I'm looking for a recommendation for good earplugs.

I attend 20–30 concerts and festivals a year, and partly because of that sheer volume I really have to use earplugs.

I'm bothered though byt the loss of sound quality that inevitably comes with them. Over the years I’ve spent fortunes on earplugs in every price range. Primitive ones, advanced, overdesigned, underdesigned, crowdfunded, launched by “musicians who are tired of…”, active, passive, you name it. Based on careful research, random impulses, and products that have been praised to the skies.

And they all sound ... shit.

There’s a difference between the yellow foam plugs from the hardware store and the expensive ones from the guitar shop, but honestly, it feels like variations on sticking a French fry in each ear.

Most of the treble disappears and takes a good chunk of the midrange with it. As a guitar lover, that sucks.

The other day I’d forgotten them in a hurry, and in lack of better options I put in my Airpods in “Transparency” mode. It wasn’t perfect hearing protection, but the band wasn't super loud anyway, and it actually sounded ... good?

What do you do?

I'm trying to copy a nice trend on Danish Mastodon, where we talk a bit about our reading with a language appropriate hashtag.

Lately I’ve been really good at reading instead of collapsing in front of the TV. It does something for my mental calm, even if it’s still “just” entertainment.

My #FridayBook was "Travel by Bullet" by John Scalzi, the third installment in the Dispatcher series. Scalzi is quite good at stories where he tweaks one wild detail about the world and then follows the tangent. E.g. a fundamental premise like the moon suddenly being made of cheese, or, in this case, that anyone who is murdered magically vanishes into thin air and reappears somewhere they feel safe. Naked and confused, but alive, reset to an earlier point in time and in perfect health. For example, most hospitals have a “Dispatcher” on duty if a surgery is heading in the wrong direction. Because if the patient is murdered, or "Dispatched" as the insurance term would say, by a Dispatcher, the patient is saved. It’s light entertainment, well written, and so on. Plenty of weird shenanigans, ethical questions.

In the meantime I also devoured Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. It’s been well covered in the media lately, so I’ll just say that yes, it's a light and quirky meal, but it’s also a really good, positive, and almost touching story. I’m very much looking forward to the film.

I had a bit more trouble with Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds. It’s about life aboard a generation ship carrying settlers to another star system, framed as a more classic noir detective story. The main character was sympathetic, but why he had to be the resurrected cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was hard for me to understand and felt like an unnecessary gimmick that dragged a trail of confusion across the whole narrative. Being Reynolds, of course something quite different was going on beneath the surface, which ultimately justified the device—and the big reveal can also be read as a biting commentary on today’s structures of power and influence in the world.

I absolutely adore everything that man writes and was well entertained, but the story felt a bit “off.” Maybe because the main characters, despite the circumstances, were uncharacteristically positive and trusting. I kept waiting for a betrayal that never came. Not sure whether I just wasn’t in the mood for that kind of unmotivated optimism, or whether it simply wasn’t Reynolds at his best.

More classic Reynolds was Sleepover. A dark little piece, maybe 60–70 pages, playing with a variation on the end of the world, the ultimate consequences of artificial intelligence (perhaps), and the nature and character of reality itself. As far as I know, the story originates from Reynolds’ notes for a novel that never came to be. Unfortunately, because there’s huge potential in the universe it sketches.

As it stands, an enormous idea told in too short a span, the story inevitably feels a bit truncated. But for $2 as an ePub? Definitely worth a couple of hours.

I also read "Time Out" by Michael Marshall Smith - a long novella of about 140 pages. The protagonist wakes up to a world where, at first, all other people have disappeared, and things only grow stranger from there. As the backstory evolves it becomes increasingly hard to see the protagonist as such, and story mainly explores his somewhat navel-gazing loneliness and the iron grip of habit.

At one point, for example, he has nothing better to do, so he works for a couple of hours. It sounds absurd, and it is.

Smith never felt obligated to write happy endings for his characters and you'll have to see for yourself how it all resolves. Smith absolutely manages to write his way out of it.

