai.  Basically, this was how the development of those names went:

1. Take a real name.  In this case, the name of a person that I was basing a Burijeoo character on.
2. Drop off part of it.  Starting with "Meghan" and trimming off the second syllable, this leaves you with just plain "Me."
3. Add some weird-sounding mix of letters.  And this is where "Me" becomes "Mejuai."  The "Me" here is pronounced as "may," by the way, not "meh" and definitely not like the English word "me."

Of course, this method wasn't only used for names I actually made characters for.  At some point I ended up making a "translate your name to Khurbyish" page on my old website, and among the more standard Khurbyish names were some Burijeoo-style names.  Here's the Burijeoo names that were included among that list and also what human name they were derived from (so if your name happens to be on this list, figuring out your Burijeoo name becomes a whole lot easier, heh.)

• Amnai (Amanda)
• Amai (Amy)
• Asuljai (Ashley and all variations in spelling)
• Kilai (Christina, Christine, and variations)
• Syai (Sierra, Cierra, etc.)
• Cuuyiai (Courtney)
• Neljuai (Danielle)
• Jizuzai (Jessica)
• Kreiai (Kayla)
• Laruai (Laura)
• Lojuai (Lauren)
• Maruai (Mary, Maria, etc.)
• Mejuai (Meghan, Megan, etc.)
• Meljuai (Melanie)
• Marujai (Michelle)
• Pojuai (Paula, Pauline)
• Erruai (Rebecca)
• Sazuai (Susan, Sue, etc.)

Yep, all of those were "ends in -ai" Burijeoo names that I had made up all the way back in the early/mid-2000s.  There's definitely some recurring patterns there: all of them end in "-ai," but beyond that there's also several "-jai" and "-juai" names, a couple of "-uai" without the J, and also a "-zai" (which you'll see again in a second.)  Going by these patterns, you could probably "Burijeoo-ize" most female names by taking a few letters out (or shifting the spelling/pronunciation a bit) and changing the ending to some variation of "-ai" instead of whatever it was before.  As a random example, you could probably turn a name like "Pamela" into something like "Pamai" or "Pamlai" or something like that.  Or "Katie" could turn into something like "Ketai" or "Katuai."  Of course, not all names that I "Burijeoo-ized" in the past were that straightforward ("Erruai" sure doesn't look much like "Rebecca," and I'm honestly not sure why they were even listed as matching names in the first place), but in the case of names that change that much you're basically just making up a new name anyway so I guess it doesn't matter too much either way.

I think I was just going through my yearbook or something and coming up with Burijeoo versions of a bunch of random people's names, because I'm fairly sure I never knew anyone with some of the names listed above back then.  But anyway, out of that bunch, only the names Asuljai, Kilai, Lojuai, and Mejuai were ever actually used for a character (three of which were at least loosely based on a real person who had the matching human name, one of which was just made up from nowhere and only had a name from this list by coincidence.)  Out of that bunch, only two of them still exist as Burijeoo (Lojuai and Mejuai have been re-written as plain ol' humans since then, and as such no longer have Burijeoo names), and of those two only Asuljai has been drawn by me anytime even remotely recently.  Here's a picture of her, drawn maybe around late 2010 or early 2011, that shows her in both her true Burijeoo form (Stage 4, in her case) and her human disguise:.

So... yeah, there's a lot of examples of "-ai" names, and they've been around for a pretty long time.  Since then, though, I've only made up a couple more "-ai" names--in 2004 there was Lomejai (who was actually a fused form of Lojuai and Mejuai, hence the combined name), and sometime years later than that I ended up giving the name "Iilyezai" to a character I made up many years before that who was originally nameless.

Not all Burijeoo names end in "-ai," though.  That was mostly a thing I did with those Burijeoo names that were derived from real-life human names; Burijeoo whose names were unrelated to any real person's name were a bit different (though, as mentioned with Iilyezai above, sometimes even those ended up being "-ai" names.)  A couple of examples from the earliest batch of Burijeoo names I can remember were Uyu and Tirenal (which, funnily enough, I seem to have originally intended to be pronounced exactly like "Tylenol" except with an R instead of the first L.  Not sure why.)  More recently, there've also been some other names that don't fit into the "-ai" pattern, like Gyaralia, Gura, Meija, Nazala, and Uraaiynu.  These names sort of seem to form another pattern--that if a Burijeoo name doesn't end in "-ai," there's a good chance it will end in "-a" instead.  Uraaiynu is an exception... but then again, her name is considered strange even by Burijeoo standards--she's actually only half-Burijeoo, and her mother named her using the English alphabet rather than the traditional Brijuo alphabet (which Burijeoo use in order to write the Khurbyish language; Brijuo as its own language is basically dead at this point.)  Which would explain the odd spelling--it's what you get when you ask an alien who's used to one alphabet to come up with a name in a different alphabet, while still sort of making an attempt to have it sound like an alien name.  Oh, and here's a picture of her (drawn way back in 2008, so unfortunately it's not the greatest, but I don't have a new one):

I've even come up with one male Burijeoo name--Momuju, the name that belongs to the only male (half-)Burijeoo known to still exist.  Here's a picture of him:
 

He's the only one left mostly because male Burijeoo have not really existed for a long time--the same war that ruined their planet 90,000 years ago also resulted in the vast majority of the male population dying off.  There are no male "pureblood" Burijeoo left now.  The only reason male half-Burijeoo are possible is the involvement of a father from another species, and also magic (literally, Burijeoo use magic to disguise themselves as other species... and crossbreeding wouldn't work if they were in their true forms at the time.)

