In Which I Expound Upon the Subject of "Why Kaa?"

[kaasirpent]

Someone asked me the other day why I had chosen the name "Kaa." I was absolutely sure I had mentioned it on either LiveJournal or my old website. The old site has a little of the story, but I have never said anything on LJ. I have bemoaned that Russian git who "stole" the kaa account and is making no use of it that I can see. But that's neither here nor there.

Here, then, is the history of...well, me. Online. :)


ca. 1987 - I discover BITNET RELAY and get on to talk to...people who were sitting in the same computer lab as me. One chair over. Because it's so much cooler than actually, you know...talking to them. I am GrimReaper. (I had just lost my father at the time, and I guess the Grim Reaper was on my mind.)

ca. 1987/8 - I meet Orion (dorsai) and Olias and Orbit (elims), changed my name to Otter, and my friends became Orcas (adsmguy) and ONona. Together: We were the O-Team! We fought...uh...well, not much, really. Being, you know...in different states. And schools. But I digress.

10/14/1989 21:14 CST - I post my very first question to usenet. rec.arts.sf-lovers. Looking for the name of the Green Knowe series of books by Lucy M. Boston. I found this out because someone answered my questions via email and told me. :) I still have those emails, somewhere.

01/05/1990 16:24 CST - I post a question about the Green Sky Trilogy by Zilpha K. Snyder, and mentioned Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince in passing.

01/08/1990 12:43 EST - I get a lone reply from a guy named Ian Smith (ian_smith) at the University of Pennsylvania. Both of the titles struck a chord.

ca. 1990, post January 8th - We started talking in email. Soon, we were on BITNET RELAY, but the inability of the UGA node to remain up for more than 20 minutes at a time severely limited our ability to waste time. So...

ca. 1990, spring - Ian recommended we try something called a "MUD," which I was told stood for "Multi-User Dungeon." It was called "tinyMUD." I connected as "Otter." Ian had built a dragon Weyr modeled after Anne McCaffrey's Pern series of novels, and since I was a fan, too, I changed my name to S'thel. (Sithel is the main character of a novel I've had in my head for...decades. Which I will eventually write. Really.)

Soon after that, two more people joined our Weyr: Kirra (ddreslough) and R'nice. Ian was the dragon Cyinth. We had fun building the Weyr and learning how to code within the confines of the game.

4/29/1990 - Disaster! tinyMUD's database reached the limit that could be stored in the 32M of RAM the host system had. The mud closed. Whatever would the intrepid members of the Weyr do? It looked very bad, indeed.

We tried various other muds, but none of them seemed to "fit." Mbongo was actually my first choice, and I went ahead and built a huge chunk of the Weyr myself, just to show the others. I was Q'ril. Then Mbongo went belly-up. I was also on Islandia (as GrimReaper, and later as Otter) and a number of other MU*s that I can't even remember because they're all long, long gone.

ca. Summer, 1990 - R'nice discovers a brand new MUD that had opened sometime before tinyMUD's closure. It wasn't rigidly controlled like many others, nor did it have building restrictions. Anyone could build anything they wanted. And it existed as a parody of some of the rigidly controlled, building-restricted MUDs. At last! A home!

We moved to TinyTIM. I connected as Otter, quickly changed my name to S'thel, created my bronze dragon Dalith, and R'nice (Renth), Cyinth, Kirra (Greneth) and I began building Tegar Weyr. Others joined the Weyr over time, but we were the core group from tinyMUD.

08/27/1990 - I start my job at Tuscaloosa Steel Corporation. I quickly discover that TELNET works from there. MUDding at work! Woohoo! (Later, I would "infect" coworkers Geoff (craftsman) and Yvonne (veldah) with the bug, and they joined TIM, too.)

ca. 11/16/1990 - I fly to Philadelphia, PA to attend PhilCon '90 and to meet Ian, Dee (Kirra), and Clay (Dee's husband invisiblemouth). Much fun was had. My very first experience spending the night in a hotel room with 16 other people I don't know. Yay. I won't mention the petty larceny of the door peepholes if they don't. Oh, darn.)

