The Queue: Wind Sprints

Recovering from being sick can really just be the worst.

Yes, it’s better than not recovering. But the problem can often be that you don’t know — simply can’t tell — if you are recovering or not.

On paper I’m doing well. About a week after I tested positive, my cough is much reduced, I’m only dizzy a few times a day, and I’m not feverish. My latest test was negative. But I am sore all over, an all body sore that I have only felt in the past when I was either sick with a really bad case of the flu, or when I wrecked my motorcycle and bounced repeatedly off of the road in a jacket and leather chaps that both ended up abraded away to nothing.

I keep being torn between the you have to rest mentality and the you’ll never get better if you don’t start making steps mindset.

Covid really sucks, y’all. I managed to avoid it for over three years, but my luck ran out in October. Ironically, getting sick from a blood sugar crash kept me from my vaccination appointment and here I am.

I know we’ll have some folks there, but I’ve been sick, so I don’t know who. Sorry! I won’t be there, because frankly getting to go once in my life required nothing short of a miracle.

Funny story — my wife and I masked up and handed out candy this week (we both tested negative but still took precautions) and yet, despite spending several hours doing that, I still forgot that it was November 1st. Now it’s November 2nd as I type this, and yet I’m still having a hard time remembering that it’s November.

In a very real way time itself broke for me in 2020.

Weirdly enough, my nickname in college was Badger, because I spent a year trying to get everyone I knew to read Mike Baron’s Badger comic.

Announcements that would ruin BlizzCon for me:

• Bobby Kotick has been appointed the overall Czar of all Microsoft games, meaning that companies like Bethesda and Obsidian now reported directly to him.
• I can’t come up with anything else as bad as that first one, but pretty much any announcement that left me with the prospect of having to write more articles about Mr. Kotick.
• Please just go away.
• Uh… I also wouldn’t like it if they killed Anduin off screen or made the Horde blow up or burn down anything else.
• “Sorry, no Diablo 4 expansion, we’re going to do all our ongoing story and content through Season Passes.”

I prefer to watch it alone or in pairs while making a slinkity sound.

I jest. Based on my life to date, the best opening ceremony was the one I was physically there for. So I’d have to say I preferred that. I’ll be watching it on my left side monitor while my right side monitor has what I need to write “Oh my God they finally did it, they’re making Warriors into the Champion and Barbarian classes, I can finally play a Barb in WoW” or some other, far more likely news.

Every source I’ve seen, including three I hadn’t seen before today, says that yes they’re going to be greyed out, but there’s plenty of uncertainty left. For example I haven’t found anything about their price dropping and it being better to vendor them before the patch. Maybe they’ve said so and I just can’t find it, I have been occupied trying not to die for the past month or so.

On the one hand, making him head of Stormwind made perfect sense, but I was always a bit disconcerted that being in charge of the largest Alliance nation with the biggest army and navy automatically means you’re the leader of the whole group. The idea of putting Anduin in the driver’s seat for the entire Alliance was almost as silly as having Varian be in charge just because he was really ridiculously good at killing things.

On the other hand, the Horde’s leaders up until recently were:

• A hand picked puppet of the Shadow Council who used Warlock magic on his own children to age them into adulthood in mere days. That’s ol’ Blackhand.
• A guy who was mostly okay but only got the job because he killed the previous holder of said job, and who immediately decided to not only keep on invading Azeroth because meh, they were already there, he decided not to kill Gul’dan but instead let the guy live after he invented Death Knights. Thanks, Orgrim Doomhammer.
• A straight up theocratical dictator. Sure, Thrall was/is a good dude, but let’s face it — his stint as Warchief was “Do what I say because the elements like me” and he eventually pushed it so far they turned their backs on him.
• Garrosh, who was appointed as a stopgap but ended up nearly causing the Horde to break apart in a civil war, blew up Theramore, and would have used the heart of an Old God to destroy all of his enemies (and I’m sure that wouldn’t have ended up with any nasty repercussions) if he hadn’t been stopped. His follow up act was to steal a time widget and start a new Horde in an alternate timeline.
• Poor Vol’jin, who was head of the Horde for like a year and basically didn’t get to do anything before he died except get tricked by an evil Loa to appoint —
• Sylvanas as Warchief so she could start another war with the Alliance as a way to kill enough people to juice up the Jailer.

I mean, yes, the Alliance has way too much in terms of Kingdom BS for my liking. But the Horde has been a Demon Worshipping military dictatorship, a Demon Tolerating military dictatorship, a Theocratic military dictatorship based on the worship of ancestor spirits and elemental beings, a racial supremacy oriented military dictatorship, Vol’jin’s year of I have no idea what I’m doing, and then a military dictatorship that was gullibly hoodwinked into attacking their neighbors and burning down civilians because it would make a bald dude stronger.

I certainly think the current Horde, the ‘we have a council and we vote on stuff” Horde is a positive direction for them. But I don’t feel like technically not having a King/Queen makes the Horde, a series of military dictatorships with different hats, have much in the way of the moral high ground here. Maybe both factions should abandon the idea of allowing political power to be entirely rooted in who kills stuff the best and go with the whole ‘mandate from the masses’ idea.

I’m cutting myself off here because I’m still getting headaches, but I do think that rj is right in that the Horde isn’t and has never been a hereditary monarchy, but that doesn’t change the fact that it has been a flat out military dictatorship that only ever existed because a smart evil guy tricked a dumb evil guy into abusing Orc tradition to form the thing in the first place.

In a way, if Sylvanas’ antics end up with the Horde sticking to this ‘council of equals’ notion, it could be an amazing, progressive moment in Azerothian political development. The Horde could bring true power to the common people of that beleaguered world.

This is the Queue. I done finished writing it. BlizzCon is tomorrow, y’all. Diablo 4 expansion news please.