This year it was a grimdark Christmas, because the mission theme was Warhammer 40,000.  Well, sort of - the mission was another Murdle, but this time set at a Warhammer tournament.  The best player has been found dead and it was my son's job to figure out who did it, how, and why.  The suspects included the game store owner, a delusional player, an overly serious cosplayer, and someone who is totally not a Tyranid in a human suit.

The format was the same as usual.  I printed out an introduction to put in the Christmas tree and hid the clues in various places around the house, each with an encoded message leading to the next.  I toned the codes down a little bit this year.  Last year, he got a little frustrated with some of them, which makes the whole thing less fun than it should be.

For some of them, I stayed with what we did last year and used the revolutionary-era style decoder disk that we got when we went to Gettysburg a few years ago.  It's just a little disk with a rotating center and the alphabet written on both parts, so you just turn it to two corresponding values to get a simple substitution cypher.  Nothing fancy.

For some of the other clues, I got a little creative-ish and introduced him to the concept of typing things out on a non-smart phone.  You know, the good old "code" of typing out numbers on your 12-key phone to spell words.  Thus we got codes like "7 777 444 66 8 33 777".  I did have to add the spaces between letters because otherwise it's ambiguous whether, for example, "7777" is supposed to be "S", "PR", "QQ" (unlikely), or "RP".  I suppose I could have made him figure it out, but again, I didn't want to turn it into an ordeal and suck all the fun out of it.

To go with the "phone" theme, I formatted some of the clues in the for of a text conversation.  Again, nothing fancy - just a couple of back-and-forth messages each.  Just enough to add a little flavor.  

As we did last year, my wife and I teamed up on it.  We came up with the plot together.  She wrote the puzzle and came up with the clues for it.  I did the codes and distributed the clues.  All in all, it worked out pretty well and our son was happy enough with it.

Here's a PDF of the full mission, if you're interested.  I always break it up into multiple pages so he can switch back and forth, and cut up the clues into partial sheets.  So while it might be weird in digital form, it works in analog.

And while I'm at it, here's the little Python script I wrote to encode the clues for me.  And by "wrote", I mean I let the Copilot plugin for Vim write it.  Or at least it wrote the functions that do all the actual work.  And I didn't really even need to prompt it - the autocomplete feature pretty much just generated it all automatically.  Nice!

This year, the Christmas Mission was a collaborative effort.  My wife had been doing the Murdle puzzle books and our son really got a kick out of them.  If you've not seen them, they're basically logic puzzles, except that each puzzle has a story and the stories all connect to make one big murder mystery.  The stories are also pretty funny, which is part of what appeals to our son.  So this year's mission was a Murdle.  My wife wrote the story and the puzzle.  She also enlisted her friends to make short videos reading the clues.  Each one of them played a different character in the mystery and presented the clues in-character. 

My job was to distribute the clues in various hiding places and to create short encrypted messages leading to the next clue.  I also collected the video files, uploaded them, and created QR codes for them so that our son could scan them with his phone camera and watch the videos.  The messages were encrypted with a simple substitution cypher and I helped walk him though a little frequency analysis to figure out the key.  (All the messages used the same key, because otherwise we would have been there all day.)

Overall, this one was a hit.  Our son enjoyed doing it and he really liked the story.  He thought the videos were really fun, and I think those really made it special.  

I got lazy on the encryption this year and just wrote a short Powershell function to do the work for me:

function encode($data) {
    $code = @{
        'A' = 'U'
        # ...
    }
    $ucInput = $data.ToUpper()
    $output = ''
    foreach ($i in 0 .. ($ucInput.Length - 1)) {
        $letter = $uCInput[$i].ToString()
        $item = $code[$letter]
        if ($item) {
            $output += $item
        } else {
            $output += $letter
        }
    }
    Write-Output $data
    Write-Output $output
    Write-Output " "
}

Here's an export of the puzzle itself.  I took out some of the details and video links, but this has the good stuff, i.e. the story.  Here's the setup, which includes all the clues and people.  I think my wife did a great job with it.

