Matthew Hunter

If Kindred: The Embraced is the Storyteller universe transferred to television, Underworld is the Storyteller universe transferred to the big screen with the serial numbers filed off. Vampires and werewolves at war with a extra helping of melodrama, all taking place under the veneer of the modern world. Unfortunately, taking that universe to the silver screen didn’t work out much better than the small screen. This movie was portrayed as an action-adventure with “romance” as the plot motivator.

The original Underworld could best be described as a movie made according to the rules of the World of Darkness roleplaying universe from White Wolf, postulating a supernatural underside to our familiar world where vampires and werewolves battle endlessly, with a plot based on cliches filtered through the rules of Hollywood scriptwriting. Despite that, it actually worked pretty well. The key, as with many such movies, is to ignore the plot holes, physics errors, and lack of characterization, instead focusing on shiny things that go bang, fanged cool factor, and Kate Beckinsale in a shiny skintight corset-enabled piece of tactical eveningwear.

Fans of the vampire genre and anime have both embraced Vampire Hunter D, the tale of a conflicted vampire hunter in a far-future world where a nobility made up of vampires rule a distinctly more supernatural and dangerous earth. A bizarre mix of magic and technology allows humans to hold their own against the monsters, but when especially powerful monsters are involved, they must turn to the specialists. Want to know about vampires?

If Vampire Hunter D was an excuse for a high “cool factor”, Bloodlust turns the cool factor up to 11 and adds moral ambiguity, a much longer runtime, better art, and much improved dialog. Perhaps the best way to describe this sequel is simply this: everything you liked about the first one is present in the sequel, and there are a lot of really good additions that bring depth and quality to the sequel.

Astra takes the lead of a new super-group, squaring off against the Green Man – an environmental super-terrorist who causes super-accelerated plant growth. Nothing exceptional in this straightforward superhero novel, though readers might find the page count and the price tag somewhat at odds with each other. This is the third novel in the Wearing the Cape series.

I pulled myself to the top of the plateau just as Seleana was promising the ravens we had brought food. Just in time, too; one of them had given the druid a nasty peck on the shoulder that nearly tore her arm off. I laid the seed out according to the directions, while Selaena made silly caw caw noises. I can’t criticize too much, I’ll be doing the same thing later.

After bringing Ygnas back, and getting her settled in at the tavern to recover, we reported to the wizards at the tower of the leaning goose. They were so excited by the report that they proposed an immediate return to Highfell, this time on the backs of giant ravens. The wizards claimed to possess a kind of magical birdseed that would allow us to befriend them, for a period of months at least.

Go itself has a built-in set of tools for building go programs and running them. The dependencies and configuration are mostly handled automatically. This makes initial development fast and easy, but eventually, more complex requirements surface and require soome type of automation. I’ve seens lots of different approaches: My work uses a custom-built tool written in go to manage packaging, deployment, signing, etc. This works well but is a lot of effort to write and maintain for a small project, especially multiple small ptojects doing the same thing.

By the time I caught up with the old man and his cart, darkness had fallen. We exchanged pleasantries and agreed to be allies for the night in case of trouble. We both went to bed, hoping to hear my friends catching up, but I drifted off. I woke to Rowen poking me with a stick. The rest of the group had found horses somewhere and caught up. I didn’t want to ask where they got the horses, for fear I wouldn’t like the answer, but I least I wouldn’t have to make the journey to Thatchem alone.

Faran Magebane The next morning, we explored further, finding a large room with a central pedastel. The pedastel was surrounded by stone pillars, and had a stone structure in the center, covered with sockets as if gems had once been held there. One large gem remained, remarkably similar to the one the earth elemental had dropped. The rest claimed this was a something-something we were supposed to clense to stop the dessert wizard.