The Queue: Upstart Trash

It’s okay to not be good at something you enjoy doing.

Now, I’m not an atrocious player of ARPG’s, but my reaction speed is not what I would call fast, and I’ve found myself dying more often than I’d like while leveling my Season 3 Barbarian to 100. Still, this is my first character to 100 in Diablo 4 — it’s both the first season I’ve enjoyed enough to keep going and the one in which I played through all the leveling content again so I got to see the story.

So while I’m very happy I got to level 100 and I’m expecting to keep playing this character once it ends up on the Eternal Realm, I’m not in any way conceited enough to pretend I got here through skill. I’m a middling player, and that’s okay, because it’s a game and not something I have to be particularly good at. I’m playing Diablo 4 because I like it, not because I’m a prodigy at it.

We should all have things we just enjoy doing and give ourselves permission to let that be all that we care about. You shouldn’t have to make everything into a grueling journey of self improvement.

I’m so glad that when the brain parasites escaped confinement and infected seemingly everyone so that they are forced to buy hundreds of games they will never play on Steam I was somehow left immune. I own like three Steam games and I never play any of them and honestly, the fact that this feels like a flex to even say seems weird and unnatural to me.

Of course I say this as someone who has a crippling character creator addiction, so there is that. Can’t get too invested in a flood of games when you spend hours and hours playing one just to make characters with it.

Almost certainly it will tell us when we’re getting 10.2.6 — my money is on next week — and I wouldn’t be surprised if it discussed things like Cataclysm Classic or 10.2.7.

Depends on which character we’re talking about. My Night Elf Warrior would likely fly up to the ruins of Darnassus and stay up there, only coming down to procure food. She’d likely use one of the various widgets she has that allow instant travel and then fly back up when she had her groceries.

My Draenei Warrior actually retired to his Garrison, which means he essentially retired to a world that seemingly blew up after about 20 to 30 years. But who knows, timey wimey and all that.

My Worgen is already heading back to Gilneas. I’m sure he can find a deserted spot that’s not too plague infested.

My Tauren would just wander the world, getting into scrapes wherever he went. Nobody tell him that’s basically what he does now.

You should paint her Surreal or Dislike Statue.

No, on a more serious note, I don’t know what those terms mean. If you just want an answer to help get your brain to decide — I do this a lot, I 0ften ask people what I should do just to see how their answer makes me feel — then I’m going to pick Like Statue because I think it probably doesn’t mean that you’d paint it to look like it likes statues, but I want it to mean that.

My utterly unnecessary stream of consciousness response to Jalamenos comment

• My wife often tells me I’m like a cat.
• I’m hungry.
• Too much effort to go eat food because I’d have to make it for myself and I’m super tired so I’m just going to keep complaining until food somehow happens.
• Honestly, I don’t think it’s true that Orange Cats all share the one brain cell, I just think they’re very aware that at any moment anything could happen and they have to be ready, which is exhausting and anxiety producing at the same time.
• Man, I miss my Tabaxi Barbarian, even if she was a hastily put together character using a piece of art from Battle Chasers: Nightwar. She was fun to play.
• What’s that on the wall? Oh, just some light coming in from the gap in the curtains. Proceeds to watch the light bug for several minutes. 
• I wonder if I’d be a black cat. I mean, I don’t think I’m cool enough to be one. Probably just an orange tabby.
• I am so tired. I need a nap.

What were we talking about again? Oh, right. Yeah, I guess some people are cats inside.

I mean, look at them:

• Discovers her entire culture is a lie and the rotting undead creature that rules her people is in fact a bad person.
• Eats magic because a magical bomb from Netheril is stuck in his chest, his ex is the Goddess of Magic.
• Vampire peacock
• Dragged to Hell and forced to fight Demons for over ten years
• Had her memories wiped by her own Goddess.
• Tricked into doing a Devil’s handiwork, may or may not be transformed into a fiend

I feel like if any group is going to be okay with “possessed by an urge to commit horrifying murder due to my paps being the literal God of Murder” it’s gonna be these people. And heck, for Jaheira and Minsc? They’re probably nostalgic for that time they helped kill most of Bhaal’s kids alongside two more of them.

First off, Falrinn is correct about the color of lightsabers in the lore, although I think you could take the crystal out of an extant lightsaber, bleed it, and re-insert it. That said, my favorite Star Wars experience was a tabletop RPG campaign using the D20 Star Wars RPG rules, set about 800 or so years before the events of the movies.

My character was Khayyin Khaine, a Jedi Padawan whose master was killed by one of the two Sith at the time (Darth Bane’s Rule of Two was in effect) and who dedicated themself to the destruction of the Sith. Abandoning the Jedi philosophy, they created their own weapon, a variant lightsaber that used three crystals to create a shorter blade and was worn on the hand like a punch Katar.

Imagine this, but with a wide lightsaber blade instead of the typical long straight blade of a normal lightsaber. Khaine became known as the Orphan, and I had a blast playing their fall to the Dark Side while always maintaining one simple rule — The Sith must be destroyed.

The last session of the game, the team’s Scoundrel managed to find the location of an ancient treasure trove on the planet Ambria. All of our character’s storylines were resolved there — our Wookie space pilot ace got revenge on the slavers that kidnapped him, our droid found love with an old capital ship the party used to escape the planet, our Scoundrel tricked her father and stole both that old capital ship and the Sith Holocrons in Darth Zannah’s tomb.

And I faced the Sith Lord, Darth Venge. He went on and on about  how I’d already embraced the Dark Side — which was manifestly true, my character was a walking ball of rage by the time I caught up to Venge — and how, having killed his apprentice, I could take her place.

I loved this session so much, because everyone thought I was going to do it and were getting ready to try and smack me down, and I ignited my lightkatar and said Hello. My name is Khayyin Kaine. You killed my master. Prepare to die.

In the end it took me tackling Venge and the two of us plummeting into the planet’s exploding core, but Khaine got their revenge.

Anyway, their lightkatar was white. Because they used the Dark Side, but they always knew that it would lead to their destruction, and they deliberately cleaned the crystal to show that their allegiance was not and never would be with the Sith.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Take care, everyone. Don’t dedicate yourself so totally to revenge that you destroy yourself to get it.