Deductive Logico and his partner Professor Irratino are finally taking a well deserved holiday vacation to the Bermuda Triangle.  As his intern, you have gone to a Christmas charity ball to accept an award on his behalf.  This year’s host is Sir Rulean, heir to a vast shampoo empire fortune. 

Unfortunately, that fortune will go to his next of kin, as the magnate is dead when you arrive at the Grand Hotel.

Logico is relying on you to solve this murder as your first real case!

Follow the clues and fill out the puzzle to find out who did the deed, what weapon they used, where they killed him, and their motive.

The Suspects:

LADY LAVENDER

Sir Rulean’s wife, a self-proclaimed psychic and mystic.  She’s mostly famous for getting every prediction wrong…including those about the sports matches she bets millions on.

5’2” * Brown Eyes * Auburn Hair * Scorpio

MADAME MAGENTA

A savvy businesswoman and sweater enthusiast.  She has the world’s finest collection of argyle cardigans.

5’1” * Brown Eyes * Brown Hair * Capricorn

PROFESSOR PINK

English professor and crazy cat lady, who got lazy a few years back and let her cats type all her scholarly articles.  No one noticed.

5’3” * Blue Eyes * Blonde Hair * Taurus

HENNA HUMAN

Absolutely not three penguins in a trench coat, why would you even ask?

7’2” * Sunglasses * Scarf * Virgos

The Locations:

THE CHRISTMAS TREE

Indoors.  A grand 12 foot Douglas fir in the main foyer of the hotel.  Tastefully decorated, but shedding needles everywhere.

THE KITCHENS

Indoors.  Don’t look too closely at the ingredients for the soup.

THE FIRE PIT

Outdoors.  A great place to cuddle up by the fire and make some s’mores.  Or get rid of a body.

THE PENTHOUSE SUITE

Extremely swanky, and extremely expensive. 

The Weapons:

A SHARPENED CANDY CANE

Light weight, made of sugar.  A beloved holiday treat, great for giving you minty fresh breath or stabbing your enemies.

A POORLY DISGUISED GIFT

Heavy weight, made of resin.  A suspiciously bowling-ball shaped package, wrapped unevenly in lime green paper with a frayed purple ribbon.  Great for knocking down pins, or people.

POISONED CHRISTMAS COOKIE

 Light weight, made of sugar and poison. If the poison doesn’t kill you, the diabetes might.

STOCKING FULL OF COAL

 Medium weight, made of fabric and mineral.  For when you’re REALLY on the Naughty list.

The Motives:

TO AVOID BLACKMAIL  --  SHEER ANGER  --  PROFESSIONAL JEALOUSY  --  TO PAY A DEBT

This past Christmas marked the third annual Christmas Mission for my son.  It started simple enough, with a semi-educational crypto puzzle two years ago.  Then there was last year's mission, which involved multiple puzzles and a theme.  And he loved both of them, which is great.  But now it looks like I'm going to be coming up with one every year for the foreseeable future.

This year's mission was very involved.  Maybe a little too involved.  The Word document I used to take notes and print out the clues was eleven pages this time, including charts and graphics.  It had five "quests", plus the introduction and conclusion notes.  It took a while to complete, but apparently this one was a hit too, so I guess I'm doing something right.

This year, Zane wanted to be included in designing his mission.  Obviously the puzzles were up to me, but he had some requests for the theme.  Last year was Peanuts/World War I.  This year, he wanted it to be based on Minecraft.  And not just "regular Minecraft".  He came up with an elaborate plot outline involving an actualization of the Internet drama war between Minecraft and Fortnite, because apparently that's a thing.  It involved a spy mission, crafting things, resurrecting the Ender Dragon, and getting messages from various Mojang staffers.  I jotted all this down in OneNote and Zane double-checked my notes several times leading up to Christmas.  So at least he was engaged, which is good.

