The Queue: Eating you is their culture

I spent yesterday watching a ton of paleontology content, including several that speculated about recent studies about encephalization quotient and therapod dinosaurs. Some of the videos are a bit optimistic, in my opinion, like the one arguing that Tyrannosaurs rex was more intelligent that a chimpanzee. I’m not arguing that T.rex wasn’t smart, there are a lot of studies that are coming to that general conclusion.

What’s amazing about this is the idea that some paleontologists are proposing that therapods could have culture, similar to corvids and other birds that live today and have elements like tool use, socialization and even seem able to communicate concepts. If Tyrannosaurus rex were as smart as primates, they could well have had elements we see in modern birds forming a kind of culture of their own.

I’m not saying they built pyramids.

I’m just really hoping.

I don’t actually know a lot about wrestling, but just from World of Warcraft, the following comes to mind:

• I absolutely can’t wait to see Garrosh Hellscream cut a promo insulting literally everyone on whatever team he is opposing and probably most of the people on his own team while talking about how awesome he is.
• Other characters I think would be excellent at no-selling their opponents and being utter trash talkers include Arthas/The Lich King, Sylvanas Wimndrunner, Deathwing and Saurfang as the rare Face trash talker.
• I guess I know a little more about wrestling than I thought.

One big strength is the relative name recognition of Blizzard’s roster of games/ip. Whether or not you necessarily like the games, it’s hard to argue that you haven’t heard of franchises like StarCraft, Warcraft, Diablo and Overwatch. Some game companies would murder you in your sleep for that level of awareness.

That strength, however, is also related to be a weakness — Blizzard routinely failing to make proper use of said recognizable franchises. StarCraft in particular hasn’t had any news in years, the Warcraft franchise is almost entirely tied up in the MMO, and Overwatch 2 backtracked so hard on the promise of a single player mode that as well as the death of the Overwatch League ending their bid for dominance of esports events that they were striving for.

The only franchise I’d say has more than it needs is probably Diablo, which currently has a remastered version of Diablo 2, the 2012 release Diablo 3, and the recent Diablo 4 as well as mobile MMO Diablo Immortal all out at the same time.

Games I would like to see from Blizzard, if I had a genie or otherwise could wish things into reality:

• A Warcraft single player CRPG in the vein of Baldur’s Gate 3, or Owlcat Games’ offerings like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous or Rogue Trader. I’m not saying it should be a slavish copy of either of those examples, of course. But a game set in Azeroth that could advance the setting forward and let you play in a kind of directed and focused narrative would be a really welcome sight in my opinion.
• Anything StarCraft. First person shooter? Open world RPG? 4X game? FortNite-esque battle royale game? I honestly don’t care anymore, just something. Anything. I especially would like to see something that picks a specific corner of the vast StarCraft setting to play in, like, say, what was going on back on Earth during the whole settlement of the Koprulu Sector.  What is life like on Earth now? You could do a lot with that.
• Bring Heroes of the Storm back. It was fun.
• A JRPG. Get Airship Syndicate to make it.
• I wouldn’t remove anything. I would probably heavily rework Overwatch 2, not so much in terms of stripping anything it currently has out, but definitely adding to it, and I’d probably make a separate Overwatch game with a heavy narrative focus telling the story of the world and the people of the setting. Also, let’s  be real — just embrace being a superhero world already. Heck, make that JRPG I mentioned be an Overwatch game.

Fairly frequently, as it turns out.

Yeah, it feels weird to say a war is my favorite. I just keep hearing that “People died” line from the meme. But there are wars and conflicts that I find interesting or illustrative of the human condition. Some of them:

• The Bone Wars — It would be hard to sum the whole thing up, but basically Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope got a whole lot of people in the Western United States fighting from 1877 to about 1892 over Dinosaur bones. Well, Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animal fossils. If you ever wanted to see all the sins and aspirations of humanity illustrated, watching two paleontologists get into a slap fight over naming fossils that ended up killing people and destroying years of work is a good way to go about it.

• The American Revolutionary War — Watch as a series of colonies goes to war with an objectively superior force from its motherland and wins due to a combination of skill and tactical acumen, ridiculous luck, begging foreign powers for aid which is granted almost entirely to tick off said motherland, and an ultimate realization by said motherland that they still had a huge swath of the valuable timberland and animal resources as well as far more financially valuable colonies all over the world and could wash their hands of 13 annoying colonies without it costing them much of anything

• The Graeco-Persian Wars — Possibly the greatest military mismatch in ancient history. At the time of their conflict, the Greek mainland consisted entirely of city states with no central government at all, not even the Leagues we would later see during the Peloponnesian War, and Persia (modern day Iran) had conquered Egypt, modern day Turkey, the middle east up to the border with India and the southern shores of the Caspian and Aral Seas. The two invasions of mainland Greece by the Persian Empire were both outright defeats, and in each case the Persians had every advantage you could possibly expect.

• Armageddon — The word is used today for a prophesied apocalyptic battle that will herald the end of the world. But the real life battle, fought around the area of Megiddo (Har Megiddo means Hill of Megiddo, referring to a city in the region that still exists today) in 1457 BCE was a decisive conflict between Egypt and the Hattusan people (called the Hittites in the Bible) that saw an Egyptian victory that preserved the status quo between these ancient empires. Not only did this battle change the course of the future of the region, keeping Egypt more or less confined to the south and west but penning the Hittites and keeping them out of Egyptian territory, it also gave us the horrifying vistas of death that inspired the concept of a war so terrible it could end the world.