The Queue: I’m not a bear, but I play one on TV

Cory is off doing awesome things this week, so I’ll be your Queue Keeper on this fine Monday afternoon. I’m excited to be here! I’m excited to be careening around K’aresh in the newest Ethereal threads. I’m excited that I got to talk to Matt and Joe about Jurassic Park for an extended period of time. I’m excited about some of the projects that I’ve been working on. I hope you’re excited too!

Juggling parenthood and work and life and other games is difficult, but carving out World of Warcraft playtime when new content drops is still high-priority for me. I got the available main quests done, I’m just about done with the side quests, and I’m trying to let myself organically poke around with the minimap off for a few more days before I start filling in what I’ve missed.

I love learning new things, but I especially love learning new things that are fairly mundane and yet blow your mind. Today I learned that broccoli on pizza is considered strange by many, if not most, pizza eaters. After some light research, it’s apparently an East Coast USA thing.

My wife’s go-to single-topping pizza is broccoli. I’m a fan, although it has to be cooked right — I’ve had some burnt-black broccoli and some sad soggy broccoli that rendered their pizza chariots quite inedible. Most of the time, though, broccoli gives pizza a crunchy pop without overwhelming the main event.

I do feel like I have a decent strange pizza résumé. One place near where I used to live would put chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, onion rings, french fries, or any combination of those on a pizza. A roadside lobster shack in Maine served lobster pizza. I’ve had quite a few potato pizzas with varying sauces and cheeses.

However, in the end I have to go with pickles. This is the only pizza that I ever ordered where a different person at the pizzeria called me back and asked if I was positive I wanted pickles on my pizza. It was good! Slightly soggy, though.

Dimensius is a Void Lord, and N’Zoth is an Old God. According to the handy World of Warcraft cosmology chart (not to be confused with the World of Warcraft cosmetology chart, which can be referenced when picking out the perfect blush to go with your transmog shoulders), Void Lords outrank Old Gods along the Shadow (Void) axis.

In fact, the Old Gods were created by the Void Lords in order to seek out developing world souls and corrupt them into powerful void beings. Thus, Dimensius should be incredibly more powerful than N’Zoth. Think of a Titan facing off against their creations, the Keepers. Think of how easily Sargeras could cleave Odyn’s stupid fiery beard right off his face.

However, it’s a super interesting time to ponder these sorts of queries. How many Void Lords are there? We only know of the one. Are there three, or a hundred? They hurtled countless Old Gods into the Twisting Nether, with four of them landing on Azeroth. From recent questing, we are finding out that Azeroth’s Old Gods may not be as loyal to the instructions of the Void Lords as intended.

World of Warcraft is full of stories of underdogs beating cosmic odds to pull off a planet-saving upset. I am super excited for the rest of the Worldsoul Saga to give us answers to some of the questions we have had about the Old Gods for over two decades.

The space race was a very, very different time. It took just under 12 years from 1957 until 1969 to go from launching the first ever object into orbit around the Earth, to a mission that successfully involved two humans walking around on the moon. The number of different technologies, techniques, and branches of science that had to be not just perfected but created boggles the mind. Compare to NASA’s current effort to get humans back to the moon, which is currently on about year 20 and might optimistically be 5 years away from boots on the lunar surface.

Jim Lovell was in on that breakneck space exploration era almost from the very beginning. He missed out on becoming one of NASA’s first class of astronauts because of a single out-of-bounds blood test, but joined the very next group. He flew four times in space, being on the first crew to ride the monstrous Saturn V rocket and the first crew to go beyond low Earth orbit.

With modern computers, I think most people imagine astronauts taking a fairly passive role in space travel. On the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission which was crippled on its way to the Moon by an exploded oxygen tank, many systems had to be shut down to conserve power. While hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth and with the stress from riding in a busted spaceship, Jim Lovell had to take a sextant (a 1700s seafarer’s tool), manually measure the positions of several stars out the window, do some navigation calculations by hand, and manually steer the ship to keep it on course for home.

To me that exemplifies the ‘grace under pressure’ characteristic that sets true heroes apart from the rest. We lost Jim Lovell this week, but he and his two Apollo 13 crewmates still hold the record for furthest distance traveled from Earth by a human being.

That’s what I’ve been saying! I am not alone in thinking that the neat, pigeon-holed universe that we have been presented by the Titans has been order-washed significantly. When Dimensius arrived at K’aresh, he “bathed the planet in shadow and arcane energies”. Why would a Void Lord throw arcane magic into the mix? The narrative of world souls being essentially Titan eggs is becoming more and more doubtful.

Without fully dusting off my Corkboard of Insanity and Red Yarn of Yelling Incoherently, I will say that I am extremely excited to see how the story plays out during the rest of our time on K’aresh and what the next moves are for several of our perennial foes.

That’s my Queue debut! Go forth this week and gear up, good luck in Manaforge Omega, and don’t forget to appreciate all of the little things like a full transmog outfit that matches your favorite pet duckie.