I've Waited So Long for This Moment....

Well, it's been a long seven years of waiting, but after having had my brand spanking new Codex: Tau Empire for a week now, I'm ready to put some thoughts down for posterity.

Plenty of Swords, Not So Much Sorcercy

Stop me if you've heard this one; a young man is drawn into the world of a videogame, trapped in a virtual world with no contact with the real one, in a deadly game where there are no 1-Ups, and you don't re-spawn...

Oh. You have have heard that one? Well, I'm going to talk about Sword Art Online anyway, so you might as well get comfortable.

The Sub-Optimal Results Obtained by Extensive Imperial Mechanization

or, Why the Devilfish is the Worst Transport in 40K

For the first time in seven years there's a new Tau Empire codex, and the 40K community, and the Tau subset in particular, has been absolutely poring over it. There are some exciting changes, like the new Signature Systems and the new Ethereal, and some disappointing ones, like the erasure of Targeting Arrays and vehicle Multi-Trackers, and some that are so radical it's hard yet to tell if they're good or bad, like the change in role for the XV88 and Kroot squads. But there's one unit that really hasn't changed at all, the Devilfish troop transport.

Why is a hover-tank so darn static?

And that's kind of a problem.

It's a 'Julian the Apostate' Reference. You Learned Something Already!

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America is the kind of book Samuel Clemens would be writing, if he were alive today. Which is not to say that Robert Charles Wilson is the next Mark Twain; he's quite good, but Twain had such an innate facility with language, such an entirely relaxed way of picking out just the right word, that it's difficult for any writer to equal his mastery of the craft. But if Clemens were still with us, I think he'd consider Julian Comstock to be a damn fine adventure.