k so, when I was 15 (this would have been february of 1991, right around valentine's day, in fact), I got my first real computer, an amiga 500 with 512k of ram, one DSDD floppy drive, and an 1200baud AmigaModem.

That same night, I'd made accounts on every bbs listed in the back of ComputerShopper (gotta start some-where..); This basically amounted to The Nashville Exchange, a big multi-line pay bbs, and The Amiga Advocate, the only amiga bbs in the nashville area, and sadly, out of my local calling area. anyway, not very interesting. but, after a week or so of trolling thru the bbslist sigs on TNE, i came across the number for "Who Am I?" bbs, and from there i entered the magical world of citadel bbses.

Citbbses, at least the ones i then found my way onto, required the use of a handle, something new to me, and being 15 and all, i chose the handle "shadow". sounded good and menacing, and went over well in the war sigs on the commodore 64 Image BBSes i'd begun to frequent.

So that lasted about six months.. round the time of my 16th birthday, it occurred to me that i might want a new handle that was somehow less generic (Especially since someone else was already using the handle 'shadow' on a wide variety of other bbses) .. so i started to experiment with other handles, and briefly i was known as quetzalcoatl.

very briefly.

While reading an old Manhunter comic, i was kinda captivated by a scene in which the villain (a japanese assassin) thinks he has killed the manhunter, but in fact it was a lookalike, and in rage he screams out 'KAGEMUSHA' .. translated in the footnotes as "lit. shadow warrior - an impostor or doppleganger" .. and i thought, wow, i'm already shadow, and i'm a yankee kinda posing as a southerner (i lived in nashville for about a year altogether, migrating there from milwaukee in sept of '90, and moving back to milwaukee thanksgiving '91), what could be more perfect than kagemusha?

Well, i liked it, but it went over like a lead balloon, everyone said the old handle was cooler, but that just made me like it more. uh so that's pretty much that, i guess, up thru december of 98.. graduated from college at the end of that semester, and decided to move to SF.. .

Figured it was time for a fresh start, so i retired the handle, and resorted to using my given name, 'benadam' ... made sense to me

Well. after being out here a few months, on a whim i went back to using 'kagemusha', and suddenly it seemed a lot more appropriate, as i'd been out here amongst y'all for nigh unto six months, and only a handful of people had made the conection that i was the same kid that'd been on icb since 1993. shadow warrior indeed. earlier this summer, tho, i decided to retire the handle, cuz im not really undercover anymore, and i figured, ten years behind the mask was enough.

ah well, i guess that's it. somehow i thought it'd be more interesting.

-ben