A sign of the economy

The "Hey buddy!" guy trying to sell me a home theater system out of the back of a van, did not have a van but a hatchback.

Of Shamballa & Spinoza

postgoodism was good enough to slip me a copy of Uncharted 2 a couple weeks back, and I finished it this weekend. He denies having really done any work on it, so I'll commend mersh instead. It's definitely a great game. I'm not sure it's the Second Coming, as many commentators seem to think, but it's great. It looks absolutely fantastic; not only are there many beautiful locations, but you'd be hard pressed to find a wall that was just a boring wall. Every wall is adorned, or grimy, or partially blowed-up.
The story is pretty basic: go get the Macguffin in Shamballa before the bad guy does. That said, they pull off a nice in media res beginning, and the whole experience is definitely very cinematic (as the commercial notes). Despite most of the activity being shoot-them-before-they-shoot-you, there is good variety in the game play, particularly if you're a cool enough customer to alternate stealth attacks with full Rambo mode.
I was tickled to see a nod to Nicolas Roerich in Drake's journal, but sad that there was no actual mention in the game, though possibly some of Roerich's Himalayan art was used by the designers. Roerich's mountainscapes were also appreciated by HPL, who refers to them a ridiculous number of times in At the Mountains of Madness.
My sucky Time-Warner Cable connection had a happy period of good connectivity, so I had a chance to play some online multiplayer. It is also a lot of fun. I got my ass handed to me in a competitive team game, but I did much better in a cooperative mode where you fight off waves of bad guys. I can see that becoming the real addiction. I've started a new game on the higher difficulty, but I'm already skipping through the cut-scenes. Cinematic or not, I'm not waiting around to watch it again.

And now in part 2 of stuff my friends gave me, jason_brez lent/gave me Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, by Jonathan Israel. It is quite the hefty tome, clocking in at 720 pages of smaller-than-average text, followed by almost another 100 pages of bibliography and index.
( It is a scholarly work )