The Queue: Halloween prep course

My two kids are each others’ polar opposites in everything, and it’s particularly obvious at Halloween. My son is ready for anything, an extrovert with a sunny disposition. He wants to be a train conductor for the seventh year in a row — he’s 10 — and go trick or treating. My daughter is an introvert with the temperament of a black cat, and wants to dress up as a particular specific character from a Roblox subgame, but not go trick or treating, because it’s cringe.

This is The Queue, our weekly column where you ask us questions and we give you the answers and then go out of office to see if we can find white foundation and black fingerless gloves, we guess?

There have always been some rumblings with this, here and there, but nothing concrete as of yet.

It does sound like it could be neat, but it also sounds like it could be a recipe for disaster, given how the player base just is. You know what I mean. And I’d expect less of that from guilds, but it’s not unheard of.

I’m also kinda wondering how that would go for a player like me. I play WoW in a pick up/put down kinda way. I haven’t had a guild in a long time. It just doesn’t make a ton of sense for me, since I’m probably going to go idle for six months and get kicked for inactivity (and rightly so). And while I wouldn’t mind there being a huge feature I can’t really interact with in any way, it does feel a little bad. But then, I don’t really raid, so I can’t really complain about dev time.

We’re not sure! And we’re really intrigued as to the possibilities. We’ve still got quite a few maintenances to go before we get Player Housing, so it seems a bit early to start patching to set the stage for that. And of course that wouldn’t explain the weirdly long maintenance for regular Classic, either. So, sorry about your pomos, but it’s likely to be a long one today.

In short, no, because movies have jump scares, and books can’t. They just can’t.

Now, jump scares are cheap, and generally poor writing, but they do come from a sense of tension, and having that tension be violated with a sudden something. They’re not universally and always bad, but for me, the scariest scene in Silence of the Lambs has nothing to do with gore or hacked up eaten bodies. It’s the scene where Clarice is in Buffalo Bill’s pitch black basement, and the lights are out, but Buffalo Bill has night vision, and we see her through Bill’s eyes. It is nothing but tension and dread, in addition to our being complicit in it by looking through his eyes and being a party to it.

The closest I’ve come to this is reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and over time coming to the realization that the narrator has been lying to me the entire time, about everything. The fat, stupid, slovenly rich woman the main character is an assistant to in the first few chapters, as we leave her service, gives a monologue revealing that she is quite obviously far more savvy than the main character told us she is. So what else is the main character lying about — to us, to herself? And as you go on, trying to deconstruct what she tells you in real time with what she shows you by the other character’s dialogue and actions is chilling. But it’s no night vision basement.

Every year I buy a singular bag of candy corn. I consume that bag of candy corn, usually with the aid of my children. Then I am set free of the curse until the next Halloween.

I am also honorbound to eat any and all candy my children score which contains coconut. I will not have an Almond Joy at any other time of the year.