My first task was to try to hammer these notes into a semi-coherent story.  Since it was supposed to be a spy mission that involved an "actual war" between Minecraft and Fortnite and the resurrection of the Ender Dragon, I somehow got the rather dark idea of a mission to use the dragon as a biological weapon to destroy the world of Fortnite.  Granted, that probably constitutes genocide and is certainly a war crime, so not exactly a happy Christmas story.  But it made sense as a motivation and used the desired plot elements, so I ran with it.

The second task was to break this up into a series of missions.  One of Zane's notes involved creating an End Portal using the Eye of Ender.  Apparently you can craft this from some glass, a Ghast tear, and an Eye of Ender.  So I decided to base the missions around that.  We would gather the ingredients for an Eye of Ender so that he could craft the End Portal and send the Ender Dragon to the world of Fortnite.

But how do you resurrect an Ender Dragon?  I don't play Minecraft, so I've got no freakin' clue.  However, my sister-in-law was giving Zane a Dungeons and Dragons themed gift, which gave me an idea - magic!  Why not?  I mean, how would you resurrect a dragon?  When in doubt, just call it magic and get on with your life.

So with that, I came up with five quests.  For each one, I wrote a note from one of the aforementioned Minecraft staffers giving a puzzle to solve with a hint on the location of the next letter.  It started with an introduction letter laying out the quest to wipe out the world of Fortnite and directing him to the living room to find the first quest letter.  For the first three quests, I also included a printout of the ingredient itself, lifted from the Minecraft wiki.  The quests were as follows:

1. First quest: Get the glass.  This involved solving a simple logic puzzle.  The glass was in one of the kitchen cabinets, but he couldn't just look in all of them because it's very delicate and too many vibrations would shatter it.  So the puzzle laid out a few rules and Zane had to deduce which cabinet it was in.  
2. Second quest: Get the Ghast tear.  This one was a simple Morse code message.  The letter included a hint directing Zane to the bathroom to find a key to decode the Morse hidden with the spare toilet paper.  The decoded message directed him back to the living room to look under the coffee table.
3. Third quest: Get the Eye of Ender.  This one was another relatively simple decoding, this time of an ASCII-encoded message.  This one was a two-step problem, as the letter contained a series of 8-bit binary numbers and a hint pointing to the kitchen silverware drawer, which contained an ASCII chart.  So Zane had to convert the binary to decimal and then do the character lookup.  The decoded message pointed to the bathroom sink, where the next message was hidden in the cabinet underneath.
4. Fourth quest: Build the End portal.  This quest was a bit more involved.  The puzzle was to decode some text, but there was a different key for each line.  (There was only one word per line, so I was nice about that.)  A hint pointed Zane to a "decoder disk" that he got at a gift shop on our trip to Gettysburg last summer.  It came with directions on how to use a two-character key to decode a message.  So the letter said that each line had a different key at the start, followed by a space and then the message.  It actually took a bit to get Zane to figure out how that was supposed to work, but he did get it eventually.  The message led him to the coat closet, which had a Minecraft storage box that was supposed to serve as the crafting table to make the portal.
5. Fifth quest: Resurrect the Ender Dragon.  This one was difficult.  To resurrect the Ender Dragon, the letter directed Zane to see his aunt, who was holding a "magic scroll" for him which would serve as the key.  The "scroll" was actually a printout of a page from an old Dungeons and Dragons manual, particularly the page for the "Wish" spell, which seemed an appropriate way to resurrect a dragon.  The puzzle was actually a set of 4--tuples, one per line, values separated by dashes.  At the bottom was a hint that these were coordinates, hinting that the page was divided into columns, which had lines, which had words, which had letters.  The idea was that, e.g. 2-5-3-4 would map to the fourth letter of the third word of the fifth line of the second column.  Clearly this was not as clear to Zane as it was in my head, because he had a hard time trying to figure out what he was supposed to do.  I eventually had to guide him through it, but once he got the idea he was able to decode the message successfully.  

