The Queue

I don’t want to get too real here, but recently a series of bad things has happened and one of them was potential uterine cancer for my wife. They had a 10 cm tumor extracted, and since then we’re trying to get her through it.

There’s an ancient legend that speaks of Wednesday as being a day for frogs. And here at Blizzard Watch we’re all about honoring such immemorial traditions.

This is The Queue, and here are some questions and some answers. Ribbit.

Any community that’s been around as long as we have will have some degree of associated lore. Some of it is tidbits about the people themselves — how Cory loves the muppets, or how Mitch is Mitch. But there are some aspects that are a little more intangible. One of those is broadly classed as The Site Curse. This usually manifests in having the Queue break in weird technical ways, but is also associated in some way with the people, and how news just seem to always happen when we’re all indisposed in some way. For instance, I planned a trip to London thinking I was safe, and oops, those are the same dates Diablo 4 dropped their first expansion. Sorry! I’ll try to be less cursed next time.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions, and we’ll hopefully supply some answers, assuming the column saves properly.

It’s hard to believe, but Blizzard Watch turns ten years old — this very day!

That’s like at least three Warcraft expansions, maybe even four!

Along the way, we’ve been to BlizzCon, covered games developed by Blizzard, and branched out into other spheres and mediums. I think it’s likely that we’ve had millions of words added into our little slice of the gaming and nerd worlds, and almost twenty thousand articles (if the number I’m looking at in the back end is right). We’ve seen faces come and go, and friends come and go, even the owners have changed!  But along the way, we’ve always stuck close to our principles of covering the things in the gaming and geek spheres that we’ve been passionate about.

So I’d like to propose a toast, of whatever your favorite beverage of choice is — here’s to all of you fine folks reading this who’ve contributed to making this a great place to be nerdy together. We wouldn’t be here without you, and I know I’m speaking for all of the other writers here and that we’re very thankful you are.

So without further ado, day one of the next ten years! Let’s Queue!

When Friday sneaks up on you, it’s never in a good way. It’s never “oh, wow, I can sleep in tomorrow!” It’s always “oh no, I have so much work that has to be done this week and the week is over already.” It’s Friday and like so many Fridays before it, I got out of bed ready to turn around and take a nap.

But instead of doing that, let’s answer some questions.

So Owlcat Games. the people who worked on Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Rogue Trader recently did an AMA talking about what they’re working on in 2025 and beyond. And because of that AMA, I have a sneaking suspicion of what big huge game license might be something they’re working on.

The Lunar Festival has begun so it’s time for my annual gripe: where the heck are the Elders of Pandaria? The Pandaren literally have spirits of their ancestors as regular residents on the island and yet none of them give us lucky red envelopes. This oversight still bugs me, and seeing that Khaz Algar was getting Elders kinda angered me.

Fortunately they did a fantastic job with the new Elders. They recognized the fact that actual spirit Elders of the three NPC races made no sense and instead turned it into a way of instructing residents of the past — one of the Earthen Archivists was even pretending to be an Elder for immersion. Kudos to the development team for not just mindlessly adding spirit Elders to the zones but finding a way to expand on the holiday. Now if they could just turn their attention to the southern continent …

While I cruise around everywhere but Pandaria collecting Coins of Ancestry for the cool new mount let’s answer some questions!

The Year of the Snake is upon us, and while I do feel bad for people who aren’t all about the reptiles, I tend to enjoy them. It’s funny though, because I’d joined a few snake ID groups on Reddit just for my own backyard. I find most North American venomous snakes are extremely threatening looking — all spikes and glares and triangular heads and rattles. But the thing is, Reddit is international, so I’ve been learning about snakes from all around the world, and while the Russel’s viper and puff adders and cobras are much the same in terms of being clearly somebody to not screw with, I would absolutely be that idiot trying to handle the cute little Australian venomous guys. They call one of them — a cute little smooth stripey guy — the bandy bandy! But he’s crazy venomous!

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions, and you can also press 1 for more snake fun facts.

I’ve been visiting a whole bunch of breweries this weekend trying the weirdest beers they’ve had. Not just regular weird, but wyrd weird. The local craft beer people throw a little wyrd festival thing in January to stretch their creative muscles, and oh boy have they been weird(wyrd)!

Thanks to my favorite person ever noticing this was going on, we’ve made a whole weekend of it and we’re only halfway through the list! She’s really the bee’s knees, and it’s not just all the beer making me say that.

So far the standouts have been a ham and pineapple beer and an out-of-this-world hypnotic purple one called Unicorn Blood that tastes like taro and bubble tea. Have all of the beers worked? Mostly! Would I get another pint of the salted mushroom porter? Unlikely! There’s still way more to taste though, and I can’t wait to find out what else is out there!

While I sober up a bit, it’s time for — The Queue!

I don’t know why this week feels so weird, like it is simultaneously Thursday and Saturday, but definitely not Friday. I assume that it’s because I haven’t been correctly turning pages on my dog-a-day calendar, because how can I know what the day is unless an adorable dog provides this information from my desk? Really, it’s impossible to know, and thus I have entered a state in which time has no meaning.

But I think it may actually be Friday… so here we go, let’s Queue.