ariyana

So Ariyana Lerilin Kylstram was my first ever AD&D (2nd ed) character. Elven Blade (one of them funky bard classes from the Bard's handbook), and quite entertaining to play.

Summer before senior year (1993) in HS I was an assistant councillor at BSA Summer camp, met some cool guys from this troop in Felton, including my friend (now residing at Circus) Pradeep. 'Beep' (common nickname) and I kept in touch via snail-mail for my entire senior year, and I probably should have considered us "dating" for the amount of interest we showed in the rest of the outside world. We saw each other 2-3 times over that year, once at his Eagle Scout Ceremony, in the fall, once over the winter, and, I think, about once in the spring.

We sent long letters. Really long letters. Soon, the beginnings of the letters were actually sort of a seperate conversation between his character (Lord Shadow Dragonsbane) and mine (The Lady Ariyana of House Kylstram). They started out innocently enough, fleshing out who the characters were, and soon they took on a life of their own. Then, the two characters started courting. Then Beep and I did.

I remember trying to choose a college (I'd narrowed it down to UCSD or UCSC, and literally spent every other day waffling between them).... and I finally settled on UCSC. I called Beep (an extravagent thing, because it was long distance), and, as a joke, told him I'd decided to go to UCSD. That didn't go over too well. Then I told him I was joking, and he was relieved, but not very happy with my joke.

Since I was going to be coming out to UCSC, he tried to introduce me to UNIX by giving me a dialup # for his computer, so I could create an account. He walked me through it, and I remember my first disastrous attempts to try to use 'mail' to send him email. No go. *sigh*

That was spring 1994.

So then I got to UCSC, with my Compaq luggable (tiny green screen, 2 big 5.25" floppy slots to the right, 2400 baud modem), and the girl across the hall (O'dette) showed me how to set up my Athena account (she had a piece of paper to walk you through it, though I found the on-screen instructions more useful).

I knew I wanted to send Beep email, and that was the whole reason I was bothering to set up my account.

I didn't even fathom doing more interesting things with it than sending email to a few people. So I chose ariyana. Luckily, it was free. =>

geekgurlSince then I've only held one other real account name. At darkwater, I'm ladycat. That goes back to having Susan 'mommycat' as my surrogate big
sister and mom all rolled into one, so since she had started calling me ladycat, I took that at darkwater. Everywhere else, I've pretty much always been ariyana, or ariyanak, or something similar.

Someday, maybe, I'll rebuild an OS from scratch with 'root' changed to 'temptation' for amusement value, but that's probably the only other login I've ever really wanted.

So that's the story of The Lady Ariyana of House Kylstram... (says she who has been saddled with all sorts of work email addresses, the worst of which was eodenwel, at Borland/Inprise/ borland.com/Borland.. quite happy to just be erino@redhat.com, now)