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How did you get into Prog? |
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RyanElliott 
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Joined: November 14 2011 Location: Cardiff Status: Offline Points: 113 |
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 Posted: April 20 2020 at 09:08 |
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I was born in 1992 and discovered progressive rock bands when I was about 8 years old.
The crazy thing besides being totally in the wrong generation of this movement is that my Mother introduced me to the music and as we know, this genre is heavily dominated by a male audience. I had been given one of the portable CD players and the first CD I ever tried it with was 'Presto' by Rush. The start of that song has light percussion followed by a really loud riff so it scared the bejeezus out of me.  My mum had started buying CD versions of old vinyl records she grew up with including mainly Rush and Genesis so they were the two of the bands I listened to growing up in school. So whilst everyone was listening to the boy and girl bands that dominated the 2000s, I was getting lost in crazy concept albums like 'A farewell to kings' and 'Selling England by the Pound' which made me come across as very weird to my school peers. By the time I got to high school, I then discovered the next generation of progressive bands like Dream Theater, Tool and Porcupine Tree, continuing down my road of highly idiosyncratic musical taste and was glad to finally meet people my age at university who shared a similar love of this kind of music. I am very grateful to my mother for introducing me to all the music.
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progaardvark
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Crossover/Symphonic/RPI Teams Joined: June 14 2007 Location: Sea of Peas Status: Offline Points: 50929 |
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Posted: April 20 2020 at 09:48 |
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I believe it was in 1974 or 1975. Dad put Dark Side of the Moon on the record player. Wow, heartbeats. Then the helicopters from "On the Run." This is clearly where it started. My Dad also listened to the Moody Blues This Is The Moody Blues, and ELO's Olé ELO and A New World Record on a regular basis. I later discovered he also had ELO's On The Third Day and Out of the Blue and Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here and Animals albums in his collection. My Uncle Eddie loaned my Dad an 8-track of Yes' Yessongs, which I remember listening to sometime in the late 1970s during a car ride.
1980s brought an interest in listening to the radio. Back then it was WMMR and WYSP in Philadelphia, both classic rock stations. They had a fair amount of prog on both of them, though they never used the term "prog." These were the two stations that introduced me to Yes, Genesis, ELP, Rush, Jethro Tull, and a host of other bands that bordered prog. Generally I started collecting vinyl by acquiring the most recent albums by these bands and then actively seeking the rest of their discographies going backwards. I had four record stores to go to back then in my teen years while in high school. Two of them were chain stores: Wall to Wall Sound and Sam Goody. The other two were used stores of which I can't recall their names anymore. Both used stores had a decent number of live bootlegs and one of them was a 2 1/2 mile walk which I made every Saturday after picking up my weekly earnings from the supermarket I worked in. Off to college, and little time to pursue such frivolous fancies (and not enough funds either). By this time I was buying cassettes because vinyl had practically disappeared by 1990. I do recall discovering the newsgroup rec.music.progressive around this time, though I didn't read that much and never contributed. After graduating and finally finding employment, I now had some spare cash to check out stores. Mostly kept buying the new releases from the dinosaurs (though they were far removed from prog by this point) and finally transitioned to CDs. I credit Magna Carta Records as the source that brought me back into the prog world, after a brief foray into electronic music and gothic rock. Those tribute albums they released in the early 1990s introduced me to new bands I had never heard of before (Cairo, Magellan, Enchant, Shadow Gallery). From there, it led to the GEPR, then Spock's Beard and The Flower Kings, to trips to Record Connection in Ephrata (which still exists), Black Planet and the HMV on Yonge St. in Toronto, Outer Music in Manhattan, and eventually to Prog Archives.
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i'm shopping for a new oil-cured sinus bag that's a happy bag of lettuce this car smells like cartilage nothing beats a good video about fractions |
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AFlowerKingCrimson
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Joined: October 02 2016 Location: Philly burbs Status: Offline Points: 18244 |
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Posted: April 20 2020 at 14:56 |
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1980s brought an interest in listening to the radio. Back then it was WMMR and WYSP in Philadelphia, both classic rock stations. They had a fair amount of prog on both of them, though they never used the term "prog." These were the two stations that introduced me to Yes, Genesis, ELP, Rush, Jethro Tull, and a host of other bands that bordered prog.
