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| You Have New Comments! | November 6, 2005, 12:44AM |
 by: eon |
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I'm sure you've all noticed this newest feature, that being a notification at the top of the screen when you have new comments. I waited to report this addition until I was sure I had all (or most!) of the bugs worked out. This way if you're browsing articles, forums or polls and someone leaves you a comment on your profile, you'll get a notice (as soon as you refresh whatever page you happen to be on). Hopefully, this will reduce the amount of time you spend clicking back to your profile to see if you have new comments and make the site a little easier to use. At this point, it seems to be working as it should be. If you notice anything out of the ordinary with it (not being notified or receiving false notifications) try to document as much as you can about what led up to it and leave me a comment. Thanks... | |
topic: Site News | |
[reply] [16 comments] |
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| Happy Halloween | October 31, 2005, 5:18PM |
by: eon |
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Here's hoping you all have an awesome night. Please, be safe. And be on the lookout for the freaks... They say we all come out tonight. | |
topic: Site News | |
[reply] [8 comments] |
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| Goths and Rockers get the shaft yet again. | October 29, 2005, 3:58AM |
 by: The Darkstar |
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Since the beginning of Rock and Roll, rockers and rappers get the shaft. They're blamed for far too many things from bad behaviour to school shootings. When it comes to the latter, no one thinks anything of inner city kids carrying guns to school or getting involved in gang related shootings at an educational institution. Most of those schools these days have invested in tighter security or at least metal detectors. Let's move onto the latest line of killers. The bad rap of today going to: Goths. It's amazing how subcultures morph into something so far away from their roots. Now turning into the next mainstram, goths are getting a worse rap than ever. The Trenchcoat Mafia: Kept amongst themselves, wore long black jackets, seemed depressed, listened to Goth and Industrial music. Shot up Columbine High School. Jeff Weise: Native American Neo-Nazi Goth. Kept to himself, seemed depressed, wore black, listened to goth and industrial. Shot up his school in Red Lake Minnesota. Scott Dyleski: Kept to himself, wore long dark jacket, seemed depressed, listened to Goth and Industrial music. Bludgeoned Pamela Vitale, wife of high profile defense attorney and TV commentator Daniel Horowitz. All three were instantly tied into Satanism. How stereotypical is that?The unfortunate part about these incidences is not that they are goths. It's the fact that they are simply tragedies with one common bond. They are all alleged to be goths. Goths themselves are in an uproar. Usually because of the stigmata being attached to them. They are being villaified as devil worshippers or overtly depressed or detached from life or obsessed with death. First let me say, I've been a goth and to those who don't understand the Epical way, they would consider me a goth still out of ignorance. ( See: Goths vs. Epicans ). So basically I understand the subculture and it's history and how it's changed drastically since its inception. Giving or taking 5 years depending on how long a trend takes to catch on in the mainstream, lets look at the path of blame. 50 years ago, they would have blamed this on Elvis, rock and roll and reefer madness. 40 years ago they would have blamed it on the Beatles, Jack Keroac, Hunter S. Thompson and LSD.30 years ago, they would have blamed it on Black Sabbath, The Who, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd and heroin. 20 years ago they would have blamed it on Quiet Riot, Metallica, Ratt, Twisted Sister, Anthrax and Motley Cruë and cocaine. 10 years ago they would have blamed it on Gangsta rap, Grunge and Nirvana and methamphetamines. Face it. No matter what, the mainstream needs a scapegoat. When it comes to goth, they're the soup du jour. But as you may have previously read in Goths vs. Epicans, it's not a unified subculture so it offshoots into too many other aspects. I did wonder about the described carving into the victims flesh on the latest incident. A cross made with two slashes. When did this become goth? Last I remember, that was the symbol for the American Heart Association. They need to release some sort of sketch to the media so we understand these things. Basically, they will always blame music. And it's always music the authorities don't understand. But you can't blame the music, the movies, the video games or the bands. Why don't we start blaming the parents for not doing their jobs? Why don't we do something about the childs depression other than going off to work while we leave them alone doped