What's in a Name?

[kaasirpent]

  by  NatalieMaynor 

Why 'kaasirpent? Why 'Prose and Kaa'? I'm sure these questions have been plaguing you since at least the length of this very sentence. Maybe longer. Maybe as far back as three sentences! :)

The answer is a bit odd, perhaps.

<insert flashback effect here>

Picture it: The University of Alabama, January 5, 1990. I'm at my apartment around 9:30 PM, and I've been trying to find this one book forever. I had located books two and three of a trilogy, but book one was literally nowhere to be found, and I had looked in every book store I could find in two of the largest cities in Alabama. By driving to them. This was pre-Google, pre-Amazon, and pre-most-every-resource-you-can-think-of. I only had one recourse: I decided to ask Usenet.

Usenet, for those of you who don't know, started waaaaay back in the paleolithic era of computers (1980) and was a gargantuan, international messaging system with no central authority. There were lists divided into interest categories, further divided into sub-, sub-sub-, and sub-sub-sub-categories. And so on. I posted on rec.arts.sf-lovers because I had had some success before that finding obscure book titles and the like. I hoped someone would know how I could get my hands on Below the Root by Zilpha Keatley Snyder.

As an afterthought, I asked about Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince series, to see if anyone knew when the next book was coming out.

This guy named Ian answered me. We started chatting over email. We discovered that we liked most of the same books, and had much to say about them. We would urge each other to read books by massive tease-spoilers (You won't BELIEVE when <CENSORED> does <CENSORED> and then <CENSORED>!) When email got old, we moved it up a step to BITNET RELAY (look it up) and chatted there. My name on BITNET RELAY was either GrimReaper or Otter (depending on my mood). Ian was at Penn State and I was at the University of Alabama. And we had hours-long conversations for free. It was awesome. But RELAY had problems. So to alleviate those, Ian told me about this really awesome new thing called a 'MUD.' That stood for Multi-User Dungeon. Basically, you could build rooms and exits and objects and deck them out with descriptions and some minor programming, and get online with dozens or hundreds of other players and interact. For 1990, it was truly awesome.

Because we both adored the Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey, we took it upon ourselves to build a dragon Weyr on this MUD, which was called, simply, tinymud. At the time, it was the only one.

Ian brought in a few more people and we had this Weyr really going. I became S'thel and Ian was Cyinth. We also had Kirra and R'nice and I think someone else. It was fantastic and a lot of fun role-playing.

Until.

The database literally got too big for the machine to handle, and the game . . . went down. Just . . . went away. Like that. This was maybe six months or so after we had connected for the first time. We started looking for a new place to play.

TinyTIM came along about four months later (March 18, 1990). It was based on the code for tinymud, which was now known as tinyclassic, because it was so five minutes ago, which might as well be precambrian by online standards. We got on there by early summer, started rebuilding our weyr, and I became first Otter, then S'thel on there as well.

Then came Halloween in 1991. The wizards of the game (those who had ultimate control over every aspect of it) decided to have a party, but everyone would "wear a costume" (i.e., change our descriptions to something else).

I adore The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. Adore. It. So I went through the characters, trying to roleplay them: Mowgli, Shere Khan, Bagheera, and Baloo, before finally settling on Kaa, the snake.

I'm big into puns, see. And on TinyTIM, I could use that to my advantage. I programmed myself to hissss everything, sso that anything I ssaid came out like thiss, with all my ssibilantss doubled. I worked out ways a snake could shrug and do other actions, and I went to the (online) party.

I sort of never went back to S'thel. I created another character called Kaa, moved to it, and left S'thel for special Weyr occasions.

In essence, I became Kaa sometime in the late fall or early winter of 1991. And I have used Kaa, KaaSerpent, or some variation of it every since. Chances are, if you see a 'kaa' or 'kaaserpent' user on a forum, there's a very good chance it's me.

Then, in 2003, I noticed that the usual crowd on TIM was getting smaller and smaller. The conversations we were having were becoming disjointed. I was hearing the second half of conversations people had obviously started elsewhere. I asked.

"Oh, it's this 'blog' called LiveJournal. We're all over there. You should check it out." (By all, they meant some fifty or sixty people.) [EDITED 7/13/2018 to note that I have since ported my LiveJournal to DreamWidth, where you're reading this, thanks to LJ becoming a tool of Putin's insane campaign against the LGBTQ+ community.]

I resisted. I had nothing to say, really. I had an old website some TIM-friends were hosting on their server for free, but it was full of rants and drivel, updated weekly or more. It was 'kaa.trippy.org,' and it's still there if you're masochistic enough to go look for it.

So I finally had to come to LiveJournal. I wanted 'kaa,' but some Russian guy had, annoyingly, already taken it. Then my love of puns came out. Instead of getting 'kaaserpent,' I thought to myself that 'kaa serpent' sounded like a name and title. Kaa, Sir Pent. It's like a (really awful) pun. Which was all I needed.

And thus, kaasirpent was born.

A few years later (2008ish) when I got serious about writing fiction again, my love for puns came out again when I was redesigning my theme for LiveJournal. I needed a name for the blog. Before this it had been "Kaa's Lair" (yawwwwn).

I liked writing. I liked Kaa. I liked puns. I liked ranting about stuff. So, "pros and cons" became "Prose and Kaa."

And thus endeth my (extremely long and rambly and probably very boring — I'm sorry) story about How My Blog Got Its Name.

I have three blogs. The stories of those are here (Philosophidian) and here (WriteWright), respectively. This was the longest one, I promise. The other two are quite short and sweet and to the point.

---

This post is in response to The Writer's Post Blog Hop 2014 #4 prompt, Explain the Name of Your Blog. The host is Suzy Que. Other entries are linked from her blog post.

Comments

[suzy que (from livejournal.com)]

Not sssure if this comment goesss onto this possst. Enjoyed the evolution of your name. I sssstudied The Jungle Book in ssstandard 5 in India. We all enjoyed sssaying Rikitikitavi - now that'sss a thought for a blog name! Thanksss for linking up.

[kaasirpent]

Riki Tiki Tavi was another of my favorite Kipling tales. I read TJB and the second one after having seen the Disney film, and was surprised to find that in the story Kaa's Hunting, the snake is the "hero" of the story. In that he actually saves Mowgli, Bagheera, and Baloo (I think; it's been a while) from the Bandar-Log (monkeys).

And yet, Disney, in their wisdom, made Kaa the villain of that piece in the movie. I felt very slighted for poor Kaa. :)