Mythology!
I read practically every entry on Wikipedia about Greek, Roman and Japanese mythological creatures and characters while I was trying to decide on the domain name. It was great fun rediscovering some creatures I knew, but had forgotten about, like the Leshy and Rusalka from Quest for Glory IV.
It was also fascinating to discover the actual root of some other ones whose names I had seen used, but for symbolically similar characters. For example, Briareus, Cottus and Gyges are the three Hecatonchires giants with 100 arms and 50 heads that helped Zeus overthrow the Titans after Zeus rescued them from Tartarus, the hell below hell itself in mythology. If you’ve read the Ghost in the Shell Appleseed manga [edit: Wow, I'm retarded. I can't believe I mixed those two up, much less that it took me almost two years to notice], most of these names should be familiar.
Briareos is one of the main characters, a Hecatonchires type cyborg who are known to be able to connect to an incredible amount of systems and control them (the hundred hands the mythos talks about). Kottus is one of the police robots who tends to surpress enemies by splattering them on walls and such (Cottus is supposed to mean “the striker” or “the furious”). Gyges means big-limbed and sounds an awful lot like Guges, the type of landmate that Deunan uses. Finally, Tartarus is the section of Olympus that the bioroids of the city are created and raised (I wonder what Shirow is trying to say there). Probably the definition for the diety Tartarus makes more sense since it says he is the “unbounded first-existing “thing” from which the Light and the cosmos is born”.
To be honest, I was about to make this part of the first post, but it ballooned way out of control (I have a tendency to do that when I get talking about something I’m interested in) and it didn’t really fit in with the rest of the post which was supposed to be an introduction, not a history lesson. Just beware when I finally start getting money again and I can actually start buying books.
