The Children of Dune miniseries

(or "Yes, Virginia, we are completely insane")

So, Saturday evening, the special seminar series resumed. As is often the case, it resumed with a rather ludicrously long session, but it was enjoyable. Kevin, alas, could not make it.

We started with a couple more episodes of Blood+, which continues to wobble between cool bit and excessive teenage angst, without quite falling off the fence on what it intends to be, followed by Bubba-HoTep, which, although I've seen several times before, I had not watched on a projector, and the film is certainly not hurt by the experience (although, given my fondness for the film, that's not that surprising a reaction).

We followed this with the entire Children of Dune miniseries, which took us to 5:15 am. The copy we had suffered from weird glitches, chopping and changing between grey scale and colour on several occasions, and having a few other glitches, but not so many as to be unwatchable.

The actual adaption isn't bad. There are some surprising liberties taken with the books, though, for reasons I don't quite fathom. The conflating of the Guild plots into the House Corrino plots seems pointless, and the depiction of Leto's second skin as a small smattering of sand trout on his right arm seems a completely bizarre choice. Also lost, although this probably hard to avoid with a TV adaption, is the doubt about the Preacher's identity. While in the book, it is only confirmed quite late, in the adaptation it is clear from the Preacher's first appearance.

The bit I found most objectionable is the chance in the structure of Leto and Ghani's plan. In the book, they both agree to Leto's departure, and Chani's belief in Leto's death is a deception she practices on herself. Here, it's a deception Leto practices on Ghani, which seems contrary to the spirit of the relationship.

Otherwise, as expected, lots of the detail of the mental battles is stripped out of the adaption, but, overall, it is not a bad effort at all.


Overall, I'm glad I saw it, but won't be buying the DVD anytime soon.

Cowboy Bepop

so, the special seminar series on Cowboy Bepop finally ended (after a glitch discovering that the last 3 episodes where subtitled, and thus needed different mplayer options, and not dubbed, like everything else). So, having ow seen the series, and the movie, my opinion piece.

The series is very good. It is not, however, quite great. It suffers from a few too many filler episodes, which delay the resolution of the major plot points. It is very entertaining, most of the time, and has one of the best intro sequences ever.

The movie plays like an extended episode. This works to its advantage, though, since it allows the opponent to be fleshed out more than is possible in most of the episodes, while still allowing a good level of interaction between the main characters.

Overall, well worth seeing.

Weekend 29 June 2007

Having finally got my car back, the special seminar series was able to resume on Saturday. Kevin, alas, could not make it, and thus fell even further behind in Cowboy Bepop (which remains very cool).

After reaching our Anime quota, Simon and I finally merged the database rework branch into Sutekh. This went surprisingly painlessly, although I spent part of Sunday morning stamping out various little awkward bugs in a less than ideally tested part of the code.

The reason why I was working on Sutekh was that we'd agreed to play vampire on Sunday. I left for this slightly late (due to the bug fixing), but fortunately the N2 was comparatively sane - until the bit where they'd closed it off due to some or other race, anyway - so getting across wasn't too much of an issue.

The modifed close-range Osebo deck was able to successfully burn a vampire in combat each game. It arguably needs some combat rush, and definately needs some more ways of gaining blood. Soem more tastes (if I had any) and some blood dolls would probably do. More immortal grapples wouldn't hurt, so I an get around S:CE. The deck, like all potence decks, suffers from not having a way around Fortitude damage prevention, which, since both simon and Adrianna were playing decks using fortitude, made my life rather difficult.

Anyway, in the first game, Kevin's mixed crypt Presence S:CE and bleed deck, swept all before it. In the second, Simon's Tremere deck did quite well, although Adrianna's Salubri deck farmed extremely successfully and showed good defensive capabilities, although not really able to generate enough bleed to pressurize Simon.

Afterwards, I returned to fix some more bugs in Sutekh. By the end of Sunday, it was getting to be back in reasonable shape.