The Queue: Time is the millstone under which we are ground fine

The past two weeks have been among the worst I have ever lived through.

I don’t have anything funny to say about that. I have not slept, I am not likely to sleep, I just keep trudging forward through this whole monotonously awful month and year, and everything keeps getting harder and harder and I see no real relief in the future. It’s been sincerely just the worst.

Lately playing video games has been all about keeping myself distracted. So hey, here’s the Queue, and then I’ll go back to distracting myself.

I mean, it is possible, but I don’t believe it to be likely. I’d be thrilled to be wrong about that — I’ve said for years that a third faction would be very interesting — but I simply don’t think they’re going to move the game in that direction. In the recent post about cross-faction play they made the point that they believed faction identity to be relevant and important to World of Warcraft, so I’m not expecting them to create a whole new faction, or even cobble one together out of older organizations like the Cenarion Circle, the Earthen Ring, the Argent Dawn or what have you.

This is, to be clear, not me saying I don’t want them to do a third faction for players to join. It’s just me saying I don’t expect them to do it. I personally think it would be a great idea if, as an example, the Forsaken went off on their own — maybe even joining a faction with folks like the Grimtotem, the Quillboars, the Gnolls and other groups who have been villified and treated as monsters by both Horde and Alliance up to now.

It lost me at The Batman. I’m really sick of the adventures of rich white dude who uses his childhood trauma to justify his particular version of Bezos funding a space agency to instead try branded vigilantism.

Seriously, once billionaires started trying to conquer space, I seriously realized that in the comics, everyone actually knows Bruce is Batman, and has always known, and just let him do it because he’s a freaking billionaire and at least he’s not going on Joe Rogan’s podcast or launching cars into space… or, at least when he does that, it tends to be to stop an evil tyrant anti-sun while dressed as a bat.

I have Batman fatigue. Let’s get a Jessica Cruz Green Lantern movie up in here.

Evolution does not have a fixed outcome. There is no end goal, like evolving into sapience. It’s even been argued that sapience is an evolutionary dead end — it lets you dominate on the small scale, but in the end it causes you to wipe out your own habitat.

If the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous hadn’t happened, there’s no guarantee that birds would have ended up existing right now. Pterosaurs might have diversified to push birds as we know them into different niches, ones that they would have ultimately failed to master, and thus the ancestors of all modern birds may have died off during the Eocene. There’s no guarantees and no end goals in evolution.

Dinosaurs were just one of many predatory families of Archosaur and Archosauriforms that were extant in the Triassic. And even among Dinosaurs, there were many species in the Triassic that aren’t part of the lines that ended up dominating the planet in the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Evolution can’t be removed from the geological events that shape it — without the Permian End Times extinction it’s exceedingly unlikely that Dinosaurs could have risen in the late Triassic at all, as there were so many Therapsid predators before The Great Dying that it would have been exceedingly hard for Archosaurs and their relatives (remember, Dinosaurs are in the Archosauria) to have pushed them out of their niches.

So, to sum it all up:

Dinosaurs were not evolving into a sapient bird species. Some Dinosaurs are today birds, but the vast majority of them were not, and birds were not a magical end goal for evolution. It just shook out that over millions of years, birds were the ones best suited to survive a global catastrophe, and today it’s speculated they did that by eating shitty, almost worthless food that would never have allowed them to outcompete other animals if not for raging world-wide wildfires killing off all the available food that wasn’t crappy half-burned seeds.

Regardless, four limbs is almost universal among tetrapods, with even species that have fewer like whales and snakes descending from ancestors that had the standard four. Even birds, bats and Pterosaurs all had four limbs.

If they don’t put in new systems, people complain that the patch is more of the same.

If they do put the patch out fast, every bug and balance change is cited as evidence that they rushed it.

Considering that we have no idea how much dev time is being consumed on those new systems vs. raid tuning or populating the new zone with quests and encounters, it ultimately comes down to not being able to please everyone. Saying “I support it taking as long as it needs, but…” is ultimately saying “I do not support them taking as long as they need if it feels too long to me, a person who is not a dev and does not know the situation” ultimately.

I’m at the point where I think it’s ultimately self defeating to watch the clock on content releases. All it did was make me unhappy with what I had because it wasn’t something else.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. I hope 2022 gets better, for me, for you, for everyone.