Only Day You Can Reblog This

Once, there was a Japanese monk who had a little personal superstition.

Every time he travelled to a new location, he’d find some wood that grew there and make it into a staff to defend himself from any bandits or ne'er-do-wells who attacked him.

He was convinced that the staff, being more in tune with his surroundings, would serve him better in a fight. One day, he explained this to a scholarly friend, who decided to do some investigating.

The scholar started swapping the monk’s staves while he was asleep. Some days, the monk would be using a staff he thought was from where he was, but wasn’t; some days he’d believe it was from elsewhere, when in fact it was the correct staff for where he was; and some days belief and truth would match.

Interestingly, the scholar discovered that it was the monk's belief that mattered - whichever staff he was using, if he thought it matched his surroundings he’d do a little better, and if he thought it didn’t he’d do a little worse.

Of course, since then there have been many more rigorous studies, but that scholar’s treatise remains one of the most important works in shaping human understanding of the place-bo effect.

You know, for as much as English lacks a few things that Portuguese takes for granted, like an one word formally agreed on plural for “you” and two different “to be” verbs, one for momentary states of being and one for more permanent ones (like, for example. We can differentiate between being busy for a certain period of time and being a busy person in general just going by the verb), you guys really went off when you decided having different terms for baby cats and baby dogs. Like, kittens and puppies? That’s SO cute and SO right. Those little things ARE kittens and puppies.

"imagine them in their underwear" is weird sanitised advice for people who think the most debased thing someone can be is naked, but not so naked that they're morally discomforting. what you have to do, if you want stage presence, is imagine them as your soulless undead army

I actually think this is more interesting than "because tournaments have been running Warhammer culture since the 90s" (it has, mostly, FWIW, but there's More To It). It's a confluence of the rules in 10e, and the post-COVID 40k renaissance

The first puzzle piece is 9e terrain rules were a hot mess. Legitimately confusing and miserable to play with. If the only thing 10e had changed was terrain, it would still have been heralded as a golden new day.

The second is that the vastly simpler 10e rules work really, really well with ruins. Hills, woods, swamps, etc are all basically "ruins but worse".

Then there's the abject failure of 10e to rein in lethality. Turn one, anything you can see should probably die, regardless of what it is. If there isn't a lot of cover, melee armies cannot win. If there is, the game is fair, balanced and fun.

So, we have game that works great with busy terrain, and the default terrain in mechanics - corner ruins - is also cheap to make.

And suddenly the game gets wildly popular. Tournaments are popping up everywhere. One quote I saw this year said there were more tournaments run in 2024 than there were tournament players in 2016!

And they all need to fill 30+ boards with legal terrain, instantly creating demand for a veritable industry of corner ruin makers -mdf, 3d prints, etc.

We must destroy the plague of L-shaped ruins

One thing I really like is how much of the Horus Heresy Design language - itself built to be a reasonable origin of the old 40k designs - ended up echoed in these new ECs. The Flawless Blades, for example, are clearly carrying the same design of sword as the Palatine Blades. The Palatines are a new-for-30k unit built around the EC's long-textual obsession with martial excellence and how many of their (40k) characters were masterful duellists. Entire unit of rapier-armed space marines who are individually a match in melee for most other chapter Centurions. Expensive, hard to use, but gorgeous models. Now, they're in 40k, with thousands of years of warp marinade. The old 40k Noise Marines were more electric-guitars-with-guns. Heresy made vaguely guitarish Sonic Cannon for them instead - the the 'body' at the back with twiddlyknobs, a long 'neck' leading to a head that opens up into a grille/emitter. Now in 40k the same cannons have been mutated back towards the Death Guitar look, with perhaps a hint of bagpipe. Love it.

Now that the hype over the initial reveal is over time to post some thoughts.

First off....Holy Slaanesh the models look amazing. All the Slaanesh bits look great. I do get that there is not alot of body horror that tends to go along with Slaanesh but to allow us our own model line combined with Warhammer going more mainstream I get it.

Lucius...just wow.... Like the new Ahriman, Kharn and Typhus he got quite the glow up.

The new lords. Gonna grab a few of them for assorted kitbashed. The Kakophonic one is personally my fav of the pair.

The new noise marines. THINGS SHALL GET LOUD NOW!!! Love the new design. It is interesting to note that at this time noise marines are the only cult troop that is not battle line.

Pour one out for the pure demon players. The reveal that Slaaneshi demons are in the codex pretty much makes the squatting of the Daemon codex rumor a sure thing. I am always sad to see a codex disappear esp one like the demon codex where they still are a major player in the lore.

The flawless blades. I was writing for my homebrew a version of them. To have models fit my headcannon is quite nice. And they look pretty good.

I am sad like most other EC players that the sonic dreadnaught is still missing. Or even an upgrade to the hellbrute. A small missed opportunity.

Despite the full list of what we keep from the CSM dex not yet available I am a little more at ease due to our new battle line. Our version of melee and bolter Legionaries still work perfect as counts as from the core CSM codex which still doesn't invalidate my current WiP jump lord conversion. Or my good luck forgfiend(so far only maulerfiend is confirmed) Fluffy. Or the traitor guard force I am planning to represent the Archite Palatines. Having 2 books to play from depending on my mood is always a good thing.

Overall I am quite excited for what we got. I was concerned our launch was gonna be just Lucius and noise marines.

stop normalizing things we are running out of Weird Shit

Black asexuals of tumblr (from the UK and Ireland), I need you...

to fill out a questionnaire about asexual tv/media representations, what you think about them, and what they could be doing better. Almost all questions are optional, so you can come and say as little or as much as you'd like!

Please help a fellow ace out, and help me make this research not be just another look at white asexuals...

Go to https://tinyurl.com/acetvquestions or the link in my bio

Please share, even if you don't wanna do the questionnaire, many thanks!

Commander Shepard - Mass Effect song (via miracleofsound)

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I've not heard this version before, but it's impossible to mistake the core melody. Remarkably rich mixing, though. Guessing this is a fan cover.