up on happy pills? Why don't we take a stand and be a presence in their lives? Why are we as a society, passing blame yet doing nothing about it? Before one can go blaming subcultures, why not let it examine itself? Subcultures offer a variety of things that are lacking in regular culture. Goths sought to be understood. They're the modern day hippie simply looking to fit in where they feel they don't elsewhere.They wanted to enjoy the creativity of design, dress and a penchant for things normally looked upon as creepy. They enjoy shock value as any prior shock culture had done. They have varying religions, tastes in the type of dark music. To quote from Gothtec.com: "Goths are NOT all: depressed, unusually bigoted, violent, suicidal, involved in illegal drugs, Vampires or believe themselves to be vampires, sado-masochists, Satanists, musicians/painters (and other artists), computer programmers (although there seem to be a lot of them), wearers of black (some wear white and gunmetal), yers of their hair, users of white makeup." So then..what are they? The music is so varied in the subculture that it has no cohesion. And of all this? What do Satanists say? Always so quick to blames Satanists as if Satanists do nothing but run around and kill and sacrifice people. Why is it always "he had gotten into being goth and ...A SATANIST!!" I think there's a few pretty pissed off Satanists right about now. Enter the new Sherrif: Epicalism. The Epicalist does not need to dress a certain way to fit into "the club". They don't have have a certain look or wear a particular makeup. They simply have to do two things: Believe in it's tomes and philosophies and listen and recreate it's music. That is all. There's soon to be a website devoted to nothing but Epicalism as a movement. A movement based on acceptance with less restrictions and a greater celebration of all things dark, within which depression can be uplifted from the mire as we take away the hurtful intent of all things negative. To translate that to a goth or Metalhead? Basically that means it's Goth grown up or sophisticated Metal. Über-elitism breeds discontentment and resentment. Epicalists are a brood family that isn't locked in the chains of most subcultures conformist nonconformity. If ever there was something to save the wayward souls... This is it. It's coming. BRACE YOURSELF. | |
topic: Philosophy | |
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| Make Public, Make Private | October 28, 2005, 5:02AM |
by: eon |
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It's been requested for a while now and so I've added it: You may now make any of your comments private. To do so, click the new 'make private' link that will appear under your comments. For the sake of coherency, the old 'de-private' link has been changed to 'make public'. | |
topic: Site News | |
[reply] [6 comments] |
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| To Help Them You Have to Help Yourself | October 20, 2005, 1:29AM |
 by: XSatansx_xHavenX |
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I live in a small town in Kentucky, filled with drug dealers, meth heads, and pill prostitutes. The children are corrupt from birth. Six year olds selling pot at school. Ten year olds over dosing. 13 year olds trading sex for pain pills. Where does it end? Or more importantly. Where does it start? Some blame television. "If my kid didn't saw it on TV they wouldn't even know what it was." In reality if you hadn't been shooting up in the bedroom you'd know that they were watching something that could potentially influence your child to do drugs/have sex/shoot up a school/etc. Some blame music. Today’s rap. Warping their minds with is x-rated verses about “pounding some b*tch’s pussy hardcore” and “busting a cap in some ’blood/crip’s’ a$$”. So now we got a bunch of 12 year old “thugs” beating the crap out of each other for wearing blue in blood territory, or red in crip territory. Ok on with what I was originally writing about. Last night on the news I saw a story that really blew my mind. Only a few counties away from where I live a first grader was on a field trip. She, like all the other children, had taken her own lunch. When she found a bag of what she thought was “funny salt” she didn‘t think anything of it. So she put it on her food. Luckily for her a teachers aid who was helping the children with their food recognized what it was before the little girl could ingest it. It was a baggie of meth that her parents had hidden in her lunch box. The amount she had on her food would have been lethal had she eaten it. They would have been responsible for the death of their child. Then who’s fault would it have been? Their own. Not the media. Not today’s music. Not George Bush’s. Their own. Poverty plays an important role in this too. People where I live simply could not get by if there wasn’t a large demand for meth, pot and narcotics. So they do what they have to so that the bills get paid. And maybe if we’re lucky there’ll be enough left over to