Ah, the cactus. Truly the most tsundere of plants. Dangerous on the outside, but secretly surviving on minimal amounts of affection. Touch it wrong? It retaliates. Neglect it completely, leaving it abandoned in some forlorn corner of a convention hall? Somehow, it thrives.

This is The Queue, your daily Q&A column where I’m not Cory, and I’m writing two Queues in a row. It happens sometimes. Just like love for a spiky plant, adeptly captured in a liminal picture.

This week on the Tavern Watch Podcast, we discuss one of the favorite pastimes of tabletop GMs: stealing borrowing very liberally from our favorite movies, books, and even other games for our own tabletop games.

Everything has been coming up Warcraft recently, as WoW patch 12.0.7's launch led directly to WoW patch 12.1's announcement, but this week is about Diablo.

After their adorable cinematic and skin collaboration with Overwatch, Le Sserafim closed out BlizzCon 2023, and now we're ready to party til it's early with our girlies for BlizzCon 2026 as they return to do the same.

If you were imprisoned in Dalaran’s maximum security prison for beings from all across the cosmos, Violet Hold, what would you do? Would you attempt a daring escape, or would you just accept your fate and wait for the heroes to inevitably come in, beat you up just for being there, and probably loot your pants on the way out? Look, I don’t know what you did but I ain’t no snitch.

This is The Queue, our daily column where we’re here to answer Qs and bribe some guards, and we’re all out of guards.

Do you remember how last week we were talking about how voidy and purple the Midnight expansion has been?

Diablo 4 went hard on RNG in the expansion, and it isn’t backing down. But it’s long since hit the point where I’m exhausted of fighting it and getting the “right” piece of gear for my build. And yet the RNG perseveres, when I do not. There is no defeating it; it will always loom over us, in every hour of every day of every game. We are slaves to this torment.

But while I continue to mourn my loot chances, let’s answer some questions. This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I make an attempt to answer your questions.

Every week the Epic Games Store gives away a game or two for free.

Diablo 3 Season 38 was the second time we'd seen the Ethereal Memory theme since the game started recycling themes, and returned us to our rose-tinted memories of Diablo 2 -- ironically, falling right after the release of the Diablo 2 Resurrected Warlock.

On June 24, 2006 I completed a quest that began in a Molten Core raid. I stood in a baking hot Seattle (technically Kirkland) back yard and married Julian, who came down from Canada and began the long, strange trip that has brought us to this day. We saw the Warcraft movie together. We stood in line for four expansions, and leveled together for decades. 20 years later, I am still Busbandon and they are still Gwifelor.

Thank you, Julian, for all of it. I love you.