One Of The Earliest Lessons I Had In 'adventure Pacing' For Running RPGs Was A Game Where The Players

“Why is snoop dogg at the Olympics-“

WRONG QUESTION!

WHY ISNT MARTHA STEWART THERE WITH HIM?

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.

weh

duellist:

That’s more like it, as the tumblr app doesn’t allow you to post embedded videos, I tried posting this as a link before, which didn’t work for some reason. 

not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’ for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker

how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant. every single post, every single time. in chronological order starting with the most recent post. note: it will not find #croissants or that time you made the typo #croidnssants. for a tag with multiple words, it’s just /tagged/my-croissant and it will show you everything with the exact phrase #my croissant

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first 

url.tumblr.com/search/croissant isn’t as perfect at finding everything, but it’s generally loads better than the search on mobile. it will find a good array of posts that have the word croissant in them somewhere. could be in the body of the post (op captioned it “look at my croissant”) or in the tags (#man I want a croissant). it won’t necessarily find EVERYTHING like /tagged/ does, but I find it’s still more reliable than search on mobile. you can sometimes even find posts by a specific user by searching their url. also, unlike whatever random assortment tumblr mobile pulls up, it will still show them in a more logically chronological order

url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 will show you every post on the blog from november 5th, 2020, in case you’re taking a break from croissants to look for destiel election memes 

url.tumblr.com/archive/ is search paradise. easily go to a particular month and see all posts as thumbnails! search by post type! search by tags but as thumbnails now

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio will show you every audio post on your blog (you can also filter by other post types). sometimes a little imperfect if you’re looking for a video when the op embedded the video in a text post instead of posting as a video post, etc

url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/croissant will show you EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant, but it will show you them in the archive thumbnail view divided by months. very useful if you’re looking for a specific picture of a croissant that was reblogged 6 months ago and want to be able to scan for it quickly 

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio/tagged/croissant will show you every audio post tagged with the specific phrase #croissant (you can also filter by photo or text instead, because I don’t know why you have audio posts tagged croissant) 

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims) 

Galaxy in Flames

This post contains spoilers for Galaxy in Flames, by Ben Counter, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) October 10th, 2006.

I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to say about this one. This book is the story of how Horus took the major part of the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, Emperor's Children, and World Eaters Legions to the Istvaan system on false pretenses of putting down another rebellion, and on the planet Istvaan III deployed those portions of them he judged most likely to object to his rebellion against the Emperor in a spearhead strike against the planetary capital, then bombarded the planet from orbit in an attempt to kill all the potential loyalists in a first strike. Saul Tarvitz, an Emperor's Children marine from Horus Rising, does some investigation behind the scenes, figures out the plot, then flees to the planet's surface in time to warn the spearhead, who take shelter underground, allowing many of them to survive the bombardment (virus bombs that otherwise kill all life on the planet, including its six or so billion civillian inhabitants). What follows is then three months of fighting on the surface in the ruins of the planetary capital, with the loyalists in slow retreat, getting whittled down to buy time in the hope that word has gotten out of Horus's treachery and a relief force will be sent to rescue them. No relief force arrives, but their slow defeat does tangle up the traitor forces in time for word of Horus's treachery to make it back to the Imperium. Loken and Torgaddon, the loyalist half of Horus's advisory Mournival council, fight Abaddon and Aximand, the traitor half; Abaddon and Aximand both live, Torgaddon dies, and Loken's fate is left unclear (spoilers he survives and is a character in later books).

It ends like this:

In the meantime, three embedded civilian observers who've been secondary characters in the last two books escape from Horus's flagship the Vengful Spirit to the Eisenstein, the one ship in the fleet held secretly by loyalists, which escapes and will be the subject of the next book. One of them, Euphrati Keeler, is now preaching the Emperor's divinity, manifesting miracles, and being called a saint.

It's essentially an extended action story with a jailbreak B-plot. It makes some odd pacing decisions, basically skipping from the bombardment to the last few day of the siege; I feel like it could have wrung more drama from making the situation more grinding and desperate... but then I'm just describing Helsreach, which is not surprising because Helsreach did this better.

All but one of the traitors have ridden a slip-and-slide down into Saturday morning cartoon villainy in this book; they're now all sneering monsters, constantly internal monologuing their own sense of superiority and expressing petty contempt for everyone around them, including amongst each other. Horus imperiously tells people who were his trusted allies, friends, and close confidants in Horus Rising how cool he is and how they'd better not fail him; those former close confidants and trusted allies just accept that he's right to do that and then treat their former friends and subordinates the same way. It's not even that they feel out of character; they don't really have characters. The exceptions are Lucius, who's like that but more so, because he's one of the series' designated ultra-assholes like Erebus, and Aximand, who kills Torgaddon and feels bad about it. I assume that'll come up later.

Look, it's fine. It does the job it sets out to do. It doesn't fail in any interesting or infuriating ways like False Gods did; the ending is reasonably affecting if you like Saul Tarvitz. It successfully novelizes some lore that was around for decades and moves the events of the series forward. This is one of the most important events in the Heresy and we'll be re-visiting it a lot in future material; I hear some of that future material treats it better than this did.

Euphrati Keeler's role is weird. You would think the book would be interested in playing with tone when it comes to the death of the atheistic Imperial Truth and the birth of the Imperial cult, but like the death of all native life on Istvaan III and the betrayal and murder of the loyalists by their traitor brothers, it's all presented in a very matter-of-fact manner.

note* I will not reveal which side I am on until the poll is over to avoid bias

Was reminded (because I am kinda terrible at social media) that I ought to let people know I made an art history video about the cave art in Lascaux: How it was made; what pigments and what ingenious art tools were used (Paleolithic mouth-powered airbrushes!); and the historical development of ideas of the Paleolithic and how they were shaped by prejudices of the time.

And I bust some myths:

The cave paintings and engravings had nothing to do with hunting. The animals that people of the time hunted don't show up in the cave art.

It is very unlikely that men made that art. There has not yet been found any physical evidence of adult men in any of the decorated caves of France and Spain -- but there are numerous examples of footprints and finger-marks of smaller people, from woman-sized down to baby-sized, and groups of children alongide woman-sized footprints.

For some weird reason most of the scholarship on Lascaux identifies these smaller footprints as "adolescent boys" for no apparent reason apart from, well, sexism. The increasingly unlikely and awkward contortions made to rationalize how half-grown boy children made this magnificent art, rather than any acknowledgement that perhaps experienced adult women artists had a hand in it, feel kinda bizarre to me.

Anyway, here's my art history video. It's educational!

Disney: ok you can use mickey mouse, but- Nomura: Michael is now a Flawed Warrior King with a reckless past who is not exactly forthcoming wrt to the truth. He makes critical mistakes like leaving people behind in the realm of darkness but also takes the nearest troubled teenagers under his wing at every possible opportunity. He is always trying to make up for how he’s erred but despite keeping a fairly level head is sometimes consumed with thoughts of vengeance when his friends are threatened. Also he says it’s not only okay to be gay but that the capacity for such strong love is the source of your power–