The Queue

I love the fall season. The leaves are changing colors, the air is crisper so I can actually wear one of my several sweaters without overheating, and Halloween spooks are popping up all over the place. It’s my favorite holiday, and I love that it’s right around the corner. I also love that the Headless Horseman will be back soon. I’m a sucker for a fun rhyme, and he’s full of them!

While I try and figure out what I dress up as for Halloween, it’s time for — the Queue.

It’s time to play the music! It’s time to light the lights! It’s time to break out the skeletons, turn on our favorite creepy movies, and either eat too much candy corn or tell the world that candy corn is the worst.

It’s October 1st. It’s our time.

Well, here we are at the end of another month.

September has never been my favorite — and the 30th in particular marks the day I lost my sister, so it always has a melancholy vibe about it. After 11 years, it’s not so much a painful reminder as it is a solemn memory but still. The upside is that it also means I have October to look forward to in less than a day, and that’s great! Spooky season is decidedly “me,” after all.

You know what else there is to look forward to? A Queue! Starting riiiiiight….now!

This is the Queue.

I’ve been playing a lot of Wrath of the Righteous, it’s basically replaced Cyberpunk 2077 which was my previous non-stop play game of 2021. It’s not strictly speaking an open world game, but it is a really big game with a lot of storytelling in it, and that’s something I really enjoy. I think I enjoy all the companion characters except Nenio, who is a lot. She’s not bad, exactly, but I end up taking pretty much anyone besides her in my party because seriously, she’s just a lot.

Pictured above is me and my party about to go buck wild on a Demon after we either blow up or save a big magic rock.

…planets.

Surprising no one, I went back to No Man’s Sky for the Frontiers update. I like it in theory, especially the builds menus, but in practice I really wish I could become the Overseer for more than one Settlement at a time. I get that it’s probably a tech limitation more than a gameplay philosophy restriction, but I’d much rather have Preston Garvey constantly hassling me to go open new ones than have to resign my successful settlement on a garbage planet in order to manage a new one on a different garbage planet.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions, and we hopefully give the right answer, because if not the Sentinels will probably attack again.

Ahead of the Curve!

My guild finally got our first Sylvanas kill! If you’ve been keeping score at home, that’s three Mythic bosses before a full Heroic clear. Difficulty curves are weird.

For some reason, she decided that she’d much rather be a Banshee at the end rather than change back into her more Elvish form. So rather than an unconscious body — we got this Banshee just staring ominously at us while we looted her giant treasure chest.

I really enjoyed this fight. It was super fun to tank since there was almost always something that I needed to be doing. I even liked the chains phase — I think it helped the fight to feel big and epic in a way that the Spine of Deathwing fight tried to be, but didn’t quite nail. I don’t doubt that there’s a parallel dimension where Blizzard split up the chains and final platform phase of Sylvanas into two distinct fights, and I think we would’ve been poorer for it.

We even recovered from my co-tank disconnecting in the middle of the final phase to clinch our victory. So I’m feeling like an extra invincible bear right now.

While I try and remember I am mortal, it’s time for — the Queue!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, everybody! That’s right: it’s Diablo time.

Diablo 2: Resurrected came out yesterday, and slaughtering the minions of hell is my current aesthetic.

Look, I get that I’m probably the only person who loved Titanfall 2 for its story, but it was also a really great game about a young mech named BT-7274 who loses one friend, makes another, and gives his life to save his new friend the way he couldn’t save the one he lost. It is a touching story about a robot with a heart of gold who loves his little buddy, and I desperately want a sequel so I can find out if BT managed to get his AI into said little buddy’s helmet or not.

So yeah, this whole thing bums me out. Nothing against Apex Legends or Jedi Fallen Order, but man, I legit got teary eyed when BT sacrificed himself and when I saw the helmet flashing at the end of the game and realized BT was trying to say help, I’m stuck in a helmet and Jack does not wash his hair enough, it really stinks in here I was so excited at the idea that we’d get a Titanfall 3 that would explore this, oh, and yeah people who love the multiplayer would be happy too and I guess that’s important.

But mostly I wanted more BT. Anyway, looks like that’s not happening for a while. And I am sad about it. Let’s all pile into the Queue.

You may remember when I wrote about Acrocanthosaurus a few weeks back, I talked about how it lived way before Tyrannosaurus Rex and if it had met one of the much smaller members of the Tyrannosauridae that had lived at that time, it wouldn’t have had much difficulty at all dispatching them? Well, meet Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, a smaller cousin of Acrocanthosaurus and other members of the Carcharodontosauridae such as Giganotosaurus or Carcharodontosaurus itself.

While I say smaller cousin, it’s still estimated to have been up to 8 meters (26 feet) long and weighed over a ton, which at that time — sometimes between 92 and 90 million years ago, based on the rocks where these fossils were found — would have potentially made it the largest predatory dinosaur in the area. Tyrannosaurids found in Uzbekistan around 92 million years ago were barely as big as horses, making Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis nearly four times their size. That means it might have pushed the Tyrannosaur radiation into North America and kept them suppressed in Asia, which would explain why we find larger Tyrannosaurs in North America such as Appallachiosaurus at 6 to 7 meters sometime around 77 million years ago in what is now the eastern United States.

It’s hard to say with the relatively limited sample size we currently have, but finding a Carcharodontid in Uzbekistan around 92 million years ago extends the range of the clade significantly further east and later in time than we’d been able to establish before now. It’s worth pointing out that some species of basal Tyrannosauroids like Dilong and Guanlong date back to the late Jurassic or early Cretaceous, significantly before Ulughbegsaurus was alive. So there may have been other Carcharodontid dinosaurs in what is now Europe and Asia keeping them smaller for millions of years.

I’m super excited about this and I can’t wait for more specimens to be discovered so that we can determine what, if any, relationship between the spread of the Allosauroid and Carcharodontid dinosaurs in the Jurassic and early Cretaceous might have had in the spread of the Tyrannnosauroidea from Europe and Asia into North America.

Cory thought he could earworm me? And forget this high holy day? As if.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’ll provide the answers as long as you know a bass player who can fill in.