Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

When I was “the new kid” in Mrs. Murphy’s third grade class, one of the first things that I noticed when trying to get my bearings in the unfamiliar little school room was the “Wall of Achievement”. The Wall of Achievement (or WoA for you online folk who have to give everything trendy little abbreviations) housed a large chart that was adorned with not only the names of my new classmates, but scratch and sniff stickers to mark off whatever accomplishment or goal they managed to reach. The very first sticker you could earn was a piece of smiling pizza for naming all of the planets in order of proximity to the Sun.

I knew then and there that I would have this sticker.

Not because I gave a damn about the heavens or the universe or ever really even noticed the sky, but because when *I* was a kid, scratch and sniff stickers were like heroin, and you would do ANYTHING to get your fix.

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Your parents would find you hunched over an old photo album that you converted in order to house your stickers, your fingers rubbed bloody and raw as you scratched and sniffed your way into a prepubescent high. So upon the promise of a pizza scented reward, I committed to memory all nine of the planets, and I got my hit off of the elementary school crack pipe. And to this day, I can STILL recall what I was asked to learn:

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune….

…and Pluto.

Because when *I* was in elementary school, Pluto was still a f***ing planet.

Sure, it stayed at the edge of our solar system, barely ever drawing near and not exactly “fitting in”, but it was still an essential part of our flimsy little Styrofoam ball dioramas. Pluto might have seemed cold and distant when compared to the other planets, but maybe those planets constantly mocked him for being new and called him hurtful names like “Dancula” because he couldn’t play in the sun with the rest of them during recess…

…but god damn it, it was STILL a frigging planet.

Pluto was the underdog, the little guy, the tough drifter with the heart of gold who might have seemed different, but in the end truly belonged. Out of all the planets, Pluto was the smallest, the strangest, and the geekiest – which is why we loved it the best. Because if women are from Venus, and Men are from Mars, geeks set up shop on Pluto.

And they probably carved a huge crater and a line around the equator to make it look more like the Death Star.

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How cool would THAT be?

“Greetings, we are from Earth. We bring you…whoa…you live on the frickin’ DEATH STAR?”

Fast-forward twenty something years, and much has changed. Our understanding of the universe has grown by leaps and bounds, and we’ve actually tossed RC cars up on the surface of Mars in the first ever interplanetary Battle Bot competition ever. We’ve learned more about the Earth, our place in the universe, and we’re starting to uncover the secrets of space itself. We are beginning to unravel the very fabric of the cosmos, and what’s the first thing we do?

Kick Pluto out of the club.

That’s right, Pluto is no longer a planet. Despite what you’ve been taught as a child, learned in countless high school science classes and were forced to repeat in a brainwashed mantra in order to get a scratch and sniff sticker, (I’m telling you, they were HUGE) Pluto is not considered a planet anymore.

It’s a Plutoid. Which just SOUNDS like a mean name that the other planets made up to hurt Pluto’s feelings. I don’t know about you, but if I were a kid and a group of my peers began to laugh at me and hurl wayward satellites and the corpses of frozen astronauts that NASA disavows knowledge of at ME while calling me a “Plutoid”?

I would have cried.

So what is a Plutoid anyway? Well, according to my exhaustive internet research, a “Plutoid” is either something to do with discount midget porn, or a cat who can’t spell but for some reason still wants a cheeseburger and hugs. Or if you go away from those sites it could quite literally mean:

“Anything further out than frigging Neptune.”

How harsh is THAT? How does that not just sing of foul play and grade school snobbery?

“Oh, sorry Pluto, but in order to be a planet you can’t be any further out than Neptune! Oh, and we wanted you in the club too. Wow that sucks, but rules are rules.”

So they stripped Pluto of its planet status, demoted it to “Plutoid” (which is planet slang for “Retard Planet of The Helmet People”) and dropped our solar system back down to eight official planets. They get to orbit around the sun and enjoy all the perks of being “official” planets, and Pluto is stuck once again in the shadows where he applies a mixture of insanely strong sun block and tears as he tries to befriend the weird kid who eats paste and collects dead flies from the classroom windowsill.

Nice.

Well I for one refuse to play by these rules. I refuse to allow Pluto to be kicked out of the planet club, and I will still happily include it whenever I am asked to recited the planets in order of proximity to the sun, which comes up much more frequently than one would expect. My children will be taught of his greatness, and to THIS geek, Pluto will live on and ALWAYS be my favorite planet.

…unless they offer me scratch and sniff stickers to conveniently forget about him.

Then he’s boned, because I’m still an addict.

-Coyote