(no subject)

I've become addicted to sudokus, since discovering their existence exactly a month ago. I bought a Mensa one and figured out the tricks to doing all of them almost at once, but (weirdly) an easier-looking non-Mensa book has a lot in its 'Very Challenging' section that are stumping me. So after much anguish I checked online for tips just now. First off, as there's no standardized vocabulary, it's pretty funny watching people make up terminology as they go. There also seem to be different notation systems in use? The one I came up with separates 1-in-2s from 1-in-3s: I mark the half-chances on the right, starting from the top; and note the 1-in-3s at the bottom, more lightly. In most of what I looked at they tossed them all together in the middle. If you're taking everything in well enough that's okay, but I'm a bit forgetful, and the two kinds behave pretty differently. Still, I'm feeling some sudoku peer pressure. Anyway, as to tactics I think I'm already using all the ones mentioned except one I still fail to understand, which one guy called The Swordfish (and he implied this is a 'tournament' term). Clearly this is what I need to remove the sucking sudoku beast from my chest, the Tic-Tac-Toe solution that makes any single puzzle just a matter of time, hence no longer a puzzle. I don't think The Swordfish description made enough sense that I actually remember it, though. It's a thing where you look across the whole puzzle for a certain kind of pattern. I was already obsessively trying for that, since clearly there was a Master's Secret I was just short of. I've been adding up columns, looking for swastika-like repeating swirls, trying to see if distances between 3s are always different--that kind of thing. The Swordfish looks nothing like a Swordfish. It seems pretty irregular too, in the examples shown. I'm going to sleep now and hope I forget all the details. I really just wanted confirmation that there was something more out there, and that some puzzles weren't just randomly unsolvable a la Solitaire. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that Swordfish might just be a guess thing: concentrating on a chain of either/ors and following the consequences of an arbitrary selection. I keep trying that when cornered and it never works for me. I turn the page to a diagonal and write in hypothetical answers in italic script. But I can never get more than a few written in, and what am I going to do then, turn the page so the italics lean the other way and fill in some second generation hypotheticals? That actually sounds like kind of a good idea now that I've typed it.