What's In A Name....

I figured I oughta tackle this before I get too deep into anything else. What's with the handle, right?

Like most things on the net, it's the name I could still get and it's the one I'm best known by in cyberspace. It started with a character I had to roll up for a Cyberpunk 2020 RPG. He was a netrunner, a hacker basically, and I was trying to figure out how to translate the Shadow into cyberpunk. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men"--red scarf, black slouch, big schnoz, a .45 in each hand--that guy. Naming my character "Shadow" was too easy in my mind, too obvious and pretentious. I went through various permutations of dark, shade, shadow, mystery, etc etc. Dark Karma was the one that stuck. It sounded ominous and mysterious. And it doesn't mean any one thing. "Karma" as in destiny, spirit, aura? Is having a dark one necessarily bad, and for whom? Anyway it had the feel I wanted. Style triumphs; substance had better keep up.

(FWIW it turned into a interesting character and he has the makings of a cool story: a hacker who had a black-cat rep for making things crash just by walking past them, literally.)

Anyway, when Jamie and I decided to sign up on a friend's BBS back in late 1992, that was my handle. Most of the kids thought it had sufficient street cred (especially when I was able to punt losers offline). Ever since, it's a handle I keep going back to. It makes people sit up and look twice in a chat room. "Kewl, wassat mean?" Now and again, I can someone online...er, borrow it. (Remind me to trademark it.)

And when the thought of my own stupid blog was too big to ignore, I just knew it had to be Dark Karma. I have to be angry, surly, and snide somewhere. I would've sign up on Dead Journal, but they sold out and stopped offering free accounts. (I'll bet the sales dept here at Blogger will love that!) If I'm stylin', whatever. That's okay too, I guess. As long as I leave a mark--something inoperable. Dark Karma isn't necessarily good luck or bad. I'm sure it's bad news for somebody. But the secret, kiddies, is to make it bad news for someone you don't like!

Now there's a thought for this Election Day, huh? Vote angry! Vote to hurt, shoot to kill, aim to maim! The system has failed for a lot of people, but only because they've failed to use it. If you can't vote for something, vote against something else!

And now, to make sure this still fits in with the miasma of narcissism that is blogdom, a Gratuitous Shallow Moment: "Oh, the Backstreet Boys are so the bomb!!!!"

Stink bomb, perhaps. Shaddup, go back to the record store and check out some CD racks full of grown-ups, you dinkette.

And here I was thinking this wasn't going to sound angry enough by the end....