^Yeah, WMMR and WYSP like you said played all those bands. I even heard King Crimson on wmmr occasionally. I lived in both the NY and Philly area during the 80's but the Philly area was a bit better for prog on the radio although WNEW in NY probably wasn't too far behind. On wmmr you had for headphones only which would play stuff that sounded good on headphones. While a good chunk of it was prog they didn't call it that like you said. They played Pink Floyd, Yes, Alan Parsons Project, Supertramp, Moody Blues, Robin Trower and on and on. Aside from for headphones only it wasn't too uncommon to hear the lesser known Yes songs(going for the one, siberian khatru, perpetual change, etc)as well as Pink Floyd's "echoes." I even remember hearing King Crimson on there a few times(epitaph and the title track to "court"). WYSP(which is now a sports station)had Ed Sciaky's progressive radio show. I remember this in the late 80's but it might have been around earlier. The focus was on what he called "the progressive era" which meant anything from the late sixties to the late seventies or so. They didn't play any current prog music but then again there wasn't much that surfaced(above the underground)at that time anyway. This show was the first time I ever heard the band Crack the Sky. This was in early 1989. I remember going to the record store to buy their latest album("from the greenhouse")but they only had it on vinyl and I wanted the cd so I had to order it on cd. They called me a week later or so and I picked it up. I moved to NY shortly after and remember I had the crack the sky on one side of a tape and Gentle Giant's "octopus" on the other. My prog days were well under way. Anyway, I remember taping stuff off that show and had interviews with Jon Anderson, Steve Howe and stuff from Renaissance. I don't remember what else though.
Edited by AFlowerKingCrimson - April 20 2020 at 14:59 |
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progaardvark
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Crossover/Symphonic/RPI Teams Joined: June 14 2007 Location: Sea of Peas Status: Offline Points: 50929 |
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Posted: April 21 2020 at 10:14 |
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^I recall one of those two stations used to play entire albums on either Saturday or Sunday night. I think they did four of them, one after the other. I must've missed the progressive radio show. By the late 1980s I was in college and didn't have as much time to listen to the radio. I remember WMMR used to do a top 500 songs that we could vote on (though I never did) and broadcast them over the Memorial Day weekend. Many prog songs made the list, so Philly did have some serious prog credentials back in the day. I remember the #1 spot typically ended up being between Led Zep's Stairway to Heaven and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird, though one year it was Genesis' Turn It On Again that made the top spot. Usually The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway title track and Yes' Roundabout made it into the top 10.
There was another radio station in the mid-1980s that used to have a show late at night that played electronic music, like Tangerine Dream and stuff similar to that, often bordering on new age music. I remember listening to it through the summer when I could stay up later. Unfortunately I can't recall the station name. I left Philadelphia in 1989 when I had to complete my studies at Penn State's main campus. I haven't been there in a couple of years. Most of my trips to Philly over the last decade have been for genealogy trips to cemeteries. Almost all of my ancestors at one time or another came through Philadelphia, so a lot of them are buried in and around the city.
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i'm shopping for a new oil-cured sinus bag that's a happy bag of lettuce this car smells like cartilage nothing beats a good video about fractions |
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AFlowerKingCrimson
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Joined: October 02 2016 Location: Philly burbs Status: Offline Points: 18244 |
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Posted: April 24 2020 at 14:34 |
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^You might be thinking of stars end on wxpn. That is an independent public radio station that typically mostly plays singer songwriter, modern folk and alternative and indie rock with some other things sprinkled in. Stars End plays electronic music(mostly Berlin school sounding stuff)and comes on at one and goes to around 6 am or so. I used to listen to it but it's too late for me now. There's also a show called echoes that plays mostly ambient kind of stuff but I don't really listen to that anymore either. At one point several years ago WXPN had a prog marathon that lasted a few years but it was pretty much all seventies stuff(I guess they never got the memo that prog never really died and is still around). They stopped doing it anyway maybe because not enough people were into it. I wouldn't have minded if it continued as long as they got into more recent stuff but since that wasn't the case it's just as well that they stopped doing it imo. The guy who did it was very knowledgable about vintage prog(even pretty obscure stuff)but I don't know how much he knew about more recent prog. Oh well.
As for the whole album thing I'm not sure. That might have been WMMR. Neither station really went that deep into prog(except maybe the Ed Sciaky show)but they still played a lot more than you will typically here these days. The only exception I can think of recently is on the classic rock station wmgk which had a free Yes ticket give away one weekend one year and so called it their prog rock weekend(that was in maybe 2017 or so) where they played one or two prog songs at the top of each hour. Judging by the facebook page there wasn't really all that much interest in it. I think most people who typically listen to just classic rock don't care much about prog or just don't understand it. Oh well. I did hear them play "21st century schizoid man" on it though(I don't remember what else) so that was kind of cool. I take it you don't live in the Philly area anymore?
