Here is the original genesis story of my gaming alter-ego name, FlamingWeenie, written in the Fall of 2002. I didn't use to do a lot of network gaming. Oh sure, back in late Onalaska High School my friend Aric Catron and I would play Duke Nukem 3D via dialing each other's modems. And later in Centralia Community College we and some friends played the same game on the LAN. I even played a spot of Team Fortress with my team at Microsoft. This is but a small amount, however, when you consider the waves of rabid gamers and their incessant skill. I was, for the most part, an unimpressive adversary.

It was at eNom, Inc., however, when the long anticipated Warcraft III came out. I immediately purchased the game and painfully convinced a few co-workers to try and play a couple sessions with me. This ended up becoming an end of the week tradition, infamously known as Warcraft Friday.

Initially there was almost more excitement than play time. Many an hour were spent solving problems. Machines would crash, fail to connect, and of course there existed the lovely process of getting everything installed. Eventually, however, we all settled into it quite nicely. Nowadays the problems getting games started lie in synchronized participation.

I'd played Warcraft 2 a couple times on Battle.net and gotten my bottom booted more than I'd like to say. In all the games I played, which to be sure were probably little more than a dozen, I only won one (against another newbie who was also new to the footman/grunt rush tactic as I was). Playing this new version, I came to realize I wasn't half bad. And beyond that I was pretty good, but I still attribute most of my wins to luck and intimidation. Despite my reasoning, the phrase around the office has become "Neil always wins".

The alias FlamingWeenie came about during the long ago time when people would change their nicknames more frequently than now. The only ones I recall as being constant were TrickyFishy (Chris Cowherd) and Pink Poodle (Laurent Gherardi). Myself, I began as Icesore, but that was before any solid winning streak. I wanted a relatively puny name, an indication to others that I should be left alone until more practiced or powerful.

Melissa Paul (aka MissyBliss), my girlfriend, was playing Final Fantasy 9 at the time and named one of her characters Sausage. In one bit of dialog he ended up saying, "I am Sausage. But some call me the FLAMING SAUSAGE!". We enjoyed a good laugh over it and I thought it was so hilarious I adopted a similar name of FlamingWeenie. Thus, the legend was born.