buy some food for when the food stamps run out. Or enough to buy a new coat for little ones so they don’t have to wear the same four years old hole filled coats that permanently smell of moth balls to keep the rats from nesting in them during the summer. Ah I’m rambling again. I guess what I’m really trying to get at is. Those of you who are parents. Be careful with you babies. If you sell pills. Don’t let them see it. If your hooked on drugs. Get help. If you make meth don’t let them around it. Because it’s not all the media/TV/anything else you can blame it on’s fault. EVERYTHING you do effects your children. EVERYTHING they see influences them. Don’t be a hypocrite. Don’t tell them not to do drugs then go in the bathroom and do a line of coke. Don’t tell them not to be lazy then go lay down on the couch and watch TV for the rest of the night. Don’t’ tell them not to drink and drive while you guzzle down a six pack then go to pick up their little sister. I’m begging all of you. Make the next generation better than ours. Don’t let them be failures. Push them to be all that they can be. But to do that you have to be all you can be too. | |
topic: Life | |
[reply] [1 comment] |
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| Re: Decrease in New Signups and Registration Trouble | October 19, 2005, 4:53PM |
by: eon |
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There seems to be a problem on hotmail.com right now. Since yesterday I've tried sending messages to an address I have there and the emails aren't showing up. It seems that a good deal of the new registrations here are made with hotmail accounts and that those new registrations are bouncing. If you or someone you know can't create a new account here, this is probably why. The solution is simple. Use Yahoo or something else instead. | |
topic: Site News | |
[reply] [9 comments] |
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| "Nightmare Before Christmas is, like, SUCH a good movie. Even th | October 18, 2005, 5:18PM |
 by: Gothy_Llama |
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Partly inspired by the rant I read recently on the horrors of stereotypical, quote-unquote "emo kids", I've decided to rant about another aspect of this irritating trend. One that quite frankly, annoys the living shite out of me. The Nightmare Before Christmas. More specifically, the embrace of said movie by uber-angsty teenagers who display too much black makeup around the eyes and listen to roughly 25 thousand watered down punk rock bands that all sound exactly the same. This select group of kids have decided that they should adopt a movie as their unofficial mascot. "Like oh my God, we should totally use The Nightmare Before Christmas! It's got like skeletons and stuff!" Then they proceed to buy every piece of merchandise ever created for said movie. Hats, T-shirts, wallets, purses, pillows, backpacks, action figures, those trendy round pins everyone seems to like attaching to the collars of their jackets, et cetera et cetera et cetera. A bunch of merchandise that seemed to magically appear out of thin air. The Nightmare Before Christmas is more than ten years old. Most people that are "fans" (using that term loosely, of course) were toddlers when it was released. So why has it suddenly become popular now? My theory is that the guy from Good Charlotte has a Jack Skellington tattoo on his arm. If you want to get a broader view of the idea, basically, the watered down punk bands I've already mentioned now dictate what is cool or uncool in emo culture. One member of one shitty band likes The Nightmare Before Christmas. Another member of another shitty band also likes the Nightmare Before Christmas. Ignorant teenage brats listen to shitty bands who like Nightmare Before Christmas. Ignorant teenage brat wants to be exactly like shitty band, ignorant teenage brat now likes The Nightmare Before Christmas. Ignorant teenage brat has never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas, but ignorant teenage brat has decided that anything his/her favourite band likes MUST be cool. Plus, it's all dark and stuff. "It is a befitting interest for my weeping tortured soul, and the darkness around me dictates that I must like The Nightmare Before Christmas and exploit it in every way possible." This annoys me mostly because I'm one of the few people who have actually seen the damn movie and been in love with it way, way, before it was trendy. I like it because it's a gorgeous movie artistically and because it has an awesome soundtrack. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against you if you like the Nightmare Before Christmas and have actually SEEN it. If you like it because you think Jack Skellington's face would be cute on a black purse, then you irritate the crap out of me. | |
topic: Rants | |
[reply] [10 comments] |
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| Possible Pandemic | October 17, 2005, 9:03PM |
 by: Prophet-Kyo |
