Four weeks! I’ve been writing at least 500 words every day for four full weeks. Another day and a half and I’ll have a Lunar Month’s worth of blog posts on Lunar Obverse. How cool is that?
I don’t know that I’ve ever explained what Lunar Obverse refers to. I’m not going to go digging in the archives to see if that’s true or not. Maybe it’s time for a Station Identification Break; a periodic reminder for those of you who are new, and those of you who have been around and might just want a reminder. A useful post to point to in the future (although, to be honest, I’ve got so many posts on here that a few years’ from now, I’m far more likely to do what I am doing now: punt on searching and linking this post, and just re-explain).
My online handle, if I run it together without CamelCasing it, is often read as Luna Rob Verse, which is amusing, and sometimes has led people who read it that way as being a femme name. Reading it that way also leads folk to think I’m a poet; alas, no. I’ve written some poetry, here and there, but I’m primarily a prose writer. Very little verse from this Luna Rob Verse. And my name is not Rob, Robert, Robbie, Bob or Bobbie, nor is it Robin. I’m Brian (although my dad is Bob, so I have sometimes called him Luna Bob Verse (OK, I haven’t, I just thought about that, but now I pretty much have to, don’t I?))
No, the handle is properly (at least from my perspective) read as Lunar Obverse. The Lunar part is clearly connected to my family name of Moon, which has generated so many nicknames for me through the years. Moonie, Moonman, Moon Pie. Reverend Moon was a popular cult leader in the 70s and 80s, and because of that someone shouted out “Reverend Moon!” when I walked across the stage to pick up my high school diploma.
Back in the early days of the various Nets, before all of them were Inter-connected to make a Network of Networks, or Internet, and I had to pick a handle that was not my name, I chose… Mithras, because he was a mystery cult figure from around the time of Christ or shortly before, and being an atheist and Christian skeptic at an early age, it was the kind of subtle trolling of Christians that I enjoyed (I was, and remain, deeply nerdy).
But I remember a bulletin board (kids, ask your parents to ask their grandparents what a “bulletin board system (BBS)” was) I wanted to sign up to, and it was popular enough that “Mithras” was already taken. Rather than be “Mithras1964” or some such abomination, I swerved and chose “Lunar”. Handles without numbers were much cooler. And it stuck.
As the networks converged, though, Lunar became harder and harder to hang on to as a unique name, and eventually, I added Obverse, which I thought was really clever. See, in coin collecting, a hobby I have never ever done, coin sides aren’t called “heads” and “tails”, they’re called “obverse” and “reverse”. Since Earth’s Moon only reveals one side to Earth, it can be like a coin. The Dark Side of the Moon would be the “reverse”, and the Bright Side is… the “obverse”.
Welcome, therefore, to the part of me I share with the whole world: Lunar Obverse, the Bright Side of a Brian Moon.