08/23/1991 - I attended my first TIM party (TIMBeach at Gulf Shores, Alabama) and actually met R'nice, Marcia, Jost (jost), Trout.Complex, Black_Dougal, Sketch, and many others with whom I'd been talking for the last year or more. I only stayed one day because I had something else I had to do on the 24th. I don't remember eating (not counting PopTarts) or sleeping. :)

ca. September, 1993 - I attended my second TIM party (Woodystock I, or as it was known at the time, "The North Carolina Party"). I know that at this time I was still S'thel, because I "signed on" when I arrived as "S'thel." I met many more TIMfolk there, and stayed longer, and slept in a hotel room I shared with "Seamus" (adsmguy) (who was also Orcas in the O-Team).

ca. 1994 - I decided at some point that the whole "Pern" thing was getting...tired. And I needed a new character to play on TIM. So I started thinking. Otter? No, that had already run its course. I liked The Jungle Book (the Disney movie), so I thought of Shere Khan. But no spaces were allowed in the names, and Shere.Khan, Shere-Khan, Shere_Khan, and ShereKhan looked dumb. Baloo? Ehh...not a lot of roleplaying you can do with a lazy bear. Mowgli? I tried it (and Baloo) for a while, but it...just didn't feel right. Bagheera? It had possibility, and I tried it for a while, too, but it, too, didn't feel right. I needed—

Wait. Kaa. The snake. Roleplaying. I could hiss...coil...never reference my limbs...do everything with coils...it had potential!

So I connected as 'Kaa' for the first time. I told everyone it was me, S'thel, so I didn't have to re-acquaint myself with everyone under false pretenses.

I've never looked back. I have been "Kaa" in one form or another since that day. If the 'kaa' top-level domains (.org, .com, .net, etc.) had not been taken by a string of organizations, other people, and companies, I would have owned at least one of them long ago. I mean, how dare Kilian And Associates, the Korean-American Association, Kids Across America, and other such unworthy endeavors keep me from my destined domain? Truly, how dare they?

The fun part came when I realized that "Kaa" could be used in many punny ways, as well. I would become FitzKaa on St. Patrick's Day, the EasterSnakey on Easter, KaauldLangSyne on New Years Day, SantaKaa on Christmas, KaaBoom on the fourth of July, SepulKaa on Halloween, KaarborDay on Arbor Day...you name it, I probably did it at some point. Not to mention substituting 'Kaa' in any word with a 'kah' sound in it. "Kaanstitution," "InKaansequential," etc.

I wrote a hisser so that Kaa always doubled his 's' sounds when he spoke, but also included 'x' and 'c,' but only when the 'c' was followed by 'e,' 'i,' or 'y' (ceiling, city, cyborg, but not cook or cask). Later, I added foreign words (celtic is not hissed unless it's the basketball team, which is "Ccelticss"; façade is; isle & island & aisle have silent 's'; etc.). Long-time TIMssterss are probably ass ussed to decciphering my lissped sspeech ass it'ss possssible to get in 18 yearss. :)

So, the short, accurate answer is that because of Ian, I know a bunch of people I wouldn't otherwise know (including all of LiveJournal, because someone I met on TIM (bigmeanie) led me to LJ), and they know me as "Kaa" or "KaaSirpent" or "KaaSerpent" or something along those lines.

All because I wanted to know about the Green Sky Trilogy and Melanie Rawn, and had the idea to ask on this newfangled¹ thing called 'usenet.' :)

So, technically, I have Zilpha K. Snyder and Melanie Rawn to thank for many of my longest friendships.

I wonder if either of them would not be completely freaked out if I wrote them and explained? Nah, who needs more restraining orders? I mean...restraining orders. Not more restraining orders. Really.

---

1. That's a tiny joke. Usenet was grey-bearded by the time I 'discovered' it in 1989.

Here's the somewhat smoother answer off my old website. I leave out all the stuff about trying the other Jungle Book characters first and portray me as going directly to Kaa. Not strictly true, but not altogether false, either. :)

Why "Kaa"? I've been asked this a number of times. I'll try to answer. One of my favorite films of all time is Walt Disney's "The Jungle Book" Gotta love that cuh-ra-zy jazz, man! But before I saw the movie as an adult (I'm sure I saw it as a child, but I have little or no recollection since it was released when I was three years old), I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. When I saw the movie, I realized that Disney had villain-ized Kaa. I can understand this—he is a snake, after all, and snakes are (rather unfortunately) viewed in our society as "evil." All because of some misty-eyed fairy tale about a woman, an apple, and the wrath of a god. But I digress. In Kipling's The Jungle Book, Kaa is not strictly a villain. He is, at worst, out for himself. If the needs of others coincide with his own best interests, he'll help. But next time, he might just decide the same people he helped last time are now good candidates for dinner. He's not about to go slithering through the jungle like some herpetic Mary Poppins, looking for people to help. In short, he's misunderstood. As a much younger me, I felt misunderstood. So when I was looking for a new persona for my online role-playing, Kaa came to mind. He's great to role-play.

