The Queue: Fire!

My son accidentally microwaved ramen without adding water yesterday and thereby started a small fire. It wasn’t a huge deal, except now everything in my house smells vaguely smoky. The fix would ordinarily be to open the windows and run fans, but it’s approximately a billion degrees outside and humid, so that had to be short-lived. I’m going to wait til the end of the day to wipe down the walls and launder all the launderable fabric, then change the HVAC filter and pretend everything is fine.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions and we’ll let you find out yourself so it’s a teachable moment. Life lesson, if you will.

Sorry, I’m still in Battlegrounds land, so this question is fairly irrelevant to me. However, I will say that, as someone who’s thereby somewhat in the know of the game but not playing it, it seems like they’re making this expansion extra tantalizing for monetization. It’s not so much the expansion itself, but the stuff around it. I think this is the first Pre-Release Brawl we’ve had that wasn’t just a fun little spin through the new cards, but was instead a way to extract cash with not only tickets, but trying to entice people to preorder by gating the available cards. It’s weird.

Anyway, this expansion seems really fun, and I do adore the theme. I’m looking forward to see what the Battlegrounds tie-in cosmetics will be. And the expansions are necessarily pretty microtransact-y. I’m just a little curious as to how this trajectory will affect the franchise going forward.

There isn’t one set timeframe. The one core reason I’ll restart a playthrough is, if it’s been a really long time since I’ve picked up a particular game, so I need to, at minimum, relearn the hotkeys and general mechanics again.

I have a bad habit of picking up and dropping persistent survival or sandbox games, and when I come back, I’m annoyed at my past self for keeping all this crap. Why do I even have this set of scrap metal? What is this glass stuff? And then I vendor or destroy it only to find out, whoops, that’s high-end endgame crafting stuff and I was at 78/100 to get the last really good gun or whatever. And if I’ve forgotten the game enough that I don’t remember that it’s E to pick stuff up and Q to block an incoming attack, then I’m definitely going to forget all that noise.

I may restart just long enough to get my bearings and then go back to my main save, but either way, it just makes sense to start a new one for a little while.

This is definitely a True Confessions thing, but I never use VATS in Fallout. In fact I completely forget it’s even an option until I fatfinger it and the little sound plays, and then when I use it for funsies because I activated it so I may as well, one of two things happens. Sometimes a shot bounces very loudly off a sign or a pillar or something between me and my target and every baddie in the whole POI is suddenly trying to burrow its way into my power armor. The other option is that I completely obliterate a radroach into a spray of goo. Which, okay, but also I could’ve just done that shooting my gun normally.

I understand why people like it, but I don’t.

I don’t have a Costco membership right now, because it makes me overspend. And it’s wild, because I am completely cognizant of things like aisle placement and marketing, and yet I still can’t resist looking at the consumer electronics right by the door, or the super nice towels that I guess I could definitely use along the aisles, and the big floating island of snacks, before I get to the cheap produce and jugs of maple syrup I went there to get in the first place.

But, that ties in to my lazy food thing, which is deli containers. You can get them for incredibly cheap from restaurant supply stores, or even just hang on to them when you get chinese food or mac and cheese from the local BBQ joint. A C-16 is a C-16, and the lids are interchangeable with the 8 and the 32, and all of them stack together so it takes up very minimal cupboard space. And they’re dishwasher safe, freezer safe, and even microwave safe if you don’t mind a little microplastics in your food. But if not, they flex, so you can run a little hot water over them right out of the freezer, and then pop out the frozen food like an ice cube tray, then run a defrost cycle in the microwave in a ceramic dish.

This means that on a high-effort day when I make soup or dahl or chili I can put up the rest in 8 or 16 oz servings in the freezer. I’ll use half a can of black beans, freeze the rest on a sheet pan overnight, then sprinkle like, a tablespoon into a quesadilla. It’s not meal prep because I’m doing it specifically because I have no plan, I just know I don’t want this food right now, but future Anna will be pumped that she doesn’t have to cook in like 3 weeks.

Speaking of, Tuesday is my busiest day of the week, because I have to do the Queue and prep Lore Watch Podcast for our Patrons for this afternoon before it releases tomorrow, and get all the Shorts planned for that and do the notes for the Blizzard Watch Podcast before they live record that tonight. I’m thinking I may bust out the container of stuffed shells I made in May, bake that off with a salad on the side.

I can’t take naps. When I do, when I wake up I’m just completely groggy and out of it until I go ahead and fully sleep all night. I guess that’s really the issue — I need to just have a good long unbroken sleep or three to catch up, and the nap itself isn’t the culprit. But today isn’t the day — I gotta wash all my linens because they smell like fire. Add one more thing to the to-dos!