Prose and Kaa

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.

( This got long and rambly. For the short version, don't click this. )

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.

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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.