The last message pointed Zane to his laptop.  His success letter was tucked inside, telling him that I'd installed a copies of Minecraft Java Edition and Minecraft Education Edition, as well as setting up a Minecraft server for him to play with.  He's been into Minecraft for a while, but hadn't had it on his computer, so that seemed like a suitable way to finish out a Minecraft-themed quest.

At the end of the day, Zane seemed pretty happy.  This was definitely a more involved mission than last year, and the puzzles were more challenging for him, but he said he enjoyed it.  So I count that as a success.  And at this rate, I suspect he'll want another mission this year, so I'll have to start planning earlier.

Turns out it's kind of a fun little app.  Sure, the presentation is very cartoonish and oriented toward children, but not distractingly so.  More importantly, it offers enough gamification to keep it interesting and allows you to do lessons in very small bites.

I subscribed to the premium package (since I figured it would be a family thing), so I haven't really messed with the free version much.  I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes to the user experience, so caveat emptor.

The exercises cover a good range of capabilities.  They include basic written translation exercises, where you read a sentence in one language and translate it to the other, either though free-form typing or a pick-a-word interface; fill-in-the-blank exercises where you have to complete a sentence; listening exercises where you type back what you hear; speaking exercises where you read/repeat a sentence; and stories that you listen to and then answer comprehension questions.  For most exercises, the interface allows you to tap a word to get the definition, which is handy.  There are also tips that you can access and which get displayed if you get a question wrong too many times.

The gamification aspect is what I find interesting and enjoyable.  There are a number of aspects to it, so you can go as deep as you want.  These include daily challenges, like completing 12 listening exercises; long-term challenges, like learning a certain number of new words; levels to progress through; various streaks to establish and maintain; leagues to compete in; and even "friend quests" to work with another user to collectively reach a goal, like a certain number of lessons completed in a week.  You can earn "points" for leagues and challenges by completing lessons and "gems" that can be used to buy power-ups by completing challenges.  You can also buy gems with cash, if you're so inclined, but they're really only used to buy "streak freezes" or "time boosts", which you don't really need.

The thing that really helps me stay with the app, though, is the lesson sizes.  They're very short.  It varies, of course, depending on what type of lesson you're doing, but it's not a big time commitment at all.  The fastest can be as short as one minute, up to maybe 6 or 7 minutes.  Sure, you're not going to learn all that much in 5 minutes, but reinforcement helps.  Smaller lessons give you lots of opportunity for review, so you can pick up new stuff slowly and get comfortable using it.  And most importantly, if you're busy, you're more likely to actually do small lessons on a regular basis.  Is that the path to rapid fluency?  Clearly not.  But it's still a way to improve your skill with a language.

This year's mission was based on the Peanuts comics where Snoopy pretends he's a World War I flying ace fighting the Red Baron.  That became my son's latest obsession this year (I'm not even sure how) and he's constantly making up games and stories about it, so that seemed like a good theme.

The mission this year was a bit longer than last year, consisting of a series of seven messages which build on each other and lead to a series of surprises.

