The Queue: Antisocial

On the one hand, I’m really jonesing to get back into raiding in World of Warcraft. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying spending absolutely no time socializing at all while playing Wrath of the Righteous. 

So yeah, I’m torn.

This is the Queue. I’m hiding from people. People are scary.

Okay, well, not you guys. You’re okay.

Remember, you asked about the feasibility first and foremost, so my answer on that is — it’s quite feasible. We actually have a great deal of preserved tissue from mammoths, for example, so while we can’t directly clone them (cloning requires living tissue) we can use gene editing to turn an elephant cell into a mammoth cell, since we can get our hands on the DNA.

Eventually, assuming we don’t end up dead on a broiling planet, it is almost inevitable that we will return extinct animals in this fashion, at least the ones for which we still have DNA.

Should we do this? There are a lot of factors to this question, but I’ll say this — until we stop destroying habitat so fast that species are going extinct at record rates, maybe don’t recreate Smilodon just yet. I have no particular ethical objection to the return of extinct animals, but doing so in our current world situation seems ill advised.

Dude, come on, I’ve heard of Bioshock. Heck, that whole Telosa thing? He’s not even the first billionaire to come up with the idea, even Gates has said he’d do something like it at one point.

I’m not sure if this counts, but I find it hilarious when the voice actor says something like “Champion, we need your help!” but the in game text actually has my name there. I understand why it happens  — Anduin’s actor can’t possibly record himself saying every possible combination of letters people use — but it still amuses me to imagine Sylvanas just forgetting your name in the middle of a dialogue or whatever.

“We are trapped in a cycle and you… er… this is embarrassing, I know I sent you on a whole bunch of missions before I left, but I’m blanking on your name?”

There are several races in game with some variant on a centaur body plan — upper body of a human, lower body is almost the entire body of a horse or other animal. We’ve got actual Centaurs, we’ve got Keepers of the Grove and Dryads, we’ve got Tol’vir. And yet none of these are playable. This irks me.

If that’s still too humanoid?

Yes. In fact, I’m probably gonna talk about it on Lore Watch this weekend. I definitely think there’s a place in the game’s story for that kind of thing, and I even think we’ve already seen it — Sargeras, for example, remained a Titan even as he channeled Fel power, making him an Arcane/Fel combination.

Okay, that’s the Queue from me this week. See y’all next week, hope you have a good day.