Back when I was much younger, before the internet was public and the Web was not yet born, I would spend evenings with a married couple and another friend playing parlor and board games to pass the time and entertain ourselves. Occasionally, we wouldn’t feel the urge to play a game, and would instead spend the evening talking about the events of the day.
Often, these discussions would evolve into political topics, and a common one was how each of us would reshape the country and the world were we in a position of power to do so. As we delved into such subjects, we would always have to qualify our goals and ambitions with “this would be too expensive” or “this would never get the support required”.
At one point, one of the people in the discussion realized that we were pointlessly limiting ourselves in the discussion. The purpose was not to imagine what was politically or economically possible, but to break out of those bounds to propose plans and ideas that might have no real world potential. His frustration at our constant qualifications was, at one memorable moment, to break into the discussion and say, “Why are you even worried about how to make this happen? Why don’t you just pretend you’re the supreme dark lord of the universe, and you can do whatever you want, except change physics, chemistry, space and time? This challenge was taken up immediately, and freed up the discussion in such a dramatic way that we had much more interesting and stimulating discussions thereafter.
There were many more evenings of pleasant gaming and stimulating discussion, but regrettably, one of the key debaters in this group died very unexpectedly of diabetic coma. With his passing also died the game and discussion nights.
It is in tribute to those heady evenings, when we explored beyond the realm of the possible, that I took up the mantle of Supreme Dark Lord Of The Universe. I created my first online identity with that acronym, as my email address of sdlotu@iac.net, in 1994. I have used that same name continuously to this day, through many changes of ISP.