I realize most of you probably agree that Cthulhu is unstoppable, unless you've drunk the "he was beaten by a steamship" flavor-ade. But here are the reasons that he is Earth's poison pill. First, he's not all alone. He's no Godzilla nor even Galactus. He's the ruler of an entire nation of starspawn, each one of them huge, potent, and mind destroying. Some are Great Old Ones on their own (notably Ghatanothoa, Zoth-Ommog, Coinchenn, and Cthylla, among others). We don't know how many starspawn lurk in R'lyeh with him, but it could be millions. Imagine millions of Godzillas rising from the deep. Second, he knows what we're up to. He has been communicating with other starspawn and aliens and cultists constantly. He knows everything going on on Earth right now, and his agents have deeply infiltrated us. He can READ OUR MINDS so we have no secrets anyway. He's super-intelligent. He is smarter than the smartest human who ever lived and he has lived for billions of years. He knows it all. He knows all science thoroughly. Our greatest accomplishments are all things he knew a billion years ago. Nukes? Super-colliders? Strangelets? He has a handle on it all. His alien power lets him blast our minds. Create structures that twist space-time. Open other dimensions. The H-Bomb is a toy. An obsolete toy for him. He's mobile. He can fly and he can plunge through space-time using wormhole travel. He can open portals to anywhere and surge through. Picture him blotting out the sun. Or appearing through a wormhole in the middle of our mightiest fortress. Millions of gigantic, super-intelligent, flying monsters with dimensional powers. Our own defenses are sabotaged by cultists. We go mad just seeing what he has. Anyway. I think about this kind of thing all the time.

How Doom changed the world. In 1991 I worked on the game Command HQ with Dan Bunten, who later became Danielle Berry. ANYWAY, Command HQ is of historical importance, because as near as I can tell, it was the first real-time strategy game. Dan thought that since 65% of gamers had modems it would mostly be played head-to-head. It bombed. I think it had about 40,000 sales. Later I went to id Software and got to work on Doom. We all agreed at id that it was unlikely anyone would ever play Deathmatch, except in very small numbers. After all zero games had a robust head-to-head experience, and my personal time with Command HQ just hammered home the point. However, everyone at id loved Deathmatch, so we kept it in the game. We figured, even if no one else played it, WE could keep doing it. We were entirely wrong. I don't know if Doom's Deathmatch exploded because there were more networks to play on, or if Doom was so compelling everyone had to try it, or if a critical mass of modems had finally been reached. Maybe it was because Doom was a hit with the college kids, all of whom had ready access to networks. Anyway, Deathmatch skyrocketed and that's what made Doom famous really. We were by no means the first first-person shooter. But we were the first game to make the player-vs-player model universal. Today, a game that DOESN'T have a PvP has to explain why. I am extremely proud of that, even if it wasn't entirely our doing.

@memeslich The owlbear is the second-dumbest “classic” D&D monster. It looks dumb. It sounds dumb. And it combines the least useful parts of two animals. The dumbest is the gelatinous cube which literally evolved to live on graph paper.