The Queue: Dog Days

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we race to finish before we melt into a puddle.

I tend to buy a lot of “books” from Amazon simply because I have a Kindle (which is the whole reason why they made the Kindle). If a book is particularly dense or something I want to truly take my time with, I opt for paper pages, because then I can sticky note and jot things down in pencil, but I blaze through recreational reads very quickly (I started a new thriller series on July 10, and I started book 9 last night), so it just makes sense to batch load a whole lot of stuff at once.

However, even with that, don’t forget about places like gutenberg.org, which lets you download public domain books, magazines, and other publications. Currently, anything published before 1927 is in the public domain, so my recent Gutenberg reads have included The Great Gatsby, The Divine Comedy, and House of Mirth. Gutenberg isn’t the only place to do this, but it’s the easiest to point to. Librivox is a similar resource if you’re into audiobooks.

If you’re really into paper books, keep an eye out at your local library. Most of them will have a yearly or bi-yearly book sale, where they sell off some of their older stock to make way for new stuff. Not only are you getting books, you’re also supporting your local library, so it’s definitely a win/win. Another great place to look is consignment. My local Goodwill tends to only have Romance, but man do they have a lot of Romance.

So, to start, I want to make sure you (and everyone, really) know that you can go over to the Occultist in every major city and Extract Aspect. You’ll destroy the item but you’ll keep the juicy Legendary effect for later, and can reapply it to a new appropriate piece of gear. Not that I personally sharded a whole bunch of stuff at the Blacksmith, or anything.

That said, gear in general isn’t really a play driver for me, no matter what game I’m playing. I want to look cool, sure, and collecting has always been a big draw for me, but stuff like builds and gear stat upgrades have always been a snoozefest. As such, my MO in D4 is usually to go ahead and murder until my bags are stuffed, then sort it all out. If it looks like it might be an upgrade, cool, I equip it. And yeah, I’ll totally cop to keeping a few effects much longer than the gear would otherwise be useful — I pretty much never get a new set of boots unless they have an extra evade charge on them.

It sure did! Here’s the link, with apologies to mobile users, maybe:

Yeah, one thing that always strikes me when they release these is just how much music is in Overwatch 2 in particular. Like with WoW, the changes from zone to zone are gradual, and you usually hang out in one spot for a while, and you might fish or herb or sort through your bags, or just hack away at a raid boss for a while. But in Overwatch while the transitions are abrupt and obvious, the action is so frenetic, and they use sound design for so much of their gameplay cues, that it can be really tough to just appreciate it all.