But yeah... since Momuju is the only male of his kind to have ever made an appearance, I suppose it might be safe to go ahead and assume that "-ju" is the male equivalent of "-jai," and that other male Burijeoo names would probably end in something like "-u" or "-ju" pretty often.  And though I didn't include it among the many "-ai" names that I listed on here, the name Momuju actually did originate from the list mentioned above--appropriately enough, as the equivalent of a name I've seen used by both guys and girls (Morgan.)  Assuming that the gender-neutralness of the name carries over to the Burijeoo version even though it ends in "-ju" instead of "-jai," his parents would've been pretty smart to give him that name, since it would be the kind of name that could be mentioned to other Burijeoo without necessarily giving away the fact that he isn't female (well, at least until they see him in person or hear his voice, anyway.  Then it would be kind of obvious.)

So I guess now the guys should be able to "Burijeoo-ize" their names too if they want.  So I guess "Robert" could turn into "Robaju" or "Rabeju" or something like that, and a name like "Timothy" could become "Timoju" or "Timaju" or maybe something like "Timeu" (tih-may-oo) if you go with "-u" being a possible name-ending for the guys (instead of just "-ju"), kind of like "-ai" is for the girls.  These newly-made guys' names do sound a bit awkward to me compared to the girls' names, though, and it seems like "add -u or -ju onto a name-fragment" might not work so well with shorter names... so maybe the method of converting them needs a bit of work.  Fortunately, I doubt I'll ever need to come up with many male Burijeoo names (unless I ever end up doing something in the "90,000+ years ago" time period when a population of them still existed, anyway), so I don't have to worry too much about that. XD

The Fnrrf Ygm Schnish wiki lives!

If you've tried to look at the Fnrrf Ygm Schnish wiki anytime in the past week or so, you probably noticed that it wouldn't load.  I'm not sure why, but apparently the whole Wikki wiki hosting service was down for a while and none of their pages were working.  But now it's up and running again! So go look at that, if you haven't already.

Fnrrf Ygm Schnish wiki weirdness

I wonder why it is that Matsu Cracke's page on the Fnrrf Ygm Schnish wiki gets so many hits compared to all of the other pages on there? Seriously... I just checked the numbers of hits for every page and he's at 152, which is just short of overtaking the Fnrrf Ygm Schnish timeline page (which has probably the most information out of the entire wiki, being a timeline of pretty much everything that's ever happened in the Fnrrf Ygm Schnish universe.)  That's kind of ridiculous.

And on top of that, Matsu is way ahead of any other character's page; the next-highest are Ma-Du Nebozu (with 130) and Eddie Ril (with 108.)  Other pages in that range are mostly pages of entire species (like the Yenrab, Blurbys, and K'hyurbhis... with the Numnums, oddly, lagging behind a bit), which get linked to a ton and are mentioned on a lot of other pages.

I wonder why Matsu, of all characters, is getting so much attention on the wiki?  His page hasn't been on there incredibly long (it's only from mid-2011, there's a bunch of pages on there nearly a year older) and isn't linked from all that many other pages (only 9, plus a redirect for if you just type in "Matsu"), at least when compared to the other most-popular pages (for comparison: Adam Nebozu has more than three times that number in actual links, plus two redirects for "Adam" and "Ma-Du Nebozu.")  So I have no idea what could be making so many people look at this one guy's page more than others.

Maybe it's Japanese people, or people searching for Japanese stuff... since apparently "matsu" means "pine tree" in Japanese (I didn't know this when I came up with the name, of course; he has nothing to do with trees.)  That's all I can think of, anyway.

The Fnrrf Ygm Schnish wiki is growing again!

Yeah... lately I've actually gotten some work in on expanding the Fnrrf Ygm Schnish wiki, adding more than a dozen new pages just in the past week or so.  In addition to filling in some stuff that was missing before (characters like Upchukk and Nummy, items like the Blubbermax pill, and critters like the Nummorrian centipede), I've also started adding pages about some of my old games and stories.  If you happened to see the wiki in its earliest days, you might remember that these things used to have their own pages but then they got deleted when I decided that the wiki wasn't going to cover my old stuff that's no longer being used.  Well, I've changed my mind on the issue, at least when it comes to old stories and games--even though characters and such from my old stuff will continue to not be covered, the stories and games themselves now have pages once again.

A few examples: an old Supernum story titled "Supernum Meets Commander Keen," the first ZZT game I ever made, and my attempt at making a card game in 6th grade.

EDIT: The wiki is dead, so none of these links will work anymore. :(