Metal Up Your Ass and all that Jazz Room V2

I'm really fucking worried to be honest and mainly about people's continual inability to do the right thing. I feel like we could have crushed this horrible virus over the summer if people had just behaved better and the government had knuckled down on restrictions. 

No, you didn't overreacted Ashley. But your brother has learned a very valuable life lesson and fortunately it does sound like you're all going to be okay. Trust me, it is very important that you don't fall out over this. If you need someone to really blame, blame the waste of oxygen who decided it was okay to go out while waiting for a Covid test result. 

Let me tell you something: when I was growing up, I made friends easier with boys. I was the only girl in a group of six. As we become teens, I soon noticed that the guys had a sort of code. If they knew one of them really liked a particular girl, not just general agreement on who they thought was hot, then that girl was off limits to the rest of them, even if she rejected the one. Now, I can imagine the potential for some real dramatic fallout for reasons of 'things just happen' with such an agreement between close mates (which luckily for our group they avoided and we're all still friends to this day), but one thing they wouldn't do is send texts like you describe (not that we had that ability then). Good mates may fool around and rag on each other, but they absolutely wouldn't do what you describe here. Clearly their only goal was to see if they could get your brother to break the rules. Unfortunately they succeeded. 

My advice to your brother is to drop them. This one lapse aside, you do give the impression that he was doing well with keeping to the rules. So he is probably a mostly responsible young man. He doesn't need people like this to drag him down. 

Thanks all for the well wishes. I think everyone is slightly improved today and we may yet get a reasonable Christmas day.

And that's good advice Nicole. Unfortunately it's not that easy. We had a rather heated argument last night, my brother and I. I actually thought my Dad was going to get out of bed and knock both our heads together. We were fighting because he admitted to me why he went out to that gathering: he was told that the girl he liked was there and some other guy kept texting him about all the things he was going to do to her when they hooked up while my brother stayed at home like a 'good little boy'. Goading him in other words.

I can understand him here to be honest with you all. He snapped and went out. This was his breaking point. But I was angry with him because that girl wasn't even there. Never was. Just a bunch of prats who didn't give a shit about the pandemic who thought it was hilarious to do that to my brother, knowing full well how much he liked this girl. But the reason my brother and I started fighting was that at that point he should have just left. He didn't. He bowed to their peer pressure and stayed. You know the result.

Did I overreact to this do you think? We've all been on edge not knowing what's going to happen. Sometimes you just want to scream. To want the nightmare to be over. To take it out on someone.

I'm optomistic about the vaccine rollout but they can only move so fast and the spread here is so bad now that the whole country's situation inevitably has to get worse before it gets better and I am really concerned about what further damage Christmas day mixing is going to do to those in lower tiers. I really do think we need to at this point say sod the ecomony, put the whole country on permenant lockdown and get everyone vaccinated. Then maybe we can get our ecomony revived from a position of strength.

So sorry to hear this Ashley. Unfortunately this echoes other stories I've heard. One rash decision is all it takes. 

Just remember that as angry as you all must be at your brother, that this is something that's going to weigh heavily on him and will be a crucial learning experience for him. So stray strong and try to forgive him. Family is even more important now than ever. Even when they do something stupid. 

And my thoughts are with all of you having to deal with COVID this Christmas. I've never been so grateful to live in New Zealand. So often I have cursed it for being so backward and boring and far from the rest of the world, but this year it's been such a blessing. Any minor inconvenience we have encountered is nothing compared to what the rest of you have had to endure. 

I like it.  It's great for listening with friends (time limit & experience of flipping records, choosing what to listen to next, can't skip songs like an ADHD child) and your hardware can color the tone in a way that digital has no real equivalent.  Even the blemishes and scratches sound good.

I wouldn't call it a fad, I use my dad's record player from the 70s and many many bands have been putting out new albums on vinyl consistently for over a decade now.  Most new vinyl is a heavier print so the bass can be deeper and they sound phenomenal on a nice stereo

Most current receivers don't have the required eq-balanced input for a record player though, I had to get an external preamp

n.b. I buy most of my music digitally still