Acelessthan3

I'm pretty sure I set this one as a scheduled post for last Thursday. Dammit, blogger, quit doing this to my scheduled posts. I schedule them to post at a certain time, post them at that time, geez, is that so hard? Oh well, posting now.

Who is Acelessthan3?

I'm pretty sure that at his most basic level, Aceless is some extension of me. It's been my chosen pseudonym for over half a year now, the façade I hide behind whenever I need to come up with a new username.

I like to think though that Aceless is a little more and a little less than me. Aceless is me in a mask, the parapersonality through which escapes all the jokes and intelligence I don't let myself show, the elegant fool on stage. He is the Locke and Demosthenes to my Peter and Valentine (please get that book reference whether you love or hate the books). But at the same time, he's so much more superficial and surface level, lacking the depth and experience of his own identity, always sharing and drawing symbiotically upon my knowledge and experience.

Of course, it's getting hard to tell the two apart. It's not like Aceless is some exclusive avatar I use while gaming with a specific circle of friends, no, virtually all of my presence online has become or is in the process of becoming an annex to the construction that is Acelessthan3.

And to think, it all started with a deck of cards.

Origins

I was at summer camp up near Leavenworth (yes, Power of Hope, the same one I talk about all the time. You would too if you had the chance to experience it, which you do have the chance, I'm telling you that you do. Look them up: http://powerofhope.org) a little over a year ago. One of the youth there with me was a boy by the name of Cyrus.

Now, Cyrus was a bit of a clown and a thespian. He had a knack for taking your attention that made him a natural magician of the stage. It was really no surprise that he did card tricks. At the end of the week, he gave away his deck of cards. Pick a card, any card and it's yours to keep. I think you can guess which card I drew.

Well flash forward to I think it was around January 2009. I'm signing up for some internet site; I don't rightly remember which one, but the site's asking me to create a username and I want one that's unique to me. I flip through the pages of the journal I got at camp and still write in, and I stop on the page where I've taped the card.

That's it! I'll use the card. But to put as my username theaceofhearts is altogether too mundane and in all likelihood already taken. I need something original. So I look at the familiar ace of hearts shape and imagine how I would type that. Perhaps if I used the well-known emoticon for a heart: A<3? No, special characters aren't allowed. And then it hits me, spell out A<3. Acelessthan3 and my internet pseudonym is born. Incorporation

It was around this time that I started talking to a rather tech-savvy friend who convinced me to sign up for several more social networking and data storage sites, each requiring a username. By now I'd become fond of Acelessthan3. It's distinctive and with the creation of my plurk , thanks to my enrollment in a literature class called Nanotexts, and twitter accounts had gained a level of personality as I wrote through Aceless.

When I started designing and silk-screening my own t-shirts, A<3 became my signature so you would know it was an Acelessthan3 original print. When I make mix CDs for friends, I always take the time to create cover art to go with it and invariably sign the bottom with "An Acelessthan3 Original Mix." Hell, I've even begun to sign personal letters with Danny A heart (since I don't know the coding to make an actual heart appear there, with the heart being underneath the A in true card style). If I weren't so comfortable in my identity as Acelessthan3, I'd be worried about this overlap.