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I posted an article about Avian Influenza last night, but I noticed many errors and untrue statements that I'd gotten off of websites which weren't correct. I have a revisal of my article, with more solid information, and without that silly "death to 1/3 of the population" comment. I hope you all enjoy it, and remember that it's just to help spread the word of a very real problem that we may have to face. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have recently been paying more attention to current events than usual, and have noticed something very disturbing. Avian Influenza, or "The Bird Flu", is spreading wildly through Asia's domestic and wild bird population. One highly pathogenic strain, "H5N1", is currently ravaging throughout many Asian countries including China, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. Normally, H5N1 is transmitted from bird to bird, through fecal matter, saliva or nasal secretions. But if a human were to come into contact with the infected bird, or it's waste/droppings, they could become infected as well. There are additional strains of Avian Influenza throughout Asia, Europe and North America.While these cases are still dangerous to both humans and birds alike, including H7N3, H7N2, H5N2, ect, they are in no way as dangerous as H5N1. All reported cases of Avian Influenza strains infecting humans, other than H5N1, have resulted in recovery with no deaths, making them a much more minor threat than H5N1. While these various strands of Avian Influenza are present, it is not thought that any of them will be the deadly pandemic that H5N1 is predicted to become. H5N1 in humans was first reported in Hong Kong, in 1997, and is the strain that is predicted to become a pandemic. H5N1 infected 18 people, causing a severe respiratory disease, killing 6. Within 3 days Hong Kong's entire poultry population was destroyed, killing 1.5 million birds and averting a possible pandemic. Two subsequent cases in Hong Kong were reported in 2003, one resulting in death. In September and October of 2004, 5 cases were reported, 4 of which resulted in death. Also, between December 30th 2004 and March 17th 2005, 12 cases were reported in Thailand and 23 in Vietnam, resulting in 23 deaths. This is a cause for concern, as H5N1 mimics the last major pandemic, The Spanish Flu, that affected the world at the end of the first world war in 1918. The Spanish Flu, another strain of Avian Influenza, had initially been present in just birds, but then mutated into a strain that was transmittable from human-to-human. The Spanish Flu caused the death of an estimated 2.5%-5% of the world's population, killing over 50 million. Victims of Spanish Flu would be struck by the effects very abruptly, with symptoms including a blue tint to the face and coughing up blood as a result of severe obstruction to the lungs. Many of those infected with Spanish Flu would die the day after contracting it. Symptoms of H5N1 are very similar to that of the common flu, with fever, cough, sore throat and sore muscules. The more severe cases include pneumonia and severe respiratory problems, which can result in death. Some humans infected with H5N1 have also contracted conjunctivitis, or pink eye. Unlike most cases with flus where the physically fit are relatively safe from death caused by the flu, even healthy young adults can be killed by H5N1. There are no H5N1 specific treatment drugs or vaccines available for human cases, but drugs such as amantadine and rimantadine could be administered to help stem H5N1. As long as H5N1 remains just a bird to human infection, a pandemic is certainly nothing to worry about. Unfourtunatly, just like the Spanish Flu of 1918, scientists are predicting that H5N1 will mutate in the near future. With a death rate of 50%-70%, this would be devastating for the population of the world, as recent cases of H5N1 have shown resistance to flu preventing and treating drugs. With a chance of death that high, and a resistance to anything trying to stop it, a severe blow could be delt to the human population. Even more shocking, a possible case human to human transmission was reported in Thailand in September of 2005. Currently not much is know of this possible transmission, and it is being further investigated. It is theorized that if a person were to have a human flu, then become infected with H5N1, the two flus could mix, and thus mutate, into a flu that affected humans with the effects of Avian Influenza. H5N1 is infecting more and more people as the months pass, so it's only a matter of time before this happens. Additionally, pigs and cats have become infected with H5N1, suggesting that they could also become hosts or transmitters of the infection. Scientists are doing everything they can in order to develop a proper vaccine/cure for H5N1. In early October of 2005, the deadly Spanish Flu was replicated in hopes of developing anything to stop H5N1. They are resorting to bringing back a virus that killed upwards of 100 million people not a century ago in order to stop this. H5N1 is a very serious problem, more than many may think. | |
