Today is the Pankration

Two years ago tonight, I created a monster, and by monster I mean the acronym M.O.N.S.T.E.R., More Oreos, No Strong Tea ETERNAL RAMPAGE! (exclamation mark my past self's emphasis, not present self mine). I acknowledge that I threw out grammar for the sake of the final acronym, and yes, I'll come close to but not entirely follow through with admitting that I started with the word monster and worked backwords. However, I can explain.

Two years ago tonight, I bought a gallon of Arizona Iced Tea and a package of Double Stuffed Oreos, along with several double-A batteries for my 360 controller and the game Mass Effect. This was the first Pankration, as I played from sundown to sunup the Monday before Thanksgiving. I skipped all my Tuesday classes.

Last year, with the same supplies, I logged twelve straight hours into Final Fantasy X. That Pankration heralded a new era of holiday, as I finished celebrating a week later. I played over thirty hours that week.

Previously, I have been the only person to honor the Pankration. My goal this year was to raise participation at least 10%. Even the Olympics can't claim to do that. Instead, through an aggressive marketing campaign that enslaved the pledges to promote my holiday, there's now over 250 people from multiple states and college campuses that will pankratronize. That's several month's worth of video games, in one night.

I got the name from my Classics teacher, Dr. Levine, who has hair like Kid from Kid 'n' Play, and huge black rimmed glasses that someone could punch through without touching the frames. He told me that the Pankration was an ancient Greek combat event where the only two rules were 1) no gouging of eyes, and 2) no biting. As apart of the Olympics, all nations competed in the event except the Spartans, who would never surrender and thus died in competition whenever they lost.

Piggybacking on the historical validity of the old Pankration, I linked from its Wikipedia page to create my own, which was sadly deleted. However, the talk page is still open. Visiting it, you will notice there is a strong and honorable fight between the editors of Wikipedia and some unknown elements. Those are pledges. I told them of the movement to delete the page, and they led a valiant crusade to keep the page legitimate as well as existant.

You can witness the argument go downhill, however, at the point where a user with the name "Half Man Half Rancor (Mancor)" enters the arena and challenges the editor who was our main antagonist, "Singularity42," to "prove that he is in fact a human and not a cyborg trying to infiltrate the plans for a mass expansion of the Pankration sensation." He then demands that Singularity42 cite his sources as to his humanity. At another point, he attempts to appeal to Mr. Wikipedia, and upon discovering there's no such person, he tries to spin that fact into the argument that made up things are still legitimate.

I haven't yet identified Half Man Half Rancor (Mancor).

I am proud, though, that we put up enough of a fight that one of the head editors of Wikipedia thought the issue had enough relevance to sum up the arguement after the page was deleted. He said this:

"The result was a snowball delete. The discussion has spawned a lot of confusion and some rancor. As for the confusion, the repeated references to [the article] Wikipedia is not for things made up one day made it appear that Wikipedia's standard for inclusion is existence. It's not. Instead, the issue here is notablity...But that has not swayed the consensus in the discussion, which is trending heavily and irreversibly delete. Where a discussion is certain to lead to only one outcome, it's time to close it."

I feel like this is an equivalent of a Supreme Court decision, which provides a precedent for all other similar minded cases. This is the Pankration's legacy. Also, no word yet if the editor meant to pun when he said the discussion spawned some rancors.