#18: Spread rumors that the Switch 2 requires a new, more costly form of electricity to use.

#23: Dress in a robe, ask others in line if they’ve accepted Mario as their lord and savior. Also, they cannot set up a shrine to their Wario Amiibo.

#26: Show off the SD Micro Express card they bought online, telling people “If you don’t have one of these, you’re already dead.”

#28: Swear people to secrecy, tell them they’re a spy working for Sony, then take pictures of people in line to send to “headquarters.”

#32: Bring a blue bowl with spikes glued to the underside, then throw it at the person at the front of the line and try to take their place.

To explain: Lists of things Private Skippy is not allowed to do (usually in the U.S. Army, but also other armed forces or even other places) are an ancient form of internet humor, possibly older than the World Wide Web itself. It’s the kind of thing that would have been traded around Usenet, or even Fidonet. (Its absence from Know Your Meme proves its affected by recency bias.) TV Tropes has a page on Skippy, a claim it originated in 2001—I think it’s older but could easily be wrong—and a link to the webpage skippyslist.com, which is a broken WordPress install. Sorry Skippy.

Here is one surviving list on the Web, although part of the process of Skippy is that people add new items as they pass it around, so there is no canonical list. I should warn you that, as a very old form of internet humor, you can expect these lists to have questionable items on them, depending on who’s posting it. The list I linked also prefaces the list with a backstory. It’s entirely unnecessary: many of us know a Pvt. Skippy of some variety, even if they never served.

rodneylives