topic: Current Events | |
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| Truth & Knowledge | October 16, 2005, 9:10PM |
 by: Sean T. |
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Truth & Knowledge…Getting beyond them.What is truth? Well, we can say that there are two kinds of truth. Ultimate truth and relative truth. Ultimate truth says, “I am it. What I am is not changeable under any circumstances.” Relative truth says, “I’m only truth to those who think I’m truth.” Kinda tough to really verify an ultimate truth, wouldn’t you say? How would we ever verify such a thing? So we can only believe we have found some sort of ultimate truth. What is ultimately true, will be expressed repeatedly and by various means. It is enduring and is forever manifested, simply because is ultimately true. Ultimate truths have unshakable foundations and apply to all realities. If we allow for realities to operate under very different and even seemingly contradictory rules, then ultimate truths must be very flexible so as to accommodate them all. The motivation of self love and expression would be an example of what might be an ultimate truth. Relative truth, on the other hand, is more the result of something we have experienced that we have formed ideas about. In our efforts to understand our world we created science and religion. Both serve a purpose, but neither can give us complete answers because all systems of thought are based upon truth as seen through the eyes of those involved. They are based on relative truths, which cannot ever reach the status of ultimate truth. If they contain any ultimate truth, we cannot be certain. What they can and do contain are ideas that we can experience for ourselves, but then we would be wise to remember that we are in the realm of relative truth. So the idea of truth and knowledge can become a great hindrance if we confuse our sense of knowing with an ultimate truth. Remember, ultimate truth can not be verified. All that can be verified is that our ideas are experienceable. So truth is really more a thought or idea about the reality of things as we see them and not really a statement about what is true for others. What is true, is true, but it’s also not something that lends itself to being packaged and forced upon others. Truth is a past dominated way of perceiving the world. It’s derived from past experience, ideas and feelings. Its objective is to facilitate better functioning in the future by learning from and understanding the past, but it is limited precisely because it is based on past events. It does not readily anticipate what does not fit with past experience. Understanding is an ongoing process which changes with additional experience. Additional experience allows for a greater understanding. Since experience is always ongoing, so is the process of understanding. Understanding of the past does not necessarily mean that we will understand the future, but learning how to comprehend our experience will allow us to better grapple with a future that we have yet to experience or understand. What is knowledge? Knowledge can be thought of as packaged ideas about truths. It’s a workable set of ideas that we don’t find the need to question anymore. They have risen above their former status as an opinion or belief and are now more authoritative in nature. It’s the idea that we are able to understand things and eventually have sufficient insight to feel that our understanding has a strong enough basis to take us out of the realm of uncertainty and into a realm of certainty. Feel it for yourself. Think “I know.” Now think, “I believe.” Which makes you feel the most personal strength? Usually it’s the “I know” part. There’s just something appealing about feeling we know something. Maybe it’s because when we think that know something, we feel a sense that we understand something in such a way that we can use our understanding to achieve something we desire. Maybe it’s just a sense of achievement. Maybe we’re competitive and we feel we have an edge of some sort. Whatever it is, it’s darn appealing. But it’s also very limiting. The Unknown You have been facing the unknown for your whole life. What you feel you know now, you developed from your life experience. To know is to feel confident in what you believe so much so that it feels like it’s not a belief at all. We came into this life as an infant putting our initial well being 100% into the hands of someone else to feed us, protect us and care for all our needs. . We developed life skills by adopting initially the ways of those who preceded us into this world. As we found that certain things seemed to work, we applied them in our life and if we got acceptable results, the birth of a new kind of knowledge was born in us. With that sense of knowledge came a sense of security since we no longer had to rely 100% on others in the way we did at birth here. We developed a sense of self sufficiency and independence. Knowledge gave us the sense