Severence[edit]

As my username implies, my nick is Severence. Yes, I know it's misspelled, there's a reason for that.

Before January 26, 1997, I didn't have any real alias that I'd used, online or otherwise. Before that time I'd used a few I just came up with out of the blue, Jeztyr and Hybrid being the two I used most often. On the aforementioned day that changed though. The reason I remember it was that day was because I'd gone over to a friend of my dad's for a Super Bowl party to watch the Packers and Patriots play. At the house his friend and 2 sons had the house fully wired so you could connect to the lan in any room in the house. Not too shabby for 97. Anyway during the party there were a good 30 people there, and at least half of us were playing Quake 1 DM on the network. So, very long story short, there was a guy there who was playing Quake and his nick was Severance. Basically, I liked the way it sounded and skanked it for myself, but I didn't want to steal it outright so I changed the 'a' to an 'e'. After 8+ years of using Severence almost exclusively in anywhere that matters I've grown to like the way I spell it better anyway.

As for using Severance's nick for inspiration, for a while there I wasn't entirely sure it was ethically ok to do. Let me explain. I'm a tech guy, I'm into computer hardware and software, as I said above in my stats I've been A+ trained and certified for years now, and most of my friends from high school are also tech guys, especially the main bulk of which I used to hang out with in high school (about 7-10 of us). We'd constantly be having fests at one of two of our houses, and if not having fests we'd play games and bullshit online on ICQ. Fests, by the way, are our version of LAN parties. We don't have LAN parties, we throw fests, basically short for lan fest. LAN parties are little things you get together for a few hours for and then leave; fests are events, usually 2-3 days long, where everyone brings their own drinks (usually a 12-24 pack of pop a person), money for grub to order out (pizza, subs, whatever), and boxes (computers for the layman), you usually have to fight for a bed/couch/chair/good spot of floor to sleep on if you sleep at all, and file shar....err, exchange of electronic information, and networked gaming goodness goes on the whole time. Occasionally a friend or two would bring over an actual hard copy of an anime movie or series (VHS, etc) and we'd chill and watch those for a while too. What usually contributed to the initiation of a fest? Actually we had fests for of lots of things: in lieu of traditional crapass birthday parties, during school vacations, during summer break, and no reason at all except to have one.

Jesus, I got way off track there. Back to the whole nick thing. I and the good majority of my friends are techs, and we may or may not have been into certain... let's say extracurricular activities regarding computers. Regardless, with the kinds of activities and places we may or may not have frequented there are a certain set of ethics and rules. I wasn't exactly sure if how I came up with Severence was totally legit so shortly after I did I asked my friends about it. We talked about it for a while and finally decided that it was an acceptable nick as far as the circumstances were concerned. The way we saw it I just had used Severance's nick for inspiration and I varied the spelling so it wasn't exactly the same. We figured also that even if I'd outright taken the name Severance as long as I wasn't planning on using it to use maliciously against the guy or to impersonate him that it would've been cool too.