Playing Rock Band with Nate keeps bringing up all these memories of when my roommates and I would spend hours and hours and hours playing Rock Band back in the house. We took it seriously, yo. Examples of said seriousness:

• Playing for 14 hours straight. This happened a few times.
• Busting through the tour mode as fast as possible to earn tons of money, and then spending all evening customizing the outfits of our band members.
• That time the Xbox red-ringed on us and we spent approximately one hour Xbox-less before we NEEDED to go get a new one to play Rock Band.
• Sean getting drunk and trying to sing Ballroom Blitz in a Scottish accent.
• Lanky singing Metallica’s “Blackened.”
• Sean and I quoting relevant Metalocalypse quotes as we play (“I have musics dyslexkia…you know that…I…don’t likes to talk about it.”).
• Michael getting drunk and falling off the drumming chair.
• Rabbi Jeff, Aaron’s burly, mountain man-esque character who was (obviously) Jewish.
• Aaron making up random lyrics on the fly as he sang.
• Our “cutoff” system. At one point or another, I said that anything less than a 97% on a song was not good enough, so we set 97% to “cutoff.” We had a bunch of other things for other percentages as well. 100% earned a high five, 99% earned a limp fist bump (because you just didn’t try hard enough to get a 100%), 98% was an actual fist bump, 96% was “not even cutoff,” 95% was “not even not even cutoff,” a 69% meant that you had to kiss everyone else in the room (this never happened), and a score of 1% meant you had to have sex with someone in the room (also never happened). There were others, but I can’t remember them.
• Calling the drummer and singer the “drummist” and “singist,” respectively.
• Calling the guitarist and bassist the “guitarer” and “basser,” respectively.
• Lanky wailing “MARYANNE!!!” in an overdrive section of More Than a Feeling and us all subsequently failing out because we were laughing so hard.
• How FREAKING EXCITED we were when my parents got me Rock Band 2.
• Sean rocking out so hard with the guitar that he tipped the couch over (this happened several times).
• Breaking at least three of Michael’s chairs.
• All of us playing Metallica’s “Blackened” on expert and just barely making it through the song. I’d actually failed out three times, but the last time was right before the end, so we still made it.
• All of us giving very serious consideration to making a documentary about our fake band.
• Putting those little plastic bendable glow stick things all over the instruments and then rocking out in the dark.

So much fun.