Angry Puppy

“Hey what’s up with this Dune business? I mean, I know it’s one of the all-time best-selling sci fi novels and is widely considered to be the greatest sci fi novel written, but what’s up with the books, the prequels, the pre-prequels, the postquels and the midquels? And what are Patrick Stewart, Kyle MacLachlan, and Linda Hunt doing in a movie that has Sting levitating in leather underwear?”

How many times have you asked yourself this very question and not known how to find out or even where to start looking?

Exactly.

Thus, we present Angry Puppy’s handy review guide to discovering the Duniverse.

So, Dune. Is It All That?

Yes indeedy. Dune, at least the original novel, does live up to the hype. Don’t try to figure out whether it’s more Star Trek or more Star Wars, because there’s no point comparing it to any other franchise; there isn’t anything remotely like it.

Frank Herbert was staggeringly imaginative in creating this complex society and characters and in so fully developing this fascinating tale of politics, religion, economics, mysticism, ecology, and ultimately an insightful exploration into what makes humans human. At the heart of the story is a highly sophisticated and incredibly well-thought-out question about not only what happens when a society crosses the technological singularity, but also what impact that event might have on the subsequent millenia. It’s Battlestar Galactica on a much grander scale.

“Aaah! No Spoilers, No Spoilers, LA LA LA LA LA…”

Don’t worry. I won’t give any spoilers here. But I will give you a word of caution: generally speaking, if you read anything about the Dune universe, you’re likely to encounter massive spoilers because of the way the series unfolds over vast periods of time and out of sequence. For this reason, we suggest you stay away from anything that talks about the Dune universe in broad strokes. Everything written here is safe, though.

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No, it’s not any sort of gay pun. We’re really just cleaning out the closet to make room for some new stuff we’ll be reviewing in the next few weeks. [Angry Puppy Episode 35]

In between the hilarious cleaning scenes, we talk about:

• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
• Spore
• Murder Party
• Iron Man DVD features
• The Making of Me: John Barrowman
• Fringe “Pilot” and “The Same Old Story”
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles “Samson and Delilah” and “Automatic for the People”
• Sandworms of Dune
• Hellblazer “The Laughing Magician”
• Plus, the answer to last week’s Mystery Geek Challenge!

We just got our review copy of Rock Band 2, complete with wireless drum kit and guitar, or as I like to call them, Kodos-proof drum kit and guitar. It came a little late for episode 35, so watch for our review next week, and you might even recognize one or two AfterElton vloggers among our test subjects.

There happened to be a few music/gaming items in my RSS reader these past few days, so in what appears to now be a quasi-weekly thing, I offer you another Friday link dump.

If you’re not into the devil’s music that is Rock Band, Guitar Praise Solid Rock also just came out. Unfortunately, there aren’t any Faith + 1 tracks, but unlike Rock Band, you’ll never inexplicably have to play Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” three times in a row. Really.

There are thousands of variations on Portal’s ending theme “Still Alive”, including the insomnia-induced mandolin version I was tinkering with last week. But here’s something a little different. Instead of re-interpreting the music, Vimeo user Trickster gave us some amazing typographical visuals to accompany the original version. [redacted 2008.09.23: The original video is no longer available. YouTube version substituted.]

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The new season of Heroes premieres this Monday in the US and Canada and October 1 in the UK. It’s made up of two volumes (”Villains” and “Fugitives”), and while Season 2 left a lot of us underwhelmed, I’m excited to see some of the new villains we’ve been hearing about this past year.

Bonus content is generally a good thing, but this summer’s series of webisodes, “Going Postal”, left me scratching my head. I’m trying to think of something good to say about this three-parter, but all I can come up with is that Angela Petrelli (Christine Rose) makes an appearance in the last installment.

There were a lot of awkward aspects (the writing, the editing, the acting), but the pointlessness is what struck me most. This is not a rhetorical question, and I’d love to hear your thoughts: was there any reason to watch other than Heroes-fandom? And did anyone read the graphic novel of the same name?

You can see the whole thing in about ten minutes, and Hulu was nice enough to make them embeddable:

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On the first day, I said, “Let there be monstrous things with big teeth and claws on their hands, feet and tails.” And it was good.

On the second day, I said, “Oh, is that all there is to do with this free trial?”

I downloaded the free Spore Creature Creator the other day and made this beautiful little thing.

I was irritated at the registration process for rejecting my chosen names, so I called him Jar Jar. I still call most annoying things Jar Jar, or Jo-Jo for short.

The game looks great, but I haven’t actually played yet. With the exception of the occasional Flash mini-game, I keep a solid line between my computer and my consoles, so I’m holding out for an Xbox or Wii version. Do other gamers here have a firm preference for desktops or consoles? Does it depend on the game?

If you’ve played Spore or even just toyed around with the Creature Creator, tell us what you think and send me some shots of your creature.