The Queue: This thorn in my side is from the tree I planted

It’s the Queue. I fell asleep at an inopportune time, because the only thing more inconvenient than my usual insomnia is when it fails and I sleep exactly when I intended to be doing something else.

Let us do things and stuff. Also, everyone hug Lefty and keep Wade in your thoughts. He’s a good boy. Wade, I mean. I’m not presumptuous enough to assume Lefty is a good boy.

That is good to hear — I’m very much wanting Legion as a fast paced ARPG experience instead of having to plod my way through it.

• Baldur’s Gate 3 comes to mind. I’m still bummed we didn’t get a level 20 DLC for that game.
• Anthem, if it had gotten a DLC or expansion that stopped it from being bad, could actually have been good. There was a kernel of a good game in there that got murdered by EA.
• Xenogears. Spiritual successors don’t count.
• In terms of sequels we’ll likely never get that I desperately want:
  • Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura was a game sadly fifteen years ahead of its time.
  • Tyranny by Obsidian Entertainment
  • Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning — I wasn’t super fond of the Fatesworn DLC that came with Re-Reckoning, but overall I loved KoA and I wish it hadn’t crashed on takeoff

Yeah, for some reason. Suuuuuure.

Especially when it’s not a post written by an AI that sounds like it needs to go home because it’s drunk.

I want Legion Remix to feel closer to Remists than, say, what we’ll get when we get Legion on WoW Classic. I want it to actually feel like you can get powerful enough to solo World Bosses and raids within a month, so that I can level a host of alts to just utterly ravage the game and collect all that transmog that’s eluded me so far.

Let me kick the Legion in the backside and rain loot down upon me, Blizzard.

Back in 2019 — when I felt that people were interested in my dinosaur ramblings — I wrote a short post about the book All Yesterdays, one of my favorite discussions of the Shrink Wrapped Dinosaur effect. So you have no idea how much it hurts me to tell you that we almost certainly would catch it if they had beaver tails. Why?

Let’s say hit to Castorocauda lutrasimilis, a prehistoric mammaliforme that is not a beaver, nor even remotely closely related to modern beavers. Heck, it’s not even a member of the crown group of mammals, it’s a member of the mammaliformes clade which includes crown group mammals and all of their extinct relatives up to Morganocodonta.

Castorcoauda is an ancient species, dating back to the middle Jurassic, older than many dinosaur species. Purely through looking at the transverse processes on its tail we can determine that its tail anatomy is similar to that of a beaver or otter, which means that despite not having anything like fossilized tissue we confidently reconstruct the animal with a tail similar to a beaver.

In other words, often we can in fact deduce these kinds of things just by looking at the bones. So, while I love talking about the Shrink Wrapping in modern paleoart, it doesn’t mean we’re gonna miss a freaking beaver tail on a fossil animal.

So, here we are now, writing the Queue as fast as I possibly can. And I’m done! Remember, Catorocauda had a big fat beaver tail and that’s why we named it that, and we figured it out without anything but the bones. Sometimes we don’t shrink wrap.