Best Of

Death. As confronting as that sounds.

In my mid 20s (back in 2005) I was very outgoing and had a large close circle of friends many of which I had known from primary school, living in the country you form some pretty strong bonds for life.

I lost 2 of my friends from that group in a murder suicide under very tragic circumstances. They were a couple and things fell apart and he refused to let go. She had 2 young kids who weren't harmed (not his).

This was hard for me personally as I knew this guy and his brother for 10 years growing up together and he was a huge part of our group as he was always funny and joking with people and never a hint of this being possible. Makes you question a lot of things and he was not into drugs at all so even more of a mystery.

Now I was well into the clubbing scene as this was mid 2000 and could easily have been consumed by that world to forget everything that happened as a few of my friends were on the Friday to Sunday train for months but instead I spent weeks just writing my thoughts in musical form, no words just instrumental playing and managed to focus on something I felt was pretty beautiful as a tribute to the girl who had been taken which helped me though the initial hard times until I was stable enough to make better choices again.

So a very tragic and hard to deal with situation that still affects me now but I had music to turn to and I feel that helped save me from going down a very different path. That is why I still produce (not as much) after 20 years, sometimes inspiration from unlikely sources will hit capturing that in a capsule of sound helps me hold on to memories and feelings of the past, even the difficult ones.

I think I agree in regards to the thread preview, I feel bombarded with a huge amount of text but it's hard to be 100% sure as I am still getting used to this platform too. Something like this would be ideal for me:

That would require custom code and I am afraid we arent at that point yet.

I have a browser extension to change the appearance of websites using very simple CSS, I used it on the old forum too, mainly to hide clutter, info I don't care, change fonts and all kinds of stuff. For this forum, I haven't had much time to tweak things but maybe it would be cool to have a dedicated thread where we share bits of CSS to customize the forum? I would contribute with small tweaks but not sure if anyone would be interested in such a thing... I guess it could also serve as a catalyst for official changes.

This is what the forum looks like to me now:

• No thread content preview.
• Bigger profile pics.
• Info under the thread title is 50% transparent.
• No "Started By" and "Most Recent By:" text.
• More readable font site-wide.

It looks cleaner to me but this is all very subjective.

1. Weekly backup EVERYTHING.
2. Pay your taxes now, later it will be much, much worst.
3. Have a 2nd job in case a pandemic happens.
4. Skill, talent, and originality are only half the battle to succeed, don't be naive kiddo!
5. Go get some Piano lessons no matter how boring it might be.
6. Jump into upcoming social media platforms before they blow up.
7. If you're not happy with a tool, switch to another one ASAP don't wait for it to improve.
8. Never trust an event promoter that says "next time we will have a bigger budget".

Im loving this thread, a lot of good advice here and some funny stuff too... very relatable.