Today, Uthanasia’s debut album, “Survival of the Fittest… Enslavement of the Weakest”, is out. It’s available on all kinds of streaming platforms, and I’ve linked to the ones I could find at the bottom of this post.

I really hope you’ll give it a listen 🙏🏼🙏🏼

I’ve got skin in the game, since my son is one of the two guitarists, and he also plays piano, church organ, and provides backing vocals for the band. Even though they were only 16 when the recordings began, the album has to stand on its own legs, and I think they’ve pulled it off – obvious bias aside. It’s a really solid metal album.

As the title may suggest, the album deals with the oppression of the world’s population by established power structures throughout history, touching on e.g. religion, socioeconomic conditions, Kristallnacht, Nanjing, the pharaohs, and the Egyptian dynasties.

As a concept album, it’s quite cohesive, but the songs also work perfectly well on their own.

My own favorites? Well, the first single “True God” still holds up, with that super cool, slightly offbeat groove, which the band themselves only realized after a while was actually just 4/4 if you lean to the side a bit.

But there are many highlights.

The drums throughout the album deserve an article of praise on their own.

“Sail Away” with another killer groove and beautiful harmonies at the end.

The saz intro on “Consequence…” is a wildly unusual choice, and damn, it’s executed flawlessly 🤯

The bass solo in “Survival…”

The harmonies in “A Place…”

The piano outro in “Enslavement…” feels a bit like “okay, we’ve just rage-binged a miniseries about the darkest corners of world history… so now let’s take a deep breath and remember that there’s still hope and beauty out there.”

I also keep coming back to “Spellcaster”, a neat little three-minute radio hit with a one-minute organ intro recorded in Båring Church, who kindly made their organ available one morning.

From the deep well of my own metalhead background I give a respectful nod to Uthanasia’s cover of Metallica’s “Creeping Death” – which is even heavier than the original (are we tuned to C# or something?). The “Die” section in the bridge includes a lot of guest vocals – including all their friends, a few teachers and probably a couple of random people walking their dogs. Maybe the dogs too.

Anywayyyyy...what now? It's too late for a TL;DR but....?

Well, here’s the thing – on most streaming platforms, it’s an algorithm that decides whether the music reaches the world. If they get some streams, the algorithm “thinks”: hey, this has a bit of momentum – let’s roll with it. Then suddenly you show up on “Discover” and “New releases for you” for other rock fans, and that might lead to some exposure, maybe even landing on broader playlists like “New Metal on the Rise,” and so on.

So pretty please, give them a “follow,” give the album a like or a boost, and most importantly – listen through it once, even if at first glance it might not be your thing 🙏🏼

Because it helps them.

And of course… if you have a friend you’ve ever seen tapping their foot to Thunderstruck, then share it, for crying out loud 🤘🏼

Qobuz:

https://www.qobuz.com/dk-en/album/survival-of-the-fittest-enslavement-of-the-weakest-uthanasia/mpl0lttw4t09b

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/album/4fOexxNk2BL7BQnMvhaFDS

Apple Music:

https://music.apple.com/dk/album/survival-of-the-fittest-enslavement-of-the-weakest/1823525694?l=da

Youtube Music:

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nBIozB3RK8MCDdgy5kHzMk2VZQzPOMM-k

Amazon Music:

https://www.qobuz.com/dk-en/album/survival-of-the-fittest-enslavement-of-the-weakest-uthanasia/mpl0lttw4t09b

I haven't included, or made any concessions to, so-called AI in any of the businesses that I run or consult with. Just like I discarded crypto currency and didn't convert my websites to Facebook pages or move my support phone lines to Zoom.

Like most fads, it's complete bullshit.

This is 100% true.

It's not why my dad insists - despite my considerable efforts to teach him better ways - that emails are forwarded by printing them, scanning the printed copy to a PDF and sending that as an attachment in a new email. It boggles the mind how that process makes more sense to him than hitting 'Forward' and 'Send'.

But 100% true. https://flausch.social/@piegames/112257366998701111