The Queue: Absurdifinity

So no one told me that I’d end up playing so much Metroid Dread when I started on Phantom Liberty.

Fortunately for me, when I get too upset and tense from being constantly chased by a killer robot, I can go into Starfield and be chased by an extremely sparkly person in a faceless helmet. Oh, and also often killer robots, mustn’t forget those.

What I’m saying is I’m spending a lot of time being chased by things in my off hours and it’s a touch exhausting.

The greatest X-Men villain of all time, Professor Xavier. Imagine how heartbroken we’d all be after finding out that the kindly, vaguely Patrick Stewartian Professor who we’ve grown to trust while attending his school for gifted students is in fact evil this week.

You see, the West Edmonton Mall is not an ordinary mall. It’s more like a calcified cyst of madness on a stop where, honestly, nothing should be. The area that the Mall was constructed on was barely a step above a swamp, there’s an entire indoor water park inside the mall, and if you ever go for a drive around the neigborhoods the Mall squats alongside you’ll notice that by simply driving straight down the road you’ll circle the Mall four or five times.

The pyramid squats like a bloated idol and yes, of course there’s a pyramid, and reality itself is deformed by the Mall as a rubber sheet is by a heavy rock, or space is deformed by the gravity of a star. The West Edmonton Mall is either the largest or second largest mall in North America (it’s technically physically smaller than the Mall of America, but has almost 300 more stores and attractions inside it) and if capitalism has a demon core, this is it.

So the answer to your question is simple. It has a pirate ship because to the WEM, the idea of stealing people’s money is the beast’s happy place and pirates are adorable.

I think you’re kind of cherry picking WoW a bit here in terms of antagonists. Just within The Burning Crusade we squared off against Illidan and his merry maniacs Lady Vashj and Kael’thas, but we also fought Zul’jin and the Amani Trolls and faced off an invasion from Kil’Jaeden at the Sunwell.

Similarly, Wrath featured The Lich King as the major threat, but we also fought Malygos, dealt with two incursions by the Black/Twilight Dragonflights directed ultimately by Deathwing himself, and stepped up in Ulduar to battle the Old God Yogg-Saron. So there were certainly multiple threats to face there, and we squared off against a bunch of them.

Even expansions like Cataclysm or Warlords of Draenor had other foes besides the box art. Sure, Deathwing was the ultimate antagonist of Cata, and a lot of what happened in the expansion was caused by him, but we still fought people who weren’t his allied and didn’t care if he won or lost. Ever since Legion, we’ve been seeing old enemies return and new ones take center stages and it’s hard for me to ignore how many characters from previous expansions showed up in Shadowlands.

I’m not saying WoW couldn’t do better in terms of feeling less like each expansion is a new season of a TV show with a Big Bad but there’s a lot of threads being connected throughout its’ long run.

Oddly enough, I really dislike the Night Elf female 2h weapon stance, except the Polearm stance, which is different and doesn’t annoy me by constantly clipping their faces with their own shoulder armor. Nelf ladies with Polearms stand in a kind of relaxed but aggressive way that I really like.

Of course, I usually play TG Fury when I DPS so I rarely ever see that pose.

I still love watching Tauren do Mortal Strike, though. For whatever reason they still have the old Tauren animation on MS and it looks like it would absolutely destroy your face off. Then again, it’s been a year or so since I played my Tauren, so who knows.

As I said when 6k first asked this question, carcinisation (the process by which specific crustaceans become more and more crab shaped) is a fascinating example of convergent evolution, but it’s hardly the only way we can see evolutionary forces shaping various unrelated animals into similar body plans.

For example, extended protruding teeth that are often called ‘saber-teeth’ have evolved numerous times. Several stem-mammal therapsids like the Gorgonopsids (you know, the ones I’m always babbling about) had them, as did the small herbivore Tiarajudens. Since then, we’ve seen all sorts of saber toothed animals, and today we can find such teeth on Walruses, the Saber Toothed Fish, and even a species of deer.

So why do mammals and their direct ancestors (and a few species of fish that are just really weird) keep evolving overlarge canines? Why did we actually get two groups, the Nimravids and the Barbourofelids, that looked almost identical to the Machiriodontid saber toothed cats but which were not even cats? Nimravids and Barbourofelids were so close to cats that you have to look at the bones in their inner ears to discern the difference in some cases — why did that happen not once, not twice, but three times and each time created large family groups of related saber toothed species?

Heck, I didn’t even mention Thylacosmlus. 

It’s actually somewhat wild that we don’t really have any sort of saber toothed predator alive today, considering how common the theme of big freaking canine teeth has been in Synapsid evolutionary history. Going all the way back to our therapsid forebears we can find at least six distinct lineages of saber toothed animals in therapsidia (the group that contains us mammals and all our relatives more closely related to mammals than to sauropsid reptiles like the squamates and archosaurs) dating back hundreds of millions of years.

And that doesn’t even account for other convergences that we see re-occurring throughout evolutionary history. Why did multiple unrelated reptile species, including crocodiles, adopt the nearly identical body plan we recognize today as the Crocodile/Alligator body plan?

Phytosaurs here sure look like crocs, but some scientists think that they actually split off from all other reptiles before the Avemetatarsalia/Pseudosuchian divide in Archosauria, and are a sister taxon to that group, meaning they’re more like cousins to both birds and crocs.

It’s hard to blame the Phytosaurs for stealing the crocodilian shtick when in fact the Crocodiles of that time period (or more accurately, the Pseudosuchians) were instead living on land and evolving big heads with bladed teeth and hunting big terrestrial animals like the Prosauropods. The Triassic was a wild time, y’all, and for most of it Dinosaurs were mostly hunted and eaten by croc relatives.

So ultimately, it’s less likely that Crabs are magic and more that Evolution is lazy and likes to do the same stuff over and over again as long as it works. That’s why we have sharks, Icthyosaurs and dolphins all kind of sharing the same basic body plan, or turtles, aetosaurs, Ankylosauridae, glyptodonts and other armadillos all going for the shelled defense option, and so on. Otters today look the way the ancestors of seals and sea lions did, as they’re repeating the same evolutionary journey as those pinnipeds took just millions of years later.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Didn’t really expect that last question to get such a big answer. Maybe ask Liz some nice Diablo questions for me so I don’t have to feel too guilty?