People and places

No tagging, but anyone who likes talking about themselves as much as JB and I do is welcome.

(I had to adapt some of these to refer to a blog and not an L-Journal)

1. My username is ______ because ______.

My username is BenVarkentine. Dull, huh? When I first came online about 10 years ago it was Saulchurch, which I think is a place in Ireland, but I took it from a character in the Doctor Who novels by Paul Cornell. When I first came online I spent a lot of time on the Doctor Who Usenet group (and was voted "Rookie of the Year," thank you very much).

Some old comic book letter pages still have that name in them, too (as well as this one).

Anyway, it wasn't even a few years in on rec.arts.drwho that I discovered the dark side of online posting, which is that some people posting anonymously feel freer to "flame" than they would if people knew who they were.

Of course, my ego may also have been involved. But anyway, when I left AOL I decided just to make my given name my screen name.

2. My name is _____ because ______.

My name is Ben after a character in Thomas Wolfe's book and play Look Homeward, Angel...

His mind gathered itself out of the wreckage of little things: out of all that the world had shown or taught him he could remember now only the great star above the town, and the light that had swung over the hill, and the fresh sod upon Ben’s grave, and the wind, and far sounds and music . . .

...and also a friend my mom had before I was born (not my father, unless she's been lying to me for 36 years...which is unlikely but not impossible).

3. My blog is titled ____ because ____.

My blog is titled a dragon dancing with the Buddha because I came across the cartoon at top, fell in love with and wanted to feature it and it wouldn't fit anywhere else. Plus dragons have always been my favorite mythological beastie, and I've been investigating Buddhism lately, so it seemed to fall into place.

Previously it was Dictionopolis in Digitopolis, inspired by the movie & book The Phantom Tollbooth.



...and I want this way-cool homemade (by Heidi Kenney) plush version of Tock.

(And my blog before that was The Sound of the Crowd, after the Human League song)

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.

I don't have one, this being a blog & not an LJ. However, nor do I have a "blogroll." Between you and me, I've never quite seen the point.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.

A picture of Butters from South Park to go with the quote from the character. I can't remember now if I found the picture first and put the quote with it or vice versa, but it was one or the other.

As a rule, it changes whenever I come across what seems to me an appropriate picture and/or quote. Once it was even actually a picture of me. They're not all South Park quotes, of course, although they could be, like, y'know, this one, for example.



6. My blog description is:

You can't see it because it's hidden behind the comic strip, but in the past it's tended to be quotes, song lyrics or lines of dialogue that took my fancy. Most recently something Alan Coil said in a comment.