Burnout, Germs and Preachers

You may have noticed the missing post on Monday, if you are one of the four folks that check this site on the regular. I was in DC for the day with my lovely wife. We got up to Georgetown at noon, had lunch walked around and went to Ikea to get new office furniture later in the day. By the time we got home at 8pm I was in the mood to sleep not type.

So to atone for my missed entry I offer a dowry of three different, but equally excellent media selections for you the dear reader.

Guns, Germs and Steel
More reading listening pleasure by way of Audible this month. GGS is the most non fiction book of all of the non fiction books that I have listened to in recent months. It reads like a college lecture or research trade, but explores some fascinating topics when doing so. It attempts to dissuade the notion that Eurasian cultures advances and dominance in the current time frame had anything to do with superior intellect or genetics. GGS offers the alternative answer that over the last 13,000 years those cultures just happened to be in the right place with population, geography and plant & animal distribution. It may seem a bit dull to some, but if history with a twist of science sounds fun to you then please follow up and read this book.

Preacher: Trades 1-9
I wrapped up Preacher about a week ago and I am now officially hooked on comics again. I know I am a bit late to the party (Preacher was completed in 2000), but man oh man is this amazing writing and art. It is not a super hero book and at first that seemed a bit odd to me considering the last comics I read were Darkness and Spiderman back in high school. I think I prefer non super hero comics after preacher though. I have a list of books I want to pick up now and will be going through them for what will probably be years. Preacher is a must read and a great place to get back into sequential art.

Burnout Paradise
I have been itching to play this game since it came out in January. Unfortunately, I was not willing to buy it so I had to rely on my local brick and mortar video store which only stocked two rental copies. I never played any of the previous Burnout games, but the demo for Paradise hooked me. It was a small sample of the open world racing game that had some swooning and others frustrated to no end. I'll put myself in the swooning category because this game has some real meat on its bones. It is a pure arcade racer that has a fully unlocked world available when you first put in the disk.

Every intersection is a new challenge and if you fail you will end up on the other side of town with no way to restart or retry the event. This is feature or lack there of is what had so many gamers fussing when the game first released. To me is was just an opportunity to try something different. Where ever you fail there is always another event right where you stopped or just a few blocks over. The online game play seemed a bit unorganized with strangers, but I had a good time doing some of the challenges. All in it was a killer rental that I probably should have bought, but will most likely end up waiting for the next title in the series.

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Bike Snob NYC's blog is the hawtness, smart and dumb humor about the many worlds of cycling. No group is safe from mockery and parody, but it is all in good fun unless your a fashion forward fixie die hard.