Loop Earplugs - Experience 2 Plus

 

(This is a product review that is not endorsed by Loopearplugs.com)

All Mechanical, the way Nature Intended!

A couple of months ago I was talking with one of the elders at church and he mentioned how his kids had gotten him some earplugs for Christmas that allowed him to get rid of background noise while still listening to people talk to him. It was strictly mechanical, without any electronic doodads or mucking around with your phone kind of garbage. I was very interested, as the "worship" time at our Sunday church has come to resemble a low level rock concert and the noise is enough to make me want to storm out. (for the record, I have, multiple times)

They have about 12 different products, or more and I settled on the Experience 2 Plus option. It is meant for a music scene, to damp down the noise without actually cancelling any of it. I got the "Plus" because it comes with an added "mute" ring to reduce the noise even further.

As you can see in the above picture, there is a black rubber ring inside the metallic ring. That is the "mute" and provides up to 17dB protection, as opposed to just the 12dB of the regular Experience 2.

There are various sized ear pieces depending on your ear size. It came with "regular" (I guess?) and I replaced them with the extra small. Fits very comfortably in my ears without making me feel like I was trying to jam a carrot in them. If you've worn those disposable foam earplugs, you'll know what I mean.

They fit tightly in a little clamshell case. As you can see, I got the silver edition and added the white mute plugs to them.

This shot is to give you a "little" perspective on just how small these are. I keep them in my messenger bag and right before the worship time starts, I pry them out of the clamshell and pop them into my ears.

Due to biometric security, I do NOT use pictures of my own eyes, ears or nose. This poor schmuck doesn't seem to care though. Bully for him.

I put them in and then rotate them backwards, so they fit snugly in my ear canal and the metal ring is in that open area leading to the ear opening.

Now the important part, do they work? Yes they certainly do! I could still hear everything, the piano, the singers, the guitars, the drums, the people around me singing, but it was much softer and didn't feel like I was being assaulted. There have been times in the past where I am just gripping the pew in front of me as hard as I can and white knuckling through the worship time. Now? While I don't enjoy the worship time (that's a completely different matter), I can stand there and not stress out or freak out. My shoulders aren't hunched up and my fists aren't clenched. What's even better, I can still hear when one of the singers speaks or the Pastor gets up and says something between songs, as is his wont. I will say that when I'm wearing these with the mute plug, I do not feel comfortable trying to carry on a conversation, as I can't judge the volume of my own voice. But I haven't walked out of a worship service in over two months, so that alone makes this an unqualified success in my books.

I have not used these in any other situation except the one described above. I could experiment and try removing the "mute" plug and see if I could wear these in a crowded area to improve hearing the person I'm talking to, but I have zero desire to remove and add a little piece of rubber, as I know I would lose it. If I wanted to use these in conversation, I'd probably buy the "Engage 2" version and just carry the 2 pair around. I'm seriously thinking about doing that, as I want to be able to talk while wearing them. Sometimes at potluck it gets down right noisy (with over 120 people packed into one area) and if I can cut that background noise down, it would be great.

These can be bought on their website (loopearplugs.com) or online at Amazon, Walmart or Target. I hope if this has been an informative post and possibly helpful. If you've got questions, ask away in the comments and I'll do my best to answer. 

Spellbound (Grimnoir Chronicles #2) 5Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Spellbound
Series: Grimnoir Chronicles #2
Author: Larry Correia
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 402
Words: 150K
Publish: 2011

Another home run. This Grimnoir trilogy just hits all my good buttons and I’m as happy as a clam.

There’s threats from a government agency, there’s threats from the Imperium (japanese), there are threats from other Actives (what magical users are called in this trilogy) and finally, you have threats on a cosmic scale.

Correia does a good job of balancing all of the threats, while expanding the cast of characters. We also get a good twist with one of the Imperial Iron Men (the ultimate bad guys in the previous book) helping out the Grimnoir because he knows the cosmic threat is real and only the Grimnoir are taking it seriously.

When I read this back in ‘13 I had an extremely visceral reaction to the first reveal of the major villain of the book, code named Crow. It was so intense that I had to put the book down back then for an entire day. I was extremely interested in how I would react this time. Oh man. I reacted the exact same way. Even down to putting the book down for 24hrs. I knew what was coming, but even so, it hit me like a runaway freight train. It’s good to know that some things about me haven’t changed.