of power to provide for ourselves in our life. This is the foundation of the expression “knowledge is power.” So knowledge feels like power, but it is not true strength. If knowledge were power, then the smartest people would be the happiest, which is not the case. Knowledge is a form of hindsight not foresight. It is like a rear view mirror. It looks to the past to provide what to expect in the future, which does function well in many cases, but it cannot provide an understanding of that which has not been previously experienced. It can only make inferences about the future by putting together the pieces of the past. We can learn from the past, but not all that we learn can be derived from the past. So knowledge has its limits. Knowledge can be viewed as beliefs and ideas reinforced by experience. What we think of as knowledge can be incorrect, as we have all experienced. So what we think we know may prove to be incorrect down the road. Knowledge requires belief to be experienced as knowledge. We don’t feel we know something if we don’t believe that it is true. So take a moment and think about what you 'truly' know. | |
topic: Philosophy | |
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| Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda, too late. | October 16, 2005, 7:56PM |
 by: colorofnightfall |
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(This is my first time writing an article so bear with me) Recently I had been complaining that everyone I knew always talked about 'what they were going to do' and and never did anything. I did acknowledge this included myself and I tried to try and get more serious and only talk about what I was really going to buckle down and do. A lot of the things I talked about doing when I would just blurt out whatever came to mind was going to visit my friend Libby, who lived about 15 minutes away from me on a bike. Libby had been recently Baker Acted(commited to a psyichiatric hospital by either a medical or law enforcement official for being a threat to herself or society) for the alarming amount of drugs she was doing and the situations she was putting herself in. While she was in the hospital she was diagnosed Bipolar and was having a lot of problem with her medications and her family life(I wasn't even concious of all the problems with her family) Well her parents had a restraining order put out against her boyfriend and made it so she had no telephone and wasn't allowed to go out. Since I lived so close I kept telling her via Livejournal 'I will come hang out with you sometime.' We even talked about just hanging out and listening to Depeche Mode(we were both Depeche Mode fangirls) sometime. This was about two weeks ago. I thought she was doing okay and never really made it around to spending any time with her. On saturday morning I showed up at a local shopping mall(I am a mall rat) and saw a lot of my friends crying. After a while one of them told me that another one of our friends called him and told him that Libby had died that morning. I spent all morning and afternoon calling around and trying to find people close to her since I myself didn't know her that well, as I never got to know her well. Well finally I ended up at an arcade/billard's place Libby's ex-boyfriend's father owned. Her ex-boyfriend was working there as was a girl who had been her friend since she was 3. Her old best-friend called Libby's father(since she had his cell phone) and asked him what happened since there was a lot of rumors flying around. Libby's father told us he was sorry, but Libby had died in her sleep, the wouldn't know how until the autopsy. Libby's old friend told me she thought it was a drug overdose because Libby had mentioned that she was going to do a lot of Oxiconnin(spelling?) and everyone wrote it off aas Libby melodrama. She left to go tell Libby's father. This is not only a wake up call to a lot of my friends but a shock to even more, including myself. While I was never into drugs and never have been, it makes me afraid for the majority of my friends who are. Libby turned 15 at the begining of September. My birthday(i turned 16) was in the middle of September and we talked about making each other furry legwarmers to go clubbing in together. I never went to visit Liibby. I never made her those legwarmers. I never went to Depeche mode with her. I never even got to know her. This is not a moral on the dangers of drugs or the possiblity of suicide. This is in esscense to tell people life is too short. Stop talking about what you are going to do and do it because something as scary and shocking as this could happpen to you. Life is fragile and precious so embrace the friends you have and make the ones you don't. But most importantly live your life while you are alive. There is no do-overs, no repeats and no second chances once its over. Just get out there and do everything you think and say you are going to because you might not get the chance later. | |
topic: Life | |
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