SPOILERS for Chapterhouse: Dune and the original Dune series (1-6)

On the last day of November I finally finished the original Dune
series. Disappointing is an understatement. Dune went out with a
whimper as Chapterhouse was easily the weakest and Greek-est of them
all. It was full of bloviating inaction and political theory more than
anything else (Greeks are dreamers, Romans are doers). Christ. It was
all about the Bene Gesserit and Honored Matres wiping out planets in
the background while the Bene Gesserit talked and talked and talked
and talked about it. Scytale was in it for no real reason. I suppose
he had some secret formula or capsules inside of him that made him
valuable. There were Face Dancers projecting hologram images of
themselves to Duncan Idaho's current ghola I think to try and lure the
people who captured Scytale to them. And it ended at that.

The only bit of action that was there was some Bene Gesserit deaths
(preceded by a bunch of nebulous political talk) and a couple battles
at the end. They were not memorable in the slightest and the Bene
Gesserit eventually "merged" with the Honored Matres under Murbella as
Mother Superior. The cast was thoroughly boring and lifeless: the only
difference between Odrade and Taraza was that Taraza died (early on,
IIRC) and Odrade was the Mother Superior making a lot of the
decisions. The characters were so bland that when Logno killed the
Spider Queen, I thought Logno was a Futar (which were never fully
explained, either). Sheeana and the worms were an interesting
connection to previous entries that was barely addressed in favor of
this background war between Honored Matres and the Bene Gesserit. 

Even as a regular book, Chapterhouse sucked so, so much ass. It has
literally taken me years to slog through it because that's exactly
what it is: a meandering slog. There's little focus. There was a
dedication in the end to Herbert's wife, who evidently died around the
time it was being written. Further research also revealed this was
when a Dune movie was released (I think I saw part of the oldest one
and could not stand it at all). So maybe that explained why it was
such drudgery trying to read it as a Dune fan and completionist. But I
read it, and I was disappointed. Evidently there was supposed to be a
7th book, but Frank died before he could finish it and later on his
son wrote a couple sequels. I really enjoyed the prequels by Brian
Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I enjoyed pretty much all but Dune 6 of
Frank Herbert's Dune series (although Heretics of Dune was a bit
sloggish, too). Moral of the story is Frank Herbert sucks at writing
when his wife is dying. It's callous but true. Sorry if I offended
anyone about that.


~~~

RCS is kind of cool, kind of not. It's a more "modern" chat protocol
that's only relevant addition to me is end-to-end encryption. I have
GFi, so it's RCS capable as G has been pushing it hard. It also does
basically everything Imessage does except true cross-device usage
(thanks to that encryption deal and needing the phone to do the actual
sending/receiving). It sucks for me that it has to use mobile data
becaue I pay for that. Now G has said that they won't charge or will
simply refund mobile data that is used for texting, but I still don't
like it. I'm a data sipper on my phone and almost always have a Wifi
signal to use, and considering I pay for every bit of mobile data that
I use, I try to keep it off. Wifi only will not work. It's a real
bummer coming from G Hangouts where everything could be done via Wifi,
even SMS/MMS. Thanks, G Assholes, for mothballing that great project
in favor of this inferior Messages program.

So far I've only been able to use RCS with my mom because my sister
uses an Iphone and the friends I still talk to also use that crap
company. RCS is cool but every person in a convo (minimum 2) needs to
have it enabled for it to work, and Ishit doesn't want to make
Imessage superfluous by supporting RCS. As a minimalist I am fine in
theory with SMS/MMS, but the whole cyberspy culture of big companies
is a big turnoff to using that for anything sensitive.

Also, I'm pretty sure one of my eyes is about to rot out of my face.
Not really, but one side of my vision is totally cloudy and I need to
see an eye doctor about it soon.