Distracted

I don't normally watch vlogs, but I'm curious what you'll come up with.

Tomorrow I'm going to the opera with my school. I'm curious.

Few things feel as good as finding something important in such desperate circumstances. Anyway, nothing special in my life.

Well said, RPG. You basically ended up wording what I didn't know how to say.

I have no idea why I'm still here, but after so many years it's hard to just up and leave.

Then you probably have a pretty dark, unhappy life. What's wrong with having a positive outlook to life? What's wrong with grabbing the chances you get in the hope they'll turn out well? Sure, sometimes things will go wrong, but what will you have gained in your life if you didn't try at all because it wouldn't lead to anything anyway? There's a difference between optimism and naiveté.

Good thing the drinking age here is 16, at least for light alcoholic drinks (basically, wine and under). Tomorrow's the school play premiere, the day after my band's having their next gig. Stressy, busy week, but it'll be worth it, especially if we play as well Friday as we did today at our rehearsal.

For the song I linked here I was trying to make a beat inspired by , but I never found a way to make a drum line I make sound anything like that.

Happy birthday, older twin. Happy birthday guys.

So uhm, could we turn away from the rape conversation?

Usually it's a combination of not finding the right samples to match what I have in my head, and not finding the right way to translate what I would play on a real drum into a drum computer, and the fact I don't feel like spending hours working on just drums. My friend, who also produces , is a master at programming drums, he manages to make a nice drumline in just a few minutes, that looks and sounds complex, while still sounding nice too. The song I linked isn't my personal favourite of his, but it does show his skills with the drum.

Programming drums has always been my weakness, I'll have a great idea in my head but I'll rarely be able to translate that to Reason. And yeah, the guitar is delayed. I also listened to your linked song yesterday, I actually quite liked it. Nice build-up and I liked the guitar(?) solo at the end. I never knew FL's instruments sounded so life-like, I would have thought it was an actual recording.

I made up for my sleepless Saturday night last night, slept over 12 hours, and I was supposed to go to school this morning... I need the rest though, I've got a busy week coming up: the school play's premiere is Thursday, so this is the stressy last week where we have to rehearse every evening. And then Friday night my band has a second gig lined up, which we're all looking forward to. And apparently we're not the only ones, a lot of people have been telling us they want to see us play (sometimes again), and our band's page has been getting more visitors lately.

I know what you mean, it's an on-and-off thing for me, sometimes I'll spend all week doing it, other weeks I won't touch it. I've experimented with genres but lately I've been making Melodic Dubstep and Hardstyle. I'm more of a synths person than a song person... I make lots of patches and FX. I'll check out your song when I get on my computer, I'm on my phone atm I'm more of a song person. I usually just pick a synth from the list that I feel is pretty close to what I'm looking for, then I just modify it a bit so it's even closer to what I was looking for, but I have no idea how to make a synth from scratch. I do like messing around with a lot of FX though, especially when I'm making more ambient music I'll use a lot of reverbs, echoes and delays, if I'm making a harder song I'll go for distortions. If you want to hear what I do, this is my latest song (I made it a few months back) and my personal favorite.

Last night was amazing: the music, the people, the events. I'm pretty sure no one there was sober, but everyone was incredibly friendly, there were no fights or anything, which is a bit rare to say around this part of Belgium. Hell, there weren't even moshpits, despite the music being really fitting: everyone just danced together without making trouble. I met a whole bunch of people that I hadn't seen for a while, and strengthened the bond with my best friends. We stayed till 6, when the party ended and walked home. It had started mildly snowing during the party, and as we walked home, it started piling up and before we knew it there was maybe an inch of snow, which is special because usually it never snows here this late in the year. This post doesn't come anywhere near to conveying what yesterday night/this morning was like.

Jump up drum 'n bass party tonight, looking forward to it. We managed to convince a whole bunch of people who came along to the Gambia to come, so it'll be nice seeing all of them in an informal setting again (meaning, outside of school), and afterwards I'm staying over at one of my best friends', who's always been a great host on the very rare occasions I get to sleep there.

Hallucinations aren't an effect of marihuana, that's just an urban myth, and to hallucinate from alcohol you'd need to drink so much you'd end up shitting yourself because you lose control of your bowels. It was the malaria pills. And either way, this was the morning after, a buzz doesn't last that long.

Apparently my suspicions were right, it's a sex line from Cyprus that's for some reason calling a bunch of Belgians, wanting them to call back to rip them off. Only one question remains though: How long has TT been in the sex phone scam business? In other news, the malaria prevention pills we took in the Gambia apparently completely [bleep]ed me over: reading the possible side-effects is like reading a checklist for all things that I felt the last few days since I've come back, including loss of appetite, stomach aches, diarrhea, vomiting and skin rash. Also, the pills caused me to hallucinate (it's also a possible, but rare side-effect) when I was still there in the Gambia. One morning we set our alarm real early, at 6:30, so we could get to Osman and start our day with a nice cup of tea. As I slowly woke up because of the song, I thought I saw my two friends who were sleeping in the same room come over to my bed: one of them sat down, the other stayed standing and both started dancing a bit to the music. Then I suddenly noticed three black young men standing in our room, just bobbing their head along to the music, seemingly unaware of their environment. I immediately thought this was just impossible, and my friends and I had already laughed at the small possibility of hallucinations, so I thought that was all it was, a hallucination. Just to make sure, I set myself straight a bit, moved my hand toward the men, and then I just swung my arm right through their bodies. It was one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. And after all that trouble, it turned out Osman was sleeping.

