Waterfox! Or how I'm running out of ideas for things to write while adding in my fixation with the color blue. Sounds about right… just click and read the rambling! It might be entertaining!

We’ve established that I pull ideas from the strangest of places (like going to take my uncle some lunch during his shift at Factory Connection, for instance). And yes, the 2015 WaterFox logo does play into something I’m gonna say… maybe, I don’t know; think of this like No Effort November or Unscripted & Casual, I don’t know. Anyway, one of my ideas for how Aleks (a previous iteration of him) relates to this logo. It wasn’t a major thing, but it also kinda was… then again, I have a pair of underwear with Japanese writing because I mistook the Kanji as Traditional Chinese Hanzi, so take that at whatever you will.

First, I’ll start with a previous iteration of Aleks. He had blue hair, especially when I tried to write him as a vampire god, the blue theme rolled on (blue hair dye to cover up the (un)natural inky-black/extremely-dark brown, blue glasses to cover up hungry, red eyes, the list can go on). Everything was blue, sosumi. Anyway, I’ve got another character that I don’t use anymore, her name is Melanie. She’s half-human/half-alien or humanoid alien (depending on my mood). Everything Aleks was, she wasn’t. He is a bored megagenius driving (at the time) a Zastava Koral (Yugo for all of you not living in Eastern Europe) because “It works.”, she’s a peppy idiot who can be called a social butterfly driving a 2015 Volkswagen Beetle. Aleks does what he believes is sensible and is a night owl, Melanie grows roses from placenta and is up with the sun. When Aleks was a vampire, she was a lycan. The list goes on if you can imagine it.

I’m not gonna lie here, but I will say a few different things I’ve tried to write Aleks in or as, and they include as as high school student, predictably. Somewhere, I have a snippet of a story I tried to write in college, but it never went anywhere. I think it was about the main character getting attacked by (and soon after meeting) an alternate version of himself as an animal. The details are fuzzy, but I’ll try to find it and maybe post it to my scraps on Fur Affinity… I think I used my English teacher as a character in it (I’m not sure, but it feels like I might’ve), so I’ll see about that detail and get in touch with him because when it comes to privacy, I’m kinda crazy about it… why did I use my name as the name for the website?

Anyway, some of the crazier things I’ve written kinda left me wondering if I’d be committed to a sanitarium if I let them see the light of day… probably a good thing that some of them were corrupted or overwritten, thanks to some shoddy flash storage I used at the time. Sadly, though, I do miss some of the things that I lost, but it’s probably for the best. Drafts I wrote as a freshman in high school (one of which was inspired by the fact that my uncle has a ‘84 Wasserboxer VW Vanagon (if memory serves)… my friend hates the vanagon in the story, probably with good reason) had some really crazy premises, though the original companion for what would become Aleksey was, personality-wise, based off of Raven from the original Teen Titans. She was a girl, she had fangs for teeth, and she had some powers. That was the extent of the similarities if you take away the personality aspect.

It was at this point I named the character Seth and gave up on the idea of Rachel being up-front (or even existent at all) with the next story. I think I may have written her a couple or three times after that, but I don’t think so, aside from the occasional name-drop. I saw The Parent Trap and </SCORPION> a year or two after I pretty-much forgot about Rachel and got the idea to give Aleks a gambling problem and bring back the companion character (this time, she’d actually be his girlfriend) and make her closer to how he acts. Early on, I didn’t do much with her (hell, I didn’t even name her, she had like five names in one story), then I saw the character Moondancer from My Little Pony, so I used that as a placeholder name after realizing how unintentionally-similar the characters were. She and Sasha (I think that was Aleksey's name at the time) were running from something in his Yugo, it starts going way-too-fast for its own good, they end up in the My Little Pony world, and after the scare and shock ends, they move into the town library, where Sasha soon after kicks Chloe out and they get back together when the main characters get Sasha and Chloe to a casino the town built (I don’t remember the specifics, but I also know the story was mostly general ideas… maybe one day I’ll find it and write it for Fur Affinity) to save their friendship. Anyway, they’re both wearing sunglasses, it’s dark, they’re pissing off everyone because they’re master gamblers or something and end up at the last table (with an audience of quite literally everyone) sitting across from each other in dark sunglasses, all of the money in the pot staying in the middle, and they finish off every dice, deck of cards, every roulette wheel, everything, before finally having a much-needed conversation (they got physically violent with each other when he kicked her out… early sign) and walking away with the money. Don’t ask me how.

For a while, every computer that I used in my stories was some form of older Macintosh model (blame SheepShaver and later Basilisk II) and either Mac OS 7 or Mac OS 9. The laptop was always either a PowerBook 5300c, PowerBook 170, PowerBook G3 Kanga, or Indigo iBook G3 Clamshell. Sometimes, if a desktop was involved, it would just be a 90s PowerMac, then I swapped to Linux and started picturing my own stuff. As for the Macs, I never name-dropped a model, but those are what I pictured in my head. I think at one time, I pictured a Mac LC of some sort, but I could be mistaken. The way Aleks dresses can actually be traced back to when I’d sneak downstairs to the basement and watch Daria as a kid in our old house. It was just kind of fitting and I even found myself mimicking the dress of the character later on (in my case, it was a jacket, t-shirt, jeans, and slip-on shoes). It was just standard-grade ‘90s stuff, nothing special. It was functional and you could probably build a whole outfit for under $25. Since the character ended up not giving a damn about what he wore, this was perfect. Before I pictured what the character would actually wear, I just pictured him wearing whatever I was wearing at the moment. The reasons he keeps to himself originally was because he was an outsider, which kind of taught him to be a loner and “do him” (as Seth), he was too vested in knowledge and technology, as well as brash (as Alex), just a pain in the ass (as Alex, Sasha, and Aleksey), and now it’s because he doesn’t see very many people as worth dealing with (as Aleksey, also voiding out the other reasons that are still very-much prevalent).

I’d originally wanted to talk about some of my other characters, but this post is on its way to becoming an essay, so I’ll save them for the next time I don’t have anything come to mind. That being said, check back next week for more ramblings… or actual stuff, whichever I manage to pull out of my brain. See ya!