1. The first message was an unsigned, cryptic note placed in an envelope on the Christmas tree.  This one was intended to be found and contained an encoded message at the bottom.  The accompanying plain-text informed him that this was a "substitution cipher" and that the cats had the key with their treats.  
2. The second message was hidden with the cat food.  It was a note from Captain Snoopy giving him the key to use with the first message.  The "key" was simple chart a mapping each plain-text character to a cipher-text character.
3. The message from the first note decoded to "your stocking is in the cat tree", which led my son to...the cat tree, where his stocking and the next note were hidden.  This note was a message from General Pershing laying out the mission: to save Christmas by engaging the Red Baron and preventing him from shooting down Santa Claus.  It gave him the hint that he need to be in tip-top condition for this mission, so his next clue was with the training equipment.
4. The next note was in the basement, between two presents, next to my barbel and squat rack.  The presents were some exercise equipment - some "workout dice", an agility ladder, and a kids punching bag set.  The note, signed "Agent Fifi" (apparently Fifi was Snoopy's girlfriend), told him to use these to get in shape to fight the Red Baron and included an excerpt from the Wikipedia article for the Battle of Verdun.  The clue said that the next message was in a room where the number of seasons matched the result of a simple subtraction problem based on the start and end dates of the battle, which yielded three.
5. Note number five was in the three-season room (get it?) off the back of the house.  I left that one in plain sight, because it was cold and I didn't want to spend a lot of time out there hunting for it.  In addition to the note, it contained a "poster" my wife got on Etsy - a color print of Snoopy sitting on his dog house in his World War I outfit, printed on an old dictionary page.  The note, signed "Captain Linus van Pelt", contained a "double encrypted" message, with instructions to use the same key as the previous message, but to shift the letters by two.  The message told him to "look in the drier".
6. The sixth note was in the laundry room,  hidden inside the drier.  With it was a hat in the style of a World War I era aviator, complete with goggles.  The note from "Colonel Charlie Brown" (I'm not sure how I came up with the fake ranks) told him that this was the last piece of equipment he needed to face the Red Baron.  The final clue to the Baron's location was another "double encrypted" message, this time with the clue to shift the key by the number of letters in the Baron's first name, again including an excerpt from the relevant Wikipedia page.  The message told him to look "under your laptop".
7. The final message (hidden under his laptop) was from the Red Baron himself.  It was a taunt, daring my son to come and face him.  It included instructions on how to start up an old "Snoopy vs the Red Baron" video game that I found.  I thought that seemed like a nice prize at the end, and also gave him something to do until the rest of the family arrived and we could open presents.

It took me about an hour and a half to come up with this and write up all the clues.  Of course, I was far too lazy to do the encoded messages by hand, so I wrote a little program to encode and decode them for me.  I even printed it out and hid it with the last message, on the off chance that my son might be interested (spoiler: he wasn't).

While I feared that I might have gone a little overboard, the mission was a big hit.  My son was a little unsure about the encoded messages at first, but once we showed him how to do it he took right to it.  By the last message, he was completely engrossed and dove right into it.  He seemed to enjoy the rest of the mission and seemed to like having the series of gifts worked into it.

But the aftermath was what really showed me how much my son enjoyed himself.  You see, he saved all the individual notes, and when his grandparents came over to open presents, he insisted on giving them a debriefing of his mission.  He read them all the notes, told them about the presents and the decoding process, and how he figured out the clues.  And the next day, when his other grandparents came to visit, he repeated the whole debriefing again.  

The only question is: How am I going to top that for next year?

I've never played the game, so I have no idea how difficult it actually is.  However, several times I've seen my son get frustrated and upset because he was having trouble with it.  So it's a life-lesson - a small one, but a lesson nonetheless.  He struggled, he stuck with it, and eventually persevered.  Games can be very useful for that sort of thing.

My son was very happy to finally beat the game.  He called me in to watch the end and called his grandmother afterward to tell her about it.  It was really nice to see him to excited and to be there with him to share this small triumph.  Call it one of the joys of parenthood.

I got the idea from a music shop in the Colonie Mall in Albany.  We stayed at a nearby hotel on the way home from our vacation this summer and were walking around the mall to stretch our legs after the long drive.  The shop had a bunch of digital pianos set up, and the FP-30X was one of them.

I tried a out a few and quite enjoyed playing the Roland.  The main attraction was the keyboard action, which was very realistic - much closer to a real piano than most keyboards I've tried.  The keys were well weighted and, even though they're plastic, they felt close to ivory.  It was also pretty compact - only about a foot deep - while still having a full-sized keyboard.  That's actually what made me think about buying one.

