The Queue

Went in to the eye doctor yesterday, which is why Anna had to cover my Queue for me, now I’m here doing Mitch’s Queue and despite double injections and having my retinas lasered, I still do not have eye based superpowers of any kind. No heat vision, no fel beams, no Cyclops style optic blasts of pure concussive force, nada.

This is the Queue. I’m starting to think I’m not going to get superpowers at all.

The day after a major patch is usually filled with some hiccups and other fixes to smooth things out, but whether or not this is disruptive can depend largely on your expectations and perspectives.

This is the Queue, where you ask us questions and we supply the answers. Quite.

It is hot in Edmonton, gang, and it’s only gonna get hotter all week. I am sweating so much I feel exhausted while I’m sleeping.

Anna and I traded Queues this week because Wednesday is my eye injection day. So I’m going to be going out, getting jabbed in both eyes and then coming home to a 40 degree Celsius hotbox, where I will be simultaneously sweating, bleeding and wincing for the better part of a day. So thank you to Anna for letting me at least not worry about the Queue.

I suspect I will be talking a lot about Hyenas today. Possibly also giant enemy crabs.

Hyenas are the best! I love telling jokes, and they keep laughing at them! Why wouldn’t I like them the best?

While I try to figure out why Mitch likes foxes better than them, it’s time for — 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.