The Queue: A Question of Taste

I feel a little bad for Cory. He always tries so hard with his earworms to choose something that’s both catchy, and that I would like, but my daughter has been listening to one Hatsune Miku song on a loop for the past two weeks, so his stellar choices are absolutely not breaking through.

Actually, on second thought, I mostly feel bad for myself.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions, and we’ll answer. I apologize in advance if I accidently start typing out lyrics in the middle.

It depends. If the character has changed their controlling motivation and had an arc to explain why their actions may have changed, I’m fine with that. Real people do this all the time — maybe when you’re in high school, winning the local show choir contest is your main focus, but then when you’ve moved on to college that comes second to your studies, though you’ll probably always love hearing about messy broadway drama. Sometimes there’s a catalyzing event, like a birth or a death, and sometimes you just gradually change over time, learn more, adapt your world view accordingly.

This is a pretty common issue with longer-running media, especially as writers leave or change, and new writers come in. I’m definitely not a “death of the author” person — the world views of the writers can deeply shape the narratives they want to convey, even when they’re working with pre-established characters. Beyond that, this is also a likely source of Flanderization, where the new writers try to keep to the original character, but may miss some nuance.

Plus, characters are primarily a vehicle for telling the story. If a writer jumps into an established universe, they still need something to drive conflict and make things interesting. As much as I personally would love an expansion where all we do is farm and the main antagonist is Linda Skeens, I realize that isn’t good enough motivation for a lot of other player characters. In terms of a story, of a character, and of people though, that kind of conflict is absolutely enough of a catalyzing event to make someone into a villain.

In instances like this I feel like taking a step back and asking yourself questions about whether the characterization itself is bad, or if the original characterization resonated with you and doesn’t anymore. There are a lot of characters out there I hate on a personal level, but which make for an interesting story — nearly any dude written by a female author in Romantic era literature, from Victor Frankenstein to Mr. Rochester, is almost universally deeply unlikeable to me, but they’re good characters. Alternately, think about whether this change being made in service of a story which isn’t all that good, or if the story just doesn’t resonate with you, personally. Also, yeah, sometimes the character and the story just kinda plain sucks.

It’s ok to abandon media if you’re not feeling it.

Absolutely. It’s well past time. But then, the isle itself is Timeless so maybe it’ll happen exactly when it’s supposed to?

Anyhoo.

I’m really surprised this hasn’t been tied to an existing, relatively early achievement — something like Timeless Nutriment, so you have to explore a bit (though maybe not that one specifically, because you have to either cheese mechanics or use a cloak). Alternatively, a geegaw on one of the Shaohao vendors for Friendly or Honored rep and some non-trivial amount of coins would be fine too. I’m especially surprised, and a little annoyed, because they still have Ordos technically gated off for people who don’t have a cloak which hasn’t been available to obtain in nearly a decade.

That said, with a game as long and large and sprawling as WoW, we’ve seen it happen time and again that something which seems like an obvious step is actually far more complicated behind the curtain than the playerbase could understand. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve tried flipping the switch on an experimental non-production server and it resulted in another World Tree burning down or something.

I haven’t thought about it on that granular a level, but my battle.net password and authenticator info is contained in my Big List Of Stuff To Deal With in a folder with end-of-life info in it. I started the folder just before I had my first child — I’ve studied enough history to recall the days when your odds in childbirth was barely better than Russian Roulette — and I’ve kept it updated ever since. I really recommend keeping a file like this, though. You never know when you might get hit by a bus!

It’s actually a big part of why I moved to a password manager, too. The infosec reasons are good, but it’s so much easier to have a long list of usernames and sites and one password to deal with all of them, rather than updating that entire paper document every couple of months. And while it’s far more important to have access to, you know, my paypal and bill pay services, I can easily foresee a scenario where my grieving husband has to deal with the additional stress of cancelling a bunch of small services, including that $15/mo expenditure from WoW, and it’s not worth adding that to his plate when I can just add it to the folder.

He does have access to my Discord and Twitter through this as well, so he could let staff and my Twitter followers know — I did make this request in the folder.

Rome, Italy. Walking the ruins of the Palatine Hill, cheek-by-jowl with modern Italy, was so surreal. You’d turn a corner and run into a church that’d been in service since before dates had four numbers, packed with artifacts and art.

Then, there was the food. The best slice of pizza I’ve ever had was in Rome, and it was a tiny pay-by-the-inch place — eggplant, green olive, and potato. Yeah, I know it sounds weird. It was heavenly — the eggplant adds a firm bite, the potato is crisp, and the green olive is salty and sharp. I had pasta with nearly every sauce you can call by name, rich red wine cheaper than I could get a bottle of water in the states, espresso at every hour of the day like a gauche American, and positively gallons of gelato.

Close runner up is Paris, which had some excellent food — an omelet with salad is still one of my favorite light dinners — but I wasn’t quite as wowed by the rest. It rained most of our stay, though, so we weren’t as able to just go walking around and see what we could see.