The book ends in such a way that I kind of wondered if Correia had modeled it after The Empire Strikes Back, the second movie in the Star Wars trilogy. The good guys strike a dramatic blow but in the end are still scattered and on their own. That didn’t stand out to me last time and even now, I wonder if I’m reaching, but boy, it really had that feeling. In all fairness, it might also just be Correia using that kind of trope and not necessarily aping ESB directly. But he’s a couple of years older than me and could have seen ESB in the theatres and it would have struck him deeper than it did me. Who knows. It’s vague and baseless speculations like this that make re-reading so much fun :-D

The final battle was awesome. The Grimnoir, the cops, the airforce, all fighting against a demon god of a previously devoured world. And it all comes down to little ol’ Faye to stop it. Jake Sullivan the smart heavy can’t do it. Toru the renegade Iron Man can’t do it. Not even a full squadron of the American Airforce/Navy can do it. But Faye does it and she does it smart. That’s what I like about these books so much, the characters might make mistakes, but they aren’t obvious author created mistakes just to create hardship or drama. Or because the author is a stupid twit who can’t write themselves out of a brown paper bag. So go Correia, keep those smart characters coming!

★★★★★

From the Publisher

The Grimnoir Society’s mission is to protect people with magic, and they’ve done so—successfully and in secret—since the mysterious arrival of the Power in the 1850s, but when a magical assassin makes an attempt on the life of President Franklin Roosevelt, the crime is pinned on the Grimnoir. The knights must become fugitives while they attempt to discover who framed them.

Thing go from bad to worse when Jake Sullivan, former p.i. and knight of the Grimnoir, receives a telephone call from a dead man—a man he helped kill.. Turns out the Power jumped universes because it was fleeing from a predator that eats magic and leaves destroyed worlds in its wake. That predator has just landed on Earth.

• Spellbound (2013 Review)

• All of My “Grimnoir” Reviews

April '26 Circum et Pervagatus

 

Raw Data:

Novels/Novellas - 13 -

Short Stories - 0 -

Manga/Graphic Novels - 0 -

Comics - 1 -

Average Rating - 3.25 ↓

Pages - 2955 ↑

Words - 1088K ↑

The Bad:

Tower of Terror - 2.5stars of snoozefestapalooza!

14 of My Favorites in Suspense - 2.5stars of wallowing in the gutter

The Good:

Hard Magic - 5Stars of really good urban fantasy

Shadows Linger - 4stars of pretty good re-reading

Movie:

Resident Evil: Extinction, the third in the RE film series, really amps up the tension but falls down pretty hard in most other areas. Decent but my least favorite of the series.

Miscellaneous Posts:

• How Do You Follow Blogs?
• He is Risen!
• Lifelace - MTG 4E
• Off-Air
• Imperatoris Chronicorum II
• Lifetap - MTG 4E
• [Art] Seasonal Trees
• Lightning Bolt - MTG 4E
• The Dirge of Porky Chunkins
• Living Artifact - MTG 4E

Personal:

Paid our taxes. We have the minimum taken out, so we usually owe some at year's end. I began doing that a long time ago when someone told me that "getting a refund" from the Feds was just giving them an interest free loan with MY money. I've never looked at the "refund" the same again. Took me about an hour, as I had all the paperwork necessary on hand. Just glad it's over with for another year.

Spring is here and we're already in drought conditions. I really don't understand that, what with all the snow we got this past winter, but that's what the weather people say. Considering how early it is for that, I foresee a very uncomfortable summer with lots of ticks.

The bot views are back, with a vengeance. March had kind of tapered off and I was hoping maybe I could use April though the end of the year, but nope, after the first week I kept getting hit. 600-1200 views a day is NOT normal for this blog, especially when I see the same posts getting hit day after day 10 times a day. Makes me wonder what Wordpress is doing, besides absolutely nothing I mean.

My Devilreads experiment is going decent but no better. Not doing reviews has kept me out of reach of the wokescolds and other such finger waggers there. The feed is atrocious though. I can't customize what I actually see so I end up with a lot of garbage as people "update" the percentage of the books they are reading. Overall, the site is not conducive to someone as words oriented as I am or who wants one on one interaction.

