The Queue: Life at the Faire

It’s been a fun ten days of going to the faire with my favorite person! We rode rides, ate fried food, saw shows, and only got rained out twice. Which, considering the wet year that Edmonton has had, is not too bad. We even snuck in a major concert at a stadium to see Jelly Roll and Post Malone. The show had so many pyrotechnics that we could feel the heat on our faces even way up in the top stands!

My feet may be tired, but I already can’t wait for next year’s faire. It’s super fun, and I love the chance to see so many musical acts that I wouldn’t get to normally. We even managed to not pay a cent for parking during the whole thing, which is a pretty good win in my books.

While I try to adjust to a normal life again, it’s time for our daily question and answer column — The Queue!

It wasn’t my wildest year of trying new faire foods. The things on option weren’t super appealing in an out-there way. I know my tastes well enough to know that I likely wouldn’t have liked the giant flat rice cracker since I don’t like regular-sized rice crackers — no matter how much shrimp or beef was pressed along with it.

I did have a deep-fried corn on the cob, which was amazing. It was like a big corn fritter, with a Mexican cream sauce and Tajín on top. It was big, not overly absurd in its decadence, and a messy, fun time to eat.

The other weird stand-out was the Buldak noodle stuffed grilled cheese sandwich. It came from the same food truck that had done donut-based grilled cheese in years past. The noodles were nice and spicy, and they complemented the cheese well. The whole thing wasn’t as messy as the picture made it look, but it was still a mouthful.

We didn’t get the fancy pistachio ice cream, but we did also try the butter-drizzled vanilla soft serve with sea salt. You could make this at your house, and I’d say it’s worth a try. It was ok, but didn’t need nearly as much butter as they poured over it.

This is a tough one because I feel in my bones it was the addition of the automatic dungeon finder in Warcraft. No more asking in trade for an hour for a tank to do your key; just have one supplied from another realm and off you go, enjoying the game. I do fully realize that it did weaken the server community and made it harder to build the relationships that made original Warcraft what it was, though. Maybe if there had been a way to only pull from people on your server who were looking for dungeons at the same time, things might’ve been different. Still, I fully stand by the convenience and quality of life of making my dungeon groups assembled faster and easier.

They’re actually going to make new new ones. They’ll take the fancy horse model and a modified elf model, and just slap them together with a little duct tape — Red Green would be proud. They’ll wind up being a little overpowered, though, since they can wear two pairs of shoes.

It’s ok though, the downside is that the dungeon designers can keep you out of boss rooms by putting some evenly spaced bars on the floor.

If they were actually going to make Dryads a new playable race though, I’d bet they’d start from the ground up. Fully new models that probably take a variety of influences from every incarnation of Dryads across the Warcraft games, not to mention the centaurs and other four-legged creatures, and Lunara in Heroes of the Storm, of course. There’s a lot of great design work done there, and it’d be a shame to leave it all in the dust.

New Allied Race and new Hero Class — Ogres and the Ogre Magi. They’ll be able to be Rogues, Warriors, Hunters, Priests, Warlocks, and Shamans. No regular Mages though; if you want to be an Ogre who is a Mage, you have to be an Ogre Magi. That’ll be the only one that is a two-headed Ogre, and you’ll be able to set your second head to cast a limited selection of spells from one of the three main Mage trees, while combining powers for your big cooldowns and signature spell.

Lore-wise, there’s probably a tribe of Ogres out there who found some sort of magical doo-dad that locked them in a bubble of fast-time, and they got to build their own flourishing Ogre society while the rest of Azeroth did all the stuff we did with Titans and such forth. Now they’re ready to help us save the planet from Xal’atath and use their magical powers to help fix that pesky sword.

I think Mists of Pandaria is my favorite expansion for timewalking. The dungeons were a good length without any that felt like they were dragging on too long. You get an interesting mix of mechanics and enemies, and hearing “Yes, yes, yes…no, no, no no no! Yes! No! Peppers!” will always make me smile. The whole suite of Pandaria dungeons feels like a pretty high point overall for instanced content.

My least favorite Timewalking is The Burning Crusade; they’re just too long, and sometimes they haven’t scaled well after so many years of changes to mechanics.

No Bacardi this week since, by the time you read this, many of you will already have visited your vaults. Instead, here’s a team of performing dogs ready to run their hearts out through an obstacle course. Would you believe that they were all good dogs — it’s true!

Would you rather

Be honored with a commemorative bronze plaque for eating a comically large meal at your favorite restaurant

Or

Get a medium sized trophy for winning a city-wide scavenger hunt

Today’s Anna Matt Earworm™: Bro Hymn

Pennywise was one of the musical acts from the faire and was a lot of fun! Sadly, I didn’t get to see this song live because of a major thunderstorm that shut the concert down early.

That’s it for me today. I’ll see you next time. Make sure to leave lots of questions for Matt, so they have a good Queue!