The Queue: this is fine

I’m not sure there’s ever a great time to come down with a chest cold and fever, but the week after you’ve had surgery, so coughing is excruciating and even kind of dangerous, is a particularly bad one. Bonus points if it’s the week before holiday break, and you still need to make sure Santa has everything stowed on his sleigh!

This is The Queue, the daily column where you ask us questions, and… yes, this auth key is still valid, please just let me answer these. Pass the Dayquil.

I haven’t, and I’ve really wanted to try both that and the Math one. I’m not sure why it hasn’t shown up for me, though Duo does have a history of pushing things out to random users in very small chunks, and maintains a bunch of weird revisions on different devices. I’m on Android, and occasionally pop in on the web app just to see if I’m missing anything, so maybe that’s why.

Breaking the bank is quite subjective!

The higher quality stuff tends to deliver more pigment for less binder, but that tends to mean the materials themselves are more fragile. In the case of colored pencils, this means that the leads are more susceptible to internal breakage if you drop them. My daughter’s in an “intro to art”-style beginner class, and her teacher tends to recommend materials which aren’t wildly expensive and can take a little middle school throwing around, but are also good enough quality that the budding little artists aren’t going to have to spend most of their time muscling their materials into usefulness.

For her classes, we get Strathmore sketch pads in a variety of sizes. She tends to prefer having a smaller one, a5ish size, for just carrying around and doodling, like a journal, but uses letter size for class. Her teacher also recommends Prismacolor pencils. They’re using very specifically wax backed to blend, to learn those materials. I tend to prefer watercolor pencils. The ones I have are Faber-Castell. You can soak the pencils themselves in water for incredibly saturated color, but they’re also less of a fuss to blend — just add water.

Don’t forget to throw in a kneaded eraser and a couple blending stumps!

I think covers count as losing, yes.

A crucial part of the construct of Whamageddon is recognizing the song, the dawning horror of what you’re actually hearing and knowing you’ve lost. As such, I feel like smooth jazz or acoustic covers are actually more effective than the original rendition. The original is recognizable almost immediately. But, imagine tapping your toe and humming along to the generic Christmas music playing over the P. A. in the middle of the local Stop n Shop, followed by the slow realization of what song this is, being betrayed by the siren song of alto sax while you’re choosing which bunch of broccoli to buy.

Now that is truly the reason for the season.