Cover Love:

The Tower of the Elephant, a Conan novella by Robert Howard. While not quite accurate, it really does portray the situation very well. And it's just plain cool looking :-)

A Son of Thunder (Non-Fiction) 3.5Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: A Son of Thunder
Series: -----
Author: Henry Mayer
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Biography
Pages: 504
Words: 178K
Publish: 1986

This was a biography of Patrick Henry and came across much more as someone telling a story than a hard facts and dates kind of biography that I kind of expect when I think of that genre. I like that story telling aspect quite a bit. Made the reading sail along smoothly instead of clumping along through boggy swamps. There is very little about his growing up days and most of it centers around his rise to fame through the American Revolution and then his subsequent hand in crafting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I enjoyed reading this, sparse as it was. Henry was apparently a private man and took that to great lengths. Good for him I say. Also, the reason he was so adamant about the Bill of Rights, everything he feared about a centralized government, has come to pass. He would look on us today as the most abject of slaves, and he was a slave owner himself, so he would know. It’s not that he was prescient, he simply knew, as did most men of his time, how Power worked and how it affected mankind.

From the few interactions with George Washington that he had, I think I’d like to investigate Washington at some time and read a couple of biographies about him. But that’ll have to wait as I’ve got about 15 other non-fiction books in the queue.

★★★✬☆

From the Publisher:

Patrick Henry was a charismatic orator whose devotion to the pursuit of liberty fueled the fire of the American Revolution and laid the groundwork for the United States. As a lawyer and a member of the Virginia House of Burgess, Henry championed the inalienable rights with which all men are born. His philosophy inspired the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and, most significantly, the Bill of Rights.   Famous for the line “Give me liberty or give me death!” Patrick Henry was a man who stirred souls and whose dedication to individual liberty became the voice for thousands. In A Son of Thunder, Henry Mayer offers “a biography as [Patrick] Henry himself would have wanted it written

Living Artifact - MTG 4E

 

Another disgusting organic looking "thing". I never understood why artists would do that. Eh, whatever.

Life gain is definitely a "green" thing, but it is like a slow drip coffee maker. You only get 1 extra life each turn, which is fine if your opponent is playing a slow deck, but if they are playing a more aggressive deck, you'd want some other cards in your deck to deal with that instead of this. Once again, it would take a very creative mind to find a good use for this card. I probably wouldn't play it anyway, just because it looks gross :-)

The Dirge of Porky Chunkins

 

Now gather round children
and I'll spin you a tale 
the tale of the Dirge of Porky Chunkins
Porky Chunkins was a mighty fine man
A manly man's man 
A man who liked what he knew and knew what he liked
and Young Chunkins he did Anime like
with cool Jap words
and cool Jap pix
so much so that a tshirt he did buy
a tshirt to his fandom
Young Chunkins wore it loud
Young Chunkins wore it proud
'cause Anime was cool you know
The Years rolled by
and Young Chunkins wore that shirt
not so proud, not so loud and not so young
The Years rolled by
and Porky Chunkins loved that tshirt still
Til one fateful night
Chunkins' wife did say
Porky, I know thou art a man of God
holy, righteous and sublime
but must thy shirt be so holey too?
Chunkins sighed and bowed his head
he asked for strength to do the deed
This tshirt had served him well
nigh on a score of years
with a heavy heart
but calm of mien
eyes dry
and soul determined
Porky Chunkins did the deed
but in his heart the tshirt lives
and Chunkins sings his song
On cold and desolate nights
when the winds do blow
and clouds the moon do cover
if you listen loud
if you listen proud
You can hear
The Dirge of Porky Chunkins...

This poem has been brought to you by Middle Age Inc.

Hard Magic (Grimnoir Chronicles #1) 5Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Hard Magic
Series: Grimnoir Chronicles #1
Author: Larry Correia
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 379
Words: 145K
Publish: 2011

Ahhhh, a re-read that lives up to my memories of it.

I read this while still (originally) on Devilreads (where I used my real name and picture, ohhhh the naivete of a misspent social youth!) and a friend there had recommended it to me. His account is still on Devilreads, but he did make the jump to Booklikes and then he’s sputtered out all over the place, so I don’t know if he’s even online any more. That’s how online friendships (come and) go I guess. I loved this book back then, even more so than Correia’s Monster Hunter International series but once I finished the trilogy in 2013, I hesitated for 13 years before taking this plunge and re-reading it.

But I have re-read this and it is just as good if not better than when I read it back in ‘13. Correia gets the vibe just correct for an Alternate History Urban Fantasy. Normally, I’d hate that subslice of genre bastardization, but Correia makes me like it, a lot.