Remember in the Disney movie how the monkeys steal Mowgli from Baloo while Baloo is being his usual, lazy self, and then Baloo and Bagheera rescue Mowgli from their clutches? Would it surprise you to know that Kaa is actually the hero of that story? Well, read "Kaa's Hunting" by Rudyard Kipling. That's the story they "Disnified" to turn into the King Louie sequence in the movie. They took the hero out, turned him into Shere Khan's whiny stooge, and pandered to the masses who think of snakes as evil. It also bears repeating (no pun intended) that the character of Baloo was also "dumbed down" by Disney. In Kipling's book, he's a wise creature who is the teacher of the Law of the Jungle to all the cubs. Disney turned him into a lazy idiot. Only Bagheera and Shere Khan escaped absolute Disnification.

Because of role-playing Kaa, most of my e-mail addresses are 'Kaa@somethingorother.com/org/net/etc.' This gets me in trouble because 1) it's only 3 letters long, so I get spam addressed to "kaa, kab, kac, kad...."; 2) it stands for a number of things, including Korean-American Association, Kids Across America, and Killian and Associates, all of which are fine organizations, but they're not me; 3) a lot of people have the initials KAA; I get cubic buttloads of misdirected e-mail to Kristen, Kyle, Kevin, Kamali, Kathy...; and 4) people who think they're getting kaa@isp.com where I already have that address don't seem to be aware that the isp is automatically appending random numbers after their e-mail address, so I get replies from people who were originally mailed by kaa123@isp.com. It can be very frustrating. But I persevere.

So, there you have it. Two explanations for the price of one!

Comments

LOL!

[ddreslough.livejournal.com]

I categorically deny any rumor of a peephole existing anywhere in my hoard o' crap here at Casa Dreslough. :)

(Eez shiny! I liiiike it...)

[lepusdomesticus.livejournal.com]

I was going to mention that Kaa was the "hero" for eating all those nasty monkeys that had kidnapped Mowgli, but you said it. Of course, one doesn't expect much else from Disney. The subtlety in books is always lost when translated to film. Bagheera was always my favorite because he had a mystery in his past, and was the one who loved Mowgli best because they were the same in a way--Bagheera had been raised in captivity and had escaped to find his true home in the jungle, and Mowgli was raised in the jungle, but had to destroy that symbol of man's primal fear of the wild (the tiger) in order to return to domestication. He wasn't happy about it in the end, though. The book never says, but one gets the impression that Mowgli could never fit in anywhere, and probably left India, or at least that rural part he was from, before he found any happiness with his own kind at all. Actually, the whole book (all six--oh dear, there are six, right?--stories) can be seen as a proto-environmentalist parable. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. : )

[lepusdomesticus.livejournal.com]

Sorry. I just realized how random that comment was...Why one should never post in haste. Next time I'll just make a snake joke and move on. : )

[kaasirpent]

What random? Random is good. :)

[ladywhy.livejournal.com]

OK, I have to say that the only good snake is a dead snake in my world... and I say that regardless of Eve. :)

But, I also love the character Kaa (from the book... the movie, not so much) and, of course, a character in literature is far superior to the same character in a movie. Especially a Disney movie. I love Disney, I'm just saying.

[kaasirpent]

A lot of people feel that way. But I think that if most people knew which snakes were beneficial and which were poisonous, we'd have a lot fewer needlessly dead, helpful snakes around.

For instance, you might like to have a rat snake hanging around out where you are, because I'm sure there are rats in all that kudzu. :) Garter snakes are harmless to people and pets, and kind of cute, in a reptilian sort of way.

In Alabama, you only have to watch for a few types. I think if people educate themselves, it's beneficial both to the snakes and to the people.

On the other hand, any snake in my house (uninvited) is probably going to be a dead snake, and any snake that slithers out from under my feet or probably within several feet of me is, by definition, a dangerous snake until I see proof to the contrary. :)

I also think there's a reason people are afraid of spiders and snakes. They're just so...alien. They don't look like they belong on our planet. I think it's that alienness that makes them the butt of fears and attack more than anything else.