The Queue

It’s a long weekend! Or it was the long weekend, depending on when you’re reading this. Time’s tricky like that.

I had a pretty good weekend. Took care of some errands that needed to be taken care of, killed some bosses, ate a giant cinnamon bun that I found frozen in the freezer. Great job past Cory for leaving that there! Monday I’m going to be helping my Mom cut up a bunch of the apples from her yard to make pies, so that’s gonna be delicious too!

While I try and cram a little more relaxation into my weekend, it’s time for — The Queue.

Friday has snuck up on me again, and that means it’s time for another Queue. So let’s follow along with the headline and do this.

Hello and happy Thursday, Queuemans! Even though I didn’t have the first Queue of the month, I’m grateful to see Anna make the obligatory yet timeless reference. The reference, of course, being to Green Day’s Wake Me Up When September Ends.

In any case, this is The Queue, and it’s time to do just that.

August was a very long, personally pretty fraught month for me, so I’m just gonna hibernate through September and hope everything’s back to normal in October.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we answer… when September ends.

Seriously, doing a Queue after Cory’s massive optical pun extravaganza 2021 was not a  great idea for the guy who gets routine injections and occasional laser blasts to his retina, burning holes in it. But what I want doesn’t matter, when what I’ve chosen is at hand — a Tuesday Queuesday, as it were.

I was going to use a header image of C’thun for this, but then I remembered Ashkandi has a big eyeball in the hilt, and here we are.

I’m listening to Gladiator by Zayde Wolf.  Now you can too!

The Mythic Eye of the Jailer is no more! For this week anyway. My guild has managed to see the path forward and didn’t blink in the face of adversity to come out victorious! I know how much you all love living vitreously through my raid updates. Even if sometimes they’re a bit cornea. I can only hope that I can lead by example and be a teacher for you, my beloved pupils. Just don’t lash out at me for these puns.

How does one celebrate after killing a giant eyeball? Well, it turns out that we celebrate by killing some Val’kyr too. The Mythic Nine wound up not being as difficult as the Eye, but I think that’s mainly because we were just trying to brute force a mechanic rather than deal with it the right way. With them down we’re now 3/10 Mythic, but we still haven’t done Heroic Sylvanas. In theory, the first three Mythic bosses were easier than her, I guess eye’ll see next week!

While I dodge all the rotten fruit that is undoubtedly being thrown at me, it’s time for — The Queue.

The days of the week inevitably sneak up on me, and Friday — complete with this super-sneaky Queue deadline — always seems to come out of nowhere. Wasn’t it Wednesday just yesterday, when I didn’t have to think about writing the Queue? Or maybe it was Tuesday. Monday?

Well, I checked the calendar and it insists it’s Friday, so I guess I’m writing a Queue for you all.

I had another in the whole line of “haha you thought it was a Mitch queue, but it’s actually a Cory Queue! Fooled you again” posts all planned out when Mitch asked me to take over his Queue today, but then I ran some Mythic+ runs and got the most down to the wire run that I’ll ever probably get — and it’s all I can think about.

We were in a Halls of Atonement and bopping along. It was our last run of the evening so we were playing a little more carefree than usual, just having a good time and making a few easy mistakes, missing interruptions, standing next to the Spiteful fiends — things like that. Nothing too terrible, we were still pretty sure that we were going to make the timer, but it was going to be more of a long shot with each tiny mistake. After the third boss though there were less than four minutes left on the timer. It would’ve been really easy to give up and say that there was no possibility of timing it, but we still kept pushing and wound up finishing the run on time!

Now when I say on time normally I mean “oh yeah, we finished that on time, we had like three minutes left over.” This time it was more “we finished on time, couldn’t have finished it more on time.” Our final time for the run was 31:59.902/32:00!!

The clock in-game had already switched to the red angry 00:00 remaining! I still can’t believe that we came that close. It literally must’ve come down to one person getting a lucky critical in the last tenth of a second. So next time you’re running something: keep at it — you might just get the photo finish to end all photo finishes.

While I take a few deep breaths, it’s time for — The Queue.

Acrocanthosaurus atokensis or ‘the high spined lizard from Atoka County’ named for where it was found and its most distinctive trait, was the largest carnivore in North America when it lived, and remains the fifth largest theropod discovered in North America to date. At a length of about 11.5 meters — a little more than 38 feet — and a weight approaching six metric tons, it was a member of the Carcharodontosauridae although it lacked some of the defining characteristics of more derived Carcharodontosaurs like Carcharodontosaurus or Giganotosaurus. As mentioned, it had a series of extremely tall spines growing out of its back, with muscle attachments that suggest a ridge of muscle possibly anchoring a fatty hump.

Acrocanthosaurus lived between 125 and 100 million years ago, which means no, it could never have met or fought Tyrannosaurus. In fact, the most contemporary Tyrannosaurid we know of from that time period is Dilong paradoxus, which lived about 126 million years ago, or the closely related Eotyrannus lengi, which lived during the Aptian which is the same geological era as Acrocanthosaurus, and which wouldn’t even have come up to the animal’s hip. Basically, at the time this dinosaur lived, it would have eaten any extant Tyrannosaurids in one or two bites. Acrocanthosaurus teeth have been found near the remains of the massive Macronarian Sauroposeidon, suggesting it may have hunted or scavenged from these behemoth relatives of Giraffatitan.

This is the Queue. Here’s hoping y’all talked about dinosaurs this week because I’m super in the mood.

I think I need more coffee.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’ll stop wallowing in ennui long enough to answer.