Random Recommendations

Occasionally, when I find something that I enjoy, I think "I should mention this on my blog". So, now I'm rounding up some of the things that I would recommend.

50FootWave - music
I doubt many of you have heard of 50FootWave. They are Kristin Hersh's new band (she fronted Throwing Muses, not that you've heard of them either). Her voice has gotten a little gravelly but I think it works well in the new band. Plus she still has a knack for writing music.

Anyway, they are giving away mp3s of their new ep "Free Music". So go give them a listen. I don't think this ep is as good as their other, "50FootWave mini-album" but after a couple listens, the songs are really starting to grow on me.

Also, she has a blog that is actually pretty interesting. She doesn't update it that often but when she does it is usually heart warming. I might point you especially to this post.

Ratchet and Clank - video games
Ratchet and Clank have easily become my favorite video game series. (It used to be Zelda but the later games, although very good (excluding Zelda 2 of course) were unable to rekindle the magic of The Legend of Zelda. I guess I'm to old now.)

R&C games are a wonderful combination of platforming and shooting but mostly they are just fun. So much so that even Arial has played it a bit.

Insomniac Games (the makers of R&C) really seem to care about the experience. In the second, they added the best Easter egg I've ever seen by putting in the Insomniac Museum. It was a place to look at all there concepts, play with some discarded ideas and generally learn a bit about game development. Mostly though, it was a nice extra bit to a really nice game.

The third R&C game "Up Your Arsenal" got rid of all the annoyances that other games seem to have. You can skip the initial splash screens, making it faster to just sit down and play for a while. They made "Load Game" the first option in the menu (rather than "New Game" which you use only once and then normally have to skip over every time you boot the game). To top it off they made purchasing ammo a lot easier by including a fill-all option (rather than having to buy ammo for each weapon individually).

I think the Ratchet and Clank series is great, mostly because they seem to care.

Microbe Hunters - book
This is a book that I'm currently reading (nearly finished). It was written in the twenties and is the story of the ground breaking scientists who discovered and studied microorganisms. It is a pretty amazing look at all the work and the pretty impressive steps of logic used to figure out what turned into the foundation of Microbiology. It details the discoveries of things we learned in our first semester of General Micro. It is presented in such a way that shows how impressive it really was to figure out simple things like growing bacteria on agar, things that are basic to modern microbiology (or at least what was modern when I learned about it).

I wouldn't recommend this book for anyone who isn't really into microbiology, but for those of you who are, I highly recommend it. I am finding it fascinating

Well, that's all you get from me today.

mwz