So I get a call on my cell from an unknown, foreign number (I looked up the area code, apparently it's from Cyprus). When I picked up, they immediately hung up on me. Out of curiosity I decided to call back, only to be met by porn sounds. Just... what?

Thing is, I've only really scratched the surface with my last post, when I reread it. Anyway, school tomorrow. Not looking forward to waking up early and getting back to the daily routine of school. On the other hand, felt nice to watch all the pictures of the trip on Facebook as they all came on throughout the day.

I'm back from my one week trip to the Gambia and it was, without a doubt, the very best week of my life. I could probably talk about it all day, but I'll only give you guys short summaries because I doubt anyone feels like wasting a half hour reading my crap. Let's start superficially: the weather was great. The place we stayed at was real nice: it was a non-touristic resort, meaning it was a nice place where our group (about 40 people in total excluding the 5 teachers who came along) could be alone, without being completely isolated from the locals. Besides the locals, I've also learned to know a lot of people from my school on the trip, either met people I've never really known or learned to know some people better that were not much more than acquaintances. Now a bit deeper: the people were incredibly friendly. There were a few people who weren't genuinely friendly (they saw tourists as a link to the western world and a chance to emigrate), but others were genuinely nice people, and it felt like they were immediately your friends. Like this one day when me and 4 friends walked through a large street in the capital Banjul, we were greeted by an upholsterer, and then immediately invited to sit down in his shop where we sat for 15 minutes talking to him and his friend while he worked. Or Osman, the night security guard at our resort, who we would sometimes go and drink tea with (the best tea I've ever drunk in my life) at 3 or 4 am. There were also a few students from our school's sister school in the Gambia (the reason our school makes the trip there every year) who accompanied us most days of the week and were all great people. It really touched me the last day, when our group of 5 friends who accompanied them the most (the rest of the group didn't spend as much time with them as we did) all received a shirt as a present from them. We also went on some kind of excursion on pretty much every day of the week. We visited schools, we went on a boat ride through the mangrove, or on a boat ride over the Gambia river to an island where slaves would be held. We went to this one place in the savannah where no tourists ever go and spent a night in the wilderness around the camp fire. We visited the biggest market in Banjul and spent an hour or two shopping there, and we all bought a bunch of souvenirs. We visited a park with monkeys and hyenas, on the last day. You can't forget though, that this was a group of 40 students aged 16-18, meaning there's also going to be a bit of partying. Almost every evening after the excursions we bought some cheap booze from the nearby supermarket and spent the night at the resort's beach around a camp fire, enjoying the liquor and each other's company. Usually the drink of choice was vodka (because it was incredibly cheap, about 3 pounds or 4 euros for a bottle, and it was actually pretty good taste-wise), but one night we held a tequila evening, which I think was the night where the most people got drunk. There was also the second night, when the most people threw up. That night one of my best friends suddenly wandered off alone with a local, away from the resort, looking for vodka, already black-out drunk. Or the last evening, when we started off with a boring camp fire, before about 10 of us gathered around a table and watched the number of people dwindle as the night progressed, until only 5 of us were left. We wanted to watch the sunrise, but eventually all four the others decided they got sick of waiting, and I ended up staying alone, spent an hour and a half doing walking around the resort and the beach waiting for the sunrise, until the sun came up around 7. Then I woke some people around 7:30, since they'd told me they wanted to go swimming in the morning. Now, we also went to the Gambia hoping to find some weed, especially the group that consisted of two of my best friends and I, joined by 2 others who quickly became great friends too. The group that went last year said it wasn't that easy and the quality wasn't too good, so you could guess how surprised I was when the very first local we spoke to, named Noah, asked me if I could play a Bob Marley tune on the guitar I was carrying on my back, before asking me if maybe I wanted to smoke some Bob Marley cigarettes along with it. It seems weed is about as common as grass over there, and after two days we were actually getting sick of all the people offering us Bob Marley cigarettes. We ended up buying the perfect amount to last us the week for almost no money (at least compared to what we would've been paying here, especially with the good quality it had), and almost all evenings, it was the last thing we did before going to bed, after drinking the vodka. Sometimes we'd join Osman the tea man for some of the Bob Marley tunes, the guy rolled like a pro in the low light. The first time we did it with him, we asked him if the security would be okay with this, since we didn't want to get caught, to which he replied he was security. As a disclaimer, we were conscious about the risk we were taking, which is why we never did it out in the open and tried our best to make sure the person who sold it to us wouldn't [bleep] us over. All in all, this week was just great, a beautiful combination of seeing new things, meeting new people and enjoying life. Edit: holy crap this was a long post, sorry guys.

Today I'll be packing my bags, finishing some work for school and then, at midnight, the trip to the Gambia starts. By tomorrow evening I'll be complaining about the heat, trying to get settled into a crappy room and mostly enjoying the scenery and the people around me.

I've been playing around with Reason for about 2 years now, occasionally making a song before forgetting about it for a few weeks again, then rinse and repeat. I've played around in different genres, but mostly stick to drum 'n bass and more ambient music. Also, more recently I've started trying to make remixes, which basically consist of me making an instrumental track with Reason then sticking acapella vocals on it with Audacity.

That feeling when you wake up from a great dream and realize it wasn't real. Also, having some kind of [bleep]ed up dream about some one close to you dying or something can really [bleep] your morning up.

How the hell can they possibly check whether or not you're doing that exercise?