Our old upright piano is nice, but it takes up a pretty good chunk of the living room, which is the only place we have to put it.  It's also getting very out of tune.  I mean, it's been very out of tune, but for a long time it was "in tune with itself", i.e. everything was out of tune in the same direction, so if you were playing by yourself, you didn't really notice.  However, that's increasingly not the case anymore.  And that's the piano I learned to play on when I was in high school, which my mother bought second-hand when I was a kid, so it's not exactly new.  I'm not sure how much it would take to get it make into proper tune and repair, but I figured it would probably cost about as much as the retail price of that Roland keyboard.  So why not just replace the piano with the keyboard?  It would probably cost the same and it's small enough to fit in my office, so it fixes two problems at once.

So that's what I did.  I bought the keyboard a few months ago.  It fits comfortably against the back wall of my office.  I even got a matching bench to go with it.  And we just got rid of the old upright today.  My wife put it on Facebook marketplace and a very nice couple took it off our hands for their daughters to use.  It served me well for many years and I hope they enjoy it.

But back to the new keyboard.

I already mentioned that I really like the action and feel of the FP-30X.  I'm no audiophile, but the sounds is pretty good as well.  The maximum volume level is just about what I would expect for a "real" piano and the internal speakers project the sound well.  But one of the "killer features" to me was the plain, simple headphone jack.  (Actually, there are two - a 3.5mm and a 6.35mm, if I'm not mistaken.)  One of the main down-sides of the old acoustic piano was the fact that you can't play it while people are using the living room or trying to sleep.  I mean, you can try to keep the noise down, but that doesn't really work all that well.  But with the Roland, I just plug in some headphones and now I can play after my son has gone to bed.  It's great!

The one thing that's kind of a mixed blessing about the FP-30X is the control scheme.  As you can see from the picture, there's no display of any kind and there aren't exactly a lot of buttons either.  On the one hand, I really like this from an aesthetic standpoint.  It makes the unit look more like a musical instrument and less like something they pulled out of an air traffic control console.  But on the other hand, that makes it a little awkward to change the settings.  Of course, you can configure pretty much everything using just the keyboard, but that involves combinations of holding down control buttons and pressing specific keys.  It's weird and you really can't do it unless you have the reference sheet right there.

However, the preferred control method is Bluetooth.  The FP-30X supports MIDI over Bluetooth, so you can pair the piano to your mobile device and control it using Roland's Piano App.  The app itself is...fine.  The interface and control scheme is decent, but not remarkable.  The pairing and connection is sometimes a little slow and doesn't always work the first time, but it does work as advertised and it does allow you to twiddle with all the settings of the keyboard.  It also includes some paid extras, like downloading sheet music in the app and things like that which I haven't played with much.  However, using the app to control the more advanced features is definitely preferable to using key combinations.

If you want to read more about the Roland FP-30X, I found this review very helpful and informative.  Honestly, a lot of the details there went over my head, but the gist is that it's pretty darn good for a budget digital piano.  I just know that it meets my needs well and I've been having a very good time using it to play Christmas songs this week.

This one is much more compact.  That means that, not only do I actually use all of the space, but my office (which is pretty small) feels bigger.

The other big win is that this is a standing desk.  I got a 60-inch by 30-inch Uplift V2 adjustable height desk with the rubberwood surface and I'm very happy with it.  The Uplift desks are fun because there's a lot of customization you can do.  Of course, that also means that the price can vary wildly.  I mean, they start at $600 for a basic 42-inch model, but as you upgrade the size, material, add-ons, etc., it adds up quickly.  The price tag for mine ended up at around $1300.

