That Isn't A Word or A Verb

I've mentioned before that several years ago my life was a lot like an episode of The Guild. So the following should come as no surprise. It's incredibly nerdy. Like, incredibly, incredibly nerdy. I'm also kind of drunk so I'm relying entirely on spellcheck to get us through this and even then my impulse to tell you this story is probably sketchy at best.

On that note, I apologize ahead of time if you read through all of this and aren't satisfied. I can't be on the ball all the time. Sometimes I have to write poorly or else you'd take my better blogs for granted. Or something. So yeah... on with it then. You've been forewarned, if you continue reading and don't like it it's now entirely your own fault.

Several years ago I was still playing an MMORPG by the name of SWG. Short for Star Wars Galaxies. I know, as far as MMORPGs go, the one based on Star Wars is by far the dorkiest. Judge me accordingly. Also during this time period the media was all in an uproar about this guy:

David Blaine doing what David Blaine does.

Notably his alleged ability to levitate. You could not even watch the news without seeing him at least three times during the broadcast. He was everywhere. So much so that spoofs were just waiting to happen, and they did of course. This is the internet after all, and this guy was honest comedy gold without even meaning to be.

It was back when this spoof was still brand new and under a thousand views that this story takes place. My guildmates and I were spending the typical Friday night in. Not because we didn't have social lives outside of the internet but because we chose to stay in. Back then the game was fantastic and the community was top notch. It didn't help that gaming was a much cheaper form of entertainment than going out for drinks or to see a movie.

Weekends often meant drinking games in game. Every time a bounty hunter lost to a Jedi, you took a drink. Every time you heard an ambient mouse droid, you took a drink. Every time you missed a shuttle, you took a drink. And so on and so forth. Considering that these sorts of things happened constantly in the game, you had the potential to be stupid drunk in no time.

One such time the guild and I were all dicking around at a shuttle port in Mos Eisley. Too drunk to go do anything else, we decided the best way to occupy our time as the universal evil Sith guild was to bunny hop around the shuttle. In SWG jumping was little more than an aesthetic. You didn't actually get enough lift to jump over any sort of obstacles. If there was a stick in your path you'd have to maneuver around it -- jumping did nothing to aid you. The action was altogether useless, the animation for it however was quite hilarious. Especially to a bunch of drunk people at 12AM on a Friday.

Eventually we had jumped so much that the game didn't know what to make of it. The result was that we were all now floating in really awkward positions. Immediately the obvious association was made. Only problem was I was too drunk to get the point across. Rather than, "Hey guys, look, I'm David Blaine!" what I said was, "LOL GAIS I'M DAVID PLANE!" Yeah, I actually said, "L-O-L."

Parapraxis? I don't know, maybe. I was drunk.

This lead to a spiral of events beyond anyone's control. Mostly everyone bastardizing David Blaine into David Plane and then turning David Plane into a verb of some weird sort so that we could proclaim to the world at large that we were David Planing. I don't remember if the denizens of Mos Eisley were as entertained by this as much as we all were, probably not, since we were usually murdering them. I imagine they didn't know what to make of our tomfoolery, actually. Especially since apparently the glitch was only client side and they could not see wtf we were talking about.

We sounded like a bunch of crazy people.

I do know that later that evening we David Planed (tm) into the cantina only to bust out in dance. You have to understand that we were basically unchallenged in PVP at the time, so to see us in such a large force was usually indicative of a massacre-about-to-happen. It was a role-play server, and RPers are serious business. No one expects shenanigans. As evident by the snarky person in the doorway, appalled by our decision to take a night off from murdering them. She would have preferred us in character, ripping out her intestines with a ceremonial dagger, I guess? Different strokes for different folks.