The Queue: My house, in the middle of nowhere

In getting ready for the holidays, I have decided that becoming a mountaintop hermit is my best options. Tell your friends. Wait, actually — don’t.

This is The Queue, the daily column where you ask us questions and we’ll answer, as long as you ask in a letter containing both a self-addressed stamped envelope and cookie-based bribery.

I’m not fully sure I’d want everyone in my Warband hanging out in the same Player House, honestly. My Blood Elf Hunter and my Dwarven Hunter would both love to live in the house that I want — very specifically, this little tent-slash-chalet construction in the header I fell in love with almost 15 years ago in Grizzly Hills. They would thrive here. They would love it so much. My Gnomish Monk would be okay with the situation, I guess. It’s close to all that interesting Curse of Flesh stuff, and practicing forms and punching the air there wouldn’t be too terribly different from the Order Hall in Kun-Lai.

My Draenei Shaman and Human Priest would both be annoyed the whole time for different reasons. It’s too isolated, it’s too dang cold. It’s roughing it, and though they’re not exactly shrinking violets or anything, they’d both really like a respite from all that adventuring at the end of the day. Of course, the flip side is also a bit of a dilemma. My Priest would love to move into a cozy little brownstone-style townhouse or loft above the flower shop in Stormwind, but the Hunters would be miserable there — especially the Horde one.

For almost all the classes, I don’t think it’s usually so much the ability to, per se. It’s more that they refuse to, because it isn’t their aesthetic.

If a priest can pick up a staff, they can probably also pick up a polearm and strap it to their back without seriously injuring themselves. Can you imagine, a wielder of the holy light and mindbreaking void, wearing a spear? Please, as if. And of course a Hunter could use a mace, even a two handed one, but a mace isn’t exactly conducive to rugged frontiersmanship other than using a mallet to stake down a tent or break apart acorns. For everything else a bladed weapon just makes more sense, especially since you can just use the flat to do all those things. And a pinpoint Marksman, holding something as imprecise and inelegant as a frickin hammer? Get out.

Jurassic Park.

It isn’t surprising per se, considering that this was right on the bubble when practical effects started being replaced with CGI, but the movies made with CGI in that vintage tend to have aged terribly — and the scenes where they did use CGI, I’m sad to say, it looks like they used CGI.

I’m so glad they went with mostly practical effects, especially the weird, quirky stuff like having human operators behind the raptor puppets, and having the dinosaurs being generally less seen, a la the shark in Jaws, because that’s truly what made it age well. And even so, in re-watching it, you can see the scenes where having CGI would’ve been so much easier, and also would have ruined it. In particular, the T Rex attack, and the bit with the pupil contracting. It’s still terrifying and full of menace, but it they’d opted for CGI for that scene, now it would be both noticeable and yawn-worthy.