There are lots of fun add-ons, though.  I got:

• The casters so I can roll the desk around easily.
• The bamboo drawer.
• The upgraded programmable adjustment control.
• The upgraded cable management system.
• Three shelves for monitors etc.
• Two of the powered grommet covers
• The extra power outlets (so I actually have 2 USB and 6 conventional plugs on the desk).
• The foot hammock.
• A standing mat.
• The bamboo Rocker-X board (with comfort pad), which is surprisingly satisfying.

The assembly took a while, but wasn't too bad.  The main challenge for me was that I had to assemble the desk more or less in-place with the other desk still in the room.  That's because I had no place to put my work setup while I assembled the desk (which I did over a couple of days) and, due to the door and hall size, the new desk couldn't easily be moved into my office after it was assembled (it would have to be turned on one edge, and that's a two-man job).  However, the instructions were fairly clear and the assembly wasn't too difficult.  There were a few steps where I needed to drill holes in the underside of the desktop, but other than that it was pretty much just screw drivers and Allen wrenches.  It takes some time, but it's not especially complicated - though some of it depends on what add-ons you get.

So if you're looking for a standing desk, the Uplift V2 is a good choice.  And if you've never used a standing desk, you might want to look into it.  I find that it really does help.  With my old desk, I sometimes found my legs starting to get stiff or cramped from sitting too long.  But if I get up and walk around frequently, that can sometimes interrupt my flow and make it harder to get things done.  A standing desk is a good compromise, because you can keep working, but still stretch your legs and move around.

I also found that the combination of the standing mat and the Rocker-X board really helps.  Just standing on the hard floor can be better than sitting, but it's still not super comfortable, especially if you're working at home and not wearing shoes.  The standing mat gives you a nice cushion, which makes standing for long periods in socks or bare feet much more comfortable.  And the Rocker-X board, while it looks like a silly gimmick, is awesome, especially if you're a fidgeter like me.  Even when I'm sitting, I'm constantly moving my legs and feet around.  The Rocker-X board lets you shift your weight and move your feet constantly, while still keeping you in a position where you can work.  I highly recommend giving it a try.

There's not much to say anyway.  We spent the week on vacation in Cape Cod.  We rented the same place in Hyannis that we stay every two or three years.  It's a nice spot, about a mile from main street and a two-minute walk from the beach, and the weather was very nice this year.

I had a fairly restful and uneventful birthday.  It was kind of a re-run of 2019, which is the last time we were in Cape Cod.  I spent a while wandering around Parnassus Books, though nothing really struck my fancy - all I got was a couple of Zane Grey novels.  We followed that up with a family lunch at the Flashback retro arcade and bar and then some mini-golf and a tasting at Barnstable Brewing (which are actually right next to each other).  We finished the day off with a delicious taco dinner at Añejo Mexican Bistro and some cupcakes from Little Miss Cupcape.

That's about it.  Just some good food and some fun activities with the family.  Nothing terribly exciting, but a good day none the less.  

See, last summer I read the original Dune novel for the first time. I'm not a big sci-fi buff, but I'd been watching some YouTube videos from Quinn's Ideas, a channel that's largely focused on the Dune franchise, and it sounded like it might be interesting. Turns out I really loved it - enough that I read the next three books in the original series and the other three are on my list. That's saying something, since I haven't read a novel series since I was in high school.  (I don't have any interest in the ones written by Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son. From the reviews, they sound like the standard mediocre sci-fi novel fair, which doesn't interest me.) 

The thing I loved about Dune is not the characters or the world building.  Both of those were great, and are worth the read by themselves if you're into sci-fi, but they weren't the main point.  What I liked were the themes that ran throughout the book and how they were illustrated and developed.

The first was the deep political intrigue - the plans within plans within plans.  Everyone in the noble houses was trying to play a life-or-death version of four-dimensional chess, with varying degrees of success, and I found it fascinating to watch this play out.  There wasn't just a single, grand plan that was being carried out - different factions had different, competing plots going, and the book illustrates these conflicts and interactions well.  And they're not morally simplistic, either - even the "good guys" are manipulators and unrepentant killers.  That's down-played a little, since they're mostly directing that against the "bad guys", but it's definitely present.

