The Queue: Blue

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us the questions and we lowkey kinda hate all of you for getting this stuck in our heads sometimes.

I think I’m going to plan on finally cracking the seal on the vault and resubbing to WoW again. I think the last time I logged in was for the sunglasses/anniversary event like, 3? years ago at this point? There’s a lot of fun, but there’s a lot of baggage. I don’t have a guild or friend group to play with, so the social pressure sticky aspect is completely absent, and that’s usually a very important aspect to keep me invested. I’m also very cognizant of the fact that indies exist and if I’m not invested in WoW I can go play Balatro or, hell, Hearthstone.

But, there is a very big IF in play here. Which is, it happens weirdly frequently with games where I’ll let them drop for a while with good intentions, and then when I come back to the game, I’m immediately doused with cold water by busywork. I’m not sure if it’s the teeny tiny ADHD-addled slice of my brain but most of the time when I’m playing a game like WoW I want to screw around in town minimally. I want to play, quest, gather, but I do not want to spend ages screwing with my inventory, or paging through dozens of quests that aren’t actually relevant to me, or setting up addons to even make it playable (I’m looking right at Skyrim when I say this). I don’t like that gameplay loop even when I’m invested, and if the barrier to entry is too high I’m just out, man.

And it’s weird, because the schrodinger’s cat of that scenario is (part of) what’s kept me from logging in. If I don’t log in, I don’t know whether WoW is too overwhelming for me. Blissful ignorance.

Knowing the Brokers and the Ethereals, I think it’s a little due to the actions of Dimensius, but it’s more likely to be gouging due to the flimsiest of excuses. I know keeping that void available would likely be trickier due to Dimensius, but also, I think it’s probably likely the Ethereals have been looking for a reason to shut it all down. Void storage, especially these days, had to be a marketing ploy at an overall financial loss, at best. They’re over here raking it in due to transmog’s constant microtransactions — which have been set as an expectation from the beginning, and therefore doesn’t make waves when it happens — and comparatively void storage couldn’t possibly measure up for them financially.

This answer might not exactly be about Void Storage.

As an actual homeowner, I would unfortunately have to say that my answer is incredibly boring.

My house was built in the mid-80s, so all the plumbing supply lines in the house are made of polybutylene. Unlike copper piping which essentially lasts until the heat death of the universe, PB plumbing is a ticking time bomb that starts giving out around 40 years after it is initially produced. There was a class action lawsuit about it in the late 90s, where the settlement was a big fat check to homeowners whose houses were built using this material. Many homeowners did the smart thing and had their houses re-plumbed then with the money, as was intended. Many other homeowners did not. In our case, because we talked to the neighbors who lived here then, we know they used the check to buy a boat, and I will be dying mad about it. So now, every six months or so there’s another hole in the ceiling or wall because one of these pipes burst. It’s a lot easier to pay for a series of sudden $300 repairs than it is to budget $10K to replumb your entire house at one go, let alone the patching and repair and repainting.

My fun answer would either be a light kitchen remodel — the flow and placement of many things is unintuitive and a poor use of space — or redoing a lot of the back deck to put a roof on it and screen it in. I’m pretty sure both of those would go over that budget, though.

Obscurity is a funny thing. What’s obscure to one demographic is mainstream to another, and if you’re familiar with the reference it can seem odd in both directions. Everyone on the planet knows the line “Luke, I am your father,” despite Star Wars still feeling weirdly fringe (it’s not). If you know musical theater after you hear the 2 notes A4 to E4, you already know how many minutes are in a year, but if you’re not into that, you have no idea what I’m talking about. And then there’s the phenomenon of “Black Celebrity,” where figures crucial to black culture are somewhat unknown to people who aren’t steeped in that culture — though again, as a musical theater fan, it’s shocking how many people don’t know Sheryl Lee Ralph. She originated the role of Deena in Dreamgirls!

So, all that said, the thing I say on a regular basis that I’m pretty sure everyone here is actually familiar with, is “get in losers, we’re going shopping.” I’m going to hold your hand very gently while I let you know that Mean Girls came out over 20 years ago. It is well past the cultural zeitgeist, despite its general revival with the stage musical and musical movie coming out last year. It was also designed for a relatively specific demographic, one which leans heavily femme and millennial. And also despite being of an age where that should be ingrained in their consciousness, calling your kids losers in front of teachers is apparently not good, or whatever.