The Queue

“Swole” may mean different things to different Stewards. I think I could maintain a Chaddius level of swole, though.

How we all doing today? We’re close to patch day now and… well, I’ve been away from WoW for a minute, so I’m hopeful it draws me back in. In the meantime, Dark Souls and Overwatch have been keeping me pretty entertained.

But enough about that. This is The Queue.

I love Therapsids. It’s a big group, and it includes not just cool prehistoric creatures like Inostrancevia and Anteosaurus, but also your house cat or dog, any bats or pigs or wolves or dolphins you might see, and human beings — because all mammals are part of the therapsidia. That’s right, despite what this headline says, Anteosaurus wasn’t a reptile at all, but a dinocephalian therapsid, and a relative of ours.

Of course, while I love dinocephalians, the gorgonopsids are my absolute favorite of the ancient, long extinct lineages that were our cousins. Big beasts like Inostrancevia and smaller but still agile predators like Aelurosaurus — these particular predators had a lot of adaptations that we see today in mammals, but also lacked some, like the larger mammalian neocortex. The non-mammalian therapsid brain was apparently, according to their skulls shape and size, more like that of a reptile than ours. But while the synapsids (including therapsids) started out as a cousin group to the sauropsids, their divergence led them down a path that differed in many ways from their counterparts in the reptilia. And for many millions of years, before the Permian-Triassic extinction called The Great Dying, therapsids ruled the Earth.

And while they were mostly pushed out by the archosaurs after the PT extinction, they hung on throughout the entire Mesozoic, with the cynodonts evolving into true mammals by the late Triassic. And today, those very cynodonts are giraffes and lions and hippos and squirrels and yes, humans — not only are all mammals therapids, all mammals are cynodonts as well.

So that’s a long winded explanation of why I put a picture of my dog at the top of today’s Queue, because she’s the cutest little therapsid you’re ever gonna see.

So, since I like to pretend I’m a good parent on Instagram, I’ve been trying to include a bunch of one-off STEM experiments and crafts in my kids’ summertime fun. Ice cream in a bag and fluffy slime were hits, but the former came with a lot of complaining that their arms were going to fall off, and fluffy slime, well, we make slime all the time, but without the shaving cream, which made it smell weird, and ugh, can’t we just play Roblox, mom?

But last week, we exploded soap in the microwave, and now they’re demanding more explosions. On the one hand, I can’t exactly blame them, but on the other hand, I feel like I’ve crossed a terrible threshold in their little lizard brains.

This the The Queue, where if you ask us questions we’ll take long enough to answer for this comically large fuse to burn down. Oh, nothing important, be chill.

Happy Father’s day to all of the dads out there. I hope you had a good day full of fun times, and just the absolute daddest of dad jokes. I spent the day hanging with my family — eating and making merry. Luckily, none of us were turned into piles of ash by evil Warlocks. It was a good day. Also, it was really long apparently, who knew?

Now that it’s over, it’s time for — The Queue.

It’s the end of the week… again. And it’s the Friday Queue… again. So let’s get to it.

I don’t really know why, but for whatever reason my preferred Cyberpunk 2077 build is focused around pistols and quickhacks. It’s similar to this build that focused on blades and quickhacks, but trading out blades for pistols, and it’s heavily reliant on the Comrade’s Hammer one-shot pistol that does ridiculous amounts of damage because it fires one big grenade instead of four normal bullets. It’s slow to reload, but that’s fine, because I use the reload time to use some quickhacks like Contagion or Breach Protocol to damage and debuff my opponents.

Anyway, I wish World of Warcraft would introduce pistols and let Hunters dual-wield them.

I think it’s a good transmog set and it’s a good place and staging. I enjoy it.

Yes, I can too enjoy things. I enjoyed all those sick exclusives for the Xbox at E3 this year! I’m looking forward to the new Arkane Studios game, Redfall, just because it’s vampires instead of zombies. In general I’m looking forward to seeing what Obsidian and Bethesda get up to as Xbox studios.

Ah, to be a former Alterra employee building my own spacious underwater seabase piece by painstaking piece.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we can totally answer while we go find more titanium and watch the Nintendo panel. Multitasking is a thing, it’s fine.

I just beat Control. Not only did I beat Control, but I got the platinum trophy for doing all of the achievements in it, then I beat both of the expansion packs and did all of their achievements too.

Have you ever felt like a game was written directly for you? Because that’s what Control felt like to me. It checked so many of my boxes that I was hooked from the first minute.

You play as a woman named Jesse Faden, led by the entity in her head to the mysterious Federal Bureau of Control — the government agency in charge of keeping the Weird™ stuff under wraps. From there you explore a sprawling interdimensional office building full of secrets and artifacts with wild powers. What powers you ask? I dunno how ’bout the power of flight? That do anything for ya? That’s levitation, holmes.

I’ve heard it described best as what would happen if the Ghostbusters were in charge of the FBI. Which pretty much nails it. You can even get it for free this week on the Epic Game Store if you wanted to check it out. I wholeheartedly recommend it!

While I take a break from ripping fire extinguishers off of the wall with my mind and launching them at transdimensional entities possessing office workers, it’s time for — The Queue.