my heart is a glorious machine;

Here, have some overdue linkage. 

i. 20000-Names.com. I found this when Googling for the meaning of the name Nox (I knew it, but I wanted to be sure), and it looks to be an excellent resource, despite it sort of being Made of Banner Advertisements. You can search for names by nationality, which isn't anything special, as Behind the Name has, I'm sure, a vaster database (and is prettier and ad-less!), and, more interestingly, you can also search for names by particular categories of meaning--dark names, colour names, moon names, and various other sections with titles in varying degrees of silliness. What you get are names with meanings relating to your category from a rather decent amount of languages (depending on your category). So, 'dream names' gets me Ialu, an Egyptian name meaning 'field of dreams', Gaelic Aisling ('dream, vision'), and Hungarian Almos ('dreamy; sleepy' or 'the dreamt one'), among others. It's not always your best bet for things, but when you're looking for a name with a particular symbolic meaning (especially for minor characters, who I am rubbish at naming out of thin air), it's a rather nice source. (Also, there are, like, a billion 'wolf names'. That? Was me, stifling a chortle.) 

ii. International Children's Digital Library. I'm kind of fangirling this right now, actually. In a nutshell, it's got children's books from all over the world that are either in the public domain, or they've somehow got permission to publish scans online. Some of these books are gloriously, exquisitely old--I've been skimming this 1910 publication of Celtic Tales by Louey Chisholm with very 1910 illustrations by Katherine Cameron. There seem to be a lot of folktales and fairy tales and the like, now that I'm looking. It appears that a substantial amount of these scans comes from the Library of Congress. And, gorblimey, some of these books are age-spotted and weathered and they must smell magnificent up close. If you like old books or children's literature, you really ought to poke about and find something to read. 


I'm kind of not doing anything productive at the moment. Argh. Still trying to write and failing rather dismally. Oh, well, today was rather cosy, anyway.