Anything you can do, I can do meta.   - Rudolf Carnap  Welcome back to The Art of Caesura! I hope you are well, and if not, join the club! We're meant to be heading on a family holiday tomorrow, and our eldest daughter (who has almost never been sick) currently has a fever of almost 40 degrees (104F). Wish us luck.  Today I have two topics, the first is a brief discussion of what it means to be "meta" and an update of my league list (which ties into the first topic).  Coming from a literature background, I was only familiar with the prefix "meta" in terms of something being self aware or self-referential. The play / film "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" is metafiction in this way, as is the game Undertale.  I have often heard this term used in gaming but just accepted that it had been adopted, in some convoluted way to mean, like, the most efficient version of something, the bandwagon that everyone is jumping on because that particular problem i...

Hello friends of the Caesura, and welcome back to another post on The Art of Caesura! Our Warhammer league is still in full swing - we're in the fifth round now - I'm playing my fifth game this weekend. There are already a few heavy hitters who are currently standing at 5-0! (I'm at 2 wins, 2 losses - hey 50% win rate isn't bad for a noob).  This time I was up against the Adepta Sororitas - the Sisters of Battle! I don't think I'd ever played them before and I was kind of nervous going into this match-up. My opponent, Kim, did a great job of psyching me out before the match, by explaining all the (massive) threat ranges of his gals. Plus, the whole concept of "Miracle Dice" - the army rule for the Sisters - seemed extremely strong.  Basically, at the beginning of each round or whenever one of his units died, Kim could roll a die and add it to a Miracle Dice pool which he could draw from for almost any roll once per phase. He also had certain models whi...

“I was born on the night of Samhain,  when the barrier between the worlds  is whisper-thin and when magic,  old magic, sings its heady and sweet song  to anyone who cares to hear it.” ― Carolyn MacCullough, Once a Witch Happy Hallowe'en! Welcome to The Art of Caesura! If my calculations are correct, Hallowe'en only falls on a Friday (the day my blog posts go live) once every 6-7 years (leap years probably mess with this), so today is a special occasion indeed.  I recently attended a TED talk by Dr. Jenny Butler, a Lecturer at University College Cork where she teaches courses on mythology, folk religion, new religious movements, and Western esotericism. Her TED talk was on "Samhain and the Origins of Halloween".  Dr. Jenny Butler Long-time readers of the blog will know that I love Hallowe'en, so I really loved her talk, and I'm excited to share aspects of it with you today! A couple last things before we start: for a fun Hallowe'en festivity, check out the...

"Never memorise something that you can look up." - Albert Einstein Hello and welcome back to The Art of Caesura! I'm sending loads of positivity your way, especially if you need it today! In today's post I'm going to share a useful tool that I made for this Warhammer 40k Gaming league that I'm involved in. It's a cheat sheet (or script) that I follow so that I don't miss anything important during the game. Warhammer 40k is an incredibly complex game. In addition to the stat line of each unit (which may or may not have multiple weapon profiles), every unit has at least one special ability plus a bunch of keywords which relate to interactions with various core rules, advanced rules or strategems. Then multiply this by the 10 - 15 unique units in your army and you can see that the rules just for your army are pretty immense. Then you might want to have some idea about how your opponent's army works... Plus you need to know the best ways to deploy your...