The second thing I loved about the book was that the story was compelling, but utterly devoid of surprises.  If you haven't read the book, it's devoid of surprises because Frank Herbert deliberately gives away the ending and all the big plot twists.  He does this with quotes at the beginning of each chapter, which are from historical works in the Dune universe written many years after the events of the novel.  So from fairly early on, you already know how the story ends.  And yet the story is constructed in such a way that you still feel like you need to know the "how" and "why" that get you to that ending.  I routinely found myself hoping that the characters would somehow manage to wriggle out of their fate, even though I already knew for certain what it was.

One of the interesting things about this is that it effectively puts the reader in the position of Paul Atreides.  One of the major themes of the novel (and especially the sequel, Dune Messiah) is Paul's struggle with his prescient visions.  He can see his terrible fate coming from far away, and yet he feels unable to prevent it.  The quotes from Princess Irulan's histories and other works presented before each chapter put the reader in this exact position.  We know the end of the story, and we watch the characters move toward that end.  At various points it looks like they might escape, that they could cheat their fate, only to be pulled back onto that path.  It adds to the sense that the end is inevitable, free will and agency be damned.

But back to the movie.  I said at the top that I was disappointed, but just to be clear, this was not a bad movie.  It's just that it didn't do justice to the book.  However, I think that's less because of problems with the movie and more because of the nature of the book.

As you probably noticed from my comments above, much of what I liked about the book was a little more abstract.  It wasn't the action-driven parts of the plot or other things that lend themselves to being displayed on a screen.  They're also things that take a long time to set up.  Even though the movie was two and a half hours long, and it's only part one.  The novel was over 600 pages long, and it wasn't 600 pages of filler, either - even the chapters that didn't have major plot events served as important motivational and establishing material.  That was one of my main worries - when I thought about the book, it didn't seem like there wasn't that much that you could cut without sacrificing some of the story.

And I think that's where the movie fell down.  As I said, the movie has a lot going for it.  And in fairness to Denis Villeneuve, it really is a very faithful adaptation of the novel.  The problem is that the story is just too deep to compress into a movie - even a five hour one.  Of course, it didn't help that the movie spent a lot of time on scenes that consisted mostly of CGI beauty shots of space ships with nothing really happening.  But even if they hadn't done that, it wouldn't have worked.

The problem is that, in the movie, nothing felt earned.  The novel spends a lot of time building up to the big events.  For example, there are numerous scenes with Doctor Yueh that establish his trusted relationship with the Atreides family, establish the "unbreakable conditioning" of the Suk School that put him beyond suspicion, and discuss his inner turmoil that leads to his betrayal of them.  (No, I'm not doing spoiler alerts for a story that's over 50 years old.  Deal with it.)  The movie has none of that.  Yeah, we see a few scenes with the doctor, but we don't really get Lady Jessica confiding in him, we don't hear about the Suk School, and we certainly don't get any of his inner monolog.  He just tells us that he's betraying the Duke because of his wife.  No foreshadowing or anything.

Yes, this movie is faithful to the book in the sense that it shows what actually happens in the plot.  And I do think they did a pretty good job getting the right aesthetic and mood.  But when you remove all the background information and scenes establishing his motivations and position, it just comes across flat.  In fact, I feel like the movie would have been a little confusing if I hadn't already read the novel.  Too much of the action feels unmotivated based just on what's in the film.  To be fair, much of the establishing material is things like Yueh's internal monolog, which isn't very amenable to film adaptation, so it's not really Villeneuve's fault.  But still, the movie suffers for it.

But maybe I'm just being overly critical.  I mean, it was a decent movie that's worth watching.  It's just that the book was so good that it was almost impossible that a movie could really live up to it.  So if you're so inclined, give the movie a watch.  And if you like it, definitely read the book.  It's way better.