The story is literally punchy, as Jake Sullivan, one of two main characters, is a “heavy”, someone who can manipulate gravity around himself. But he’s smart and he’s figuring stuff out about how to use his powers that no one else has even thought of. I LIKE that in a main character. Don’t make him stupid because you’re a stupid writer. Correia has never gone down that path and I respect him for that. The other main character is Faye, a teen girl who can teleport. She seems to have unlimited power though and it hints at the greater conflict that is coming, a conflict of cosmic horror’esque proportions. I had not read any cosmic horror before this back then, nor did I even know what it was. Given how I’ve gravitated to that genre over the years, I can understand why I was so attracted to this series without quite knowing why. Correia does cosmic horror in his MHI series too, but it’s not quite as in your face as here. But it isn’t the grim, hopeless, void of despair that Cthulhu type cosmic horror is supposed to be, but a more hopeful, humanity can survive if we just try hard enough (think of the optimism from the original Star Trek show). I like that threat of reality being destroyed but it is skillfully balanced by the hope, which I also like.

In my usual reading rotation, I have 6-8 weeks before cycling back to a series. That gives me time to sample a wide variety of other styles so that one series or author doesn’t overwhelm and I get burnt out on them. I’m going to be making an exception for this trilogy. I’ll be reading and reviewing the rest of the trilogy over the next two weeks. Each Friday  I’ll be putting up the next review. Spellbound will go up May 1st and Warbound will go up May 8th. That is very high praise in my estimation.

Also, Wikipedia has NO individual pages for ANY of Correia’s books so there is no indepth synopsis. With how popular Correia is with his fanbase, I cannot fathom why this is the case. I have my suspicions, but no concrete proof, nor do I care enough to try to do one of the books myself just to see it deleted by the damn commies who run wikipedia. There, that rant is out of my system so it shouldn’t show up again in the reviews for the next two books :-D

★★★★★

From Fandom.com

The year is 1930. Opening the story is a chance meeting by a Portuguese cow farmer Active Joe Vierra and a traveling family with a teenage Active named Sally Faye. The farmer realizes she has the same Power as him (Travel) and adopts her. A covert meeting from wealthy blimp business mogul Cornelius Stuyvesant with the Pale Horse, Jonathan Harkness, begins a plot to murder another man through the Power of Plague. As payment for his work, the Pale Horse requests a future favor from Stuyvesant who reluctantly agrees.

Three years later, Jake Sullivan, a former soldier and now ex-convict Active with the Power to manipulate gravity (colloquially called a 'Heavy') is serving off the last of his sentence under the federal government to bring in criminal Actives. Sullivan is a slow-talking, brutish looking man, but is ferociously intelligent and a master at using his seemingly simple Power in clever and creative ways after years of intense practice while in prison at Rockfell. His last job with the feds is to bring in an old friend (and flame) from his criminal days: Delilah Jones, an Active with the 'Brute' ability to imbue her muscles with extraordinary strength. On the run for mass murder, Delilah gives the Feds trouble and is almost captured by Jake when a group of vigilantes appear and assist Delilah's escape on a blimp. Sullivan is left with more questions than the government will answer, and so goes to begin an investigation into Delilah and the group who involved themselves to whisk her away.

The young Sally Faye has grown into her power, able to Travel with ease and beginning to ask Joe questions about the limits of the power and possible ways of using it. Their lives are interrupted when a group of men arrive at the farm looking for something Joe had been tasked to guard years prior. Refusing to give up the item, a firefight erupts. Joe is able to evade the enemy for just long enough to give the device to Sally before being killed by a big man with a terribly scarred face and a white eye called 'Mr Madi'. Telling Sally to flee, Joe gives her instructions to find the Grimnoir.

Turning up a few leads from an old mafia acquaintance unfortunately puts Jake on the radar for the Red Imperium: a foreign Japanese shadow organization that seeks to obtain world dominance. The Red Imperium sends members of the elite Iron Guard to kill Sullivan, but are stopped by the very same party that assisted Delilah: The Grimnoir. Another secret organization, their purpose is to uphold justice and protect the world with their Grimnoir Knights.

Dark forces are at work to gather components of a deadly Tesla device, and it becomes a race to recover the missing pieces before the enemy can put the device back together.

• Hard Magic (2012 Review)

• All of My “Grimnoir” Reviews