Edited by AFlowerKingCrimson - April 24 2020 at 14:40 |
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progaardvark
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Crossover/Symphonic/RPI Teams Joined: June 14 2007 Location: Sea of Peas Status: Offline Points: 50929 |
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Posted: April 24 2020 at 20:59 |
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^Yes, Stars End was it. Thanks for jogging my memory.
 I left Philly in 1989. I only visited to see relatives, but almost all of them are either gone or moved out themselves. Now it's the occasional cemetery trip for genealogy.
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i'm shopping for a new oil-cured sinus bag that's a happy bag of lettuce this car smells like cartilage nothing beats a good video about fractions |
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AFlowerKingCrimson
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Joined: October 02 2016 Location: Philly burbs Status: Offline Points: 18244 |
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Posted: April 24 2020 at 21:30 |
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Maybe not the appropriate place to ask this but just out of curiosity where do you live now(what state or country)?
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Frenetic Zetetic
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Joined: December 09 2017 Location: Now Status: Offline Points: 9233 |
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Posted: April 25 2020 at 00:38 |
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Good to see another "younger" person on PA! I'm 1988!
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"I am so prog, I listen to concept albums on shuffle." -KMac2021 |
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progaardvark
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Posted: April 26 2020 at 14:30 |
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I'm not that far from Philly. I live outside of a little town called Bellefonte, in central Pa.
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i'm shopping for a new oil-cured sinus bag that's a happy bag of lettuce this car smells like cartilage nothing beats a good video about fractions |
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AFlowerKingCrimson
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Joined: October 02 2016 Location: Philly burbs Status: Offline Points: 18244 |
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Posted: April 26 2020 at 14:44 |
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Oh ok. I know a guy(fb friend in fact) who is a teacher at State College(and lives around there too). I would run into him at Rosfest(when it was still in Gettysburg). However, he was lucky because his drive was probably at least 50 percent less than mine was(I'm in lower Bucks just outside Philly).
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Blacksword
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Joined: June 22 2004 Location: England Status: Offline Points: 16130 |
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Posted: April 27 2020 at 01:56 |
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I guess you could say I liked prog rock before knowing what it was.
Aged 10, I first heard Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. This gave me an appetite for stories put to music (preferably rock music), about the same time I became aware of The Buggles, and liked that mix of guitar and synth, and I'm sure had someone played me Drama at that time, I would have loved it. Then I got into heavy metal, aged 12. Skip forward to age 15, I first heard Marillion and a friend played me Exit..Stage Left by Rush, AND I heard Dance on a Volcano by Genesis on a late night radio rock show, all in the space of two weeks or so. That was it, hooked, no looking back. |
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Ultimately bored by endless ecstasy!
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superQuizzie
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Joined: May 10 2018 Location: Washington Status: Offline Points: 19 |
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Posted: April 27 2020 at 23:02 |
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I was in highschool marching band, and one of the songs we played was Karn Evil 9 1st Impression part 2. It was well known to be the hardest song we had. We were going to play it for halftime for one of the football games, so the week before I decided to listen to the original song to get used to the song, and see if I could play it in a way that made it more authentic. I hadn't a clue what I was getting into...
I saw that the youtube video for Karn Evil 9 (I didn't know it was just 1st Impression part 2 yet) was 30 minutes long and I was utterly confused! I figured, whatever I have plenty of time. I decided to listen to it, and 30 minutes flew by rather quickly, and I was really puzzled. I didn't recall any of the song we were playing in class in the song I just listened to! I also didn't really like it a whole lot. I thought it was nonsense. I decided to give it another play, and I started to recognize it a bit better. I also liked it a bit better. Throughout the week I grew to LOVE Karn Evil 9, and I was able to hum the first 12 minutes from memory. Then a bunch of months went by, and I was still listening to Karn Evil 9 almost on a daily basis, and then I saw on the youtube recommendations a song called Tarkus also by ELP. I decided to give it a listen, and I didn't really like it. It was even more nonsensical than Karn Evil 9. But again, I decided to give it another shot, and then another repeat, another loop, and before I knew it I utterly loved Tarkus too! After that I would listen to most all ELP discography, and I liked most of it a lot! I heard that bands like Yes, and Pink Floyd were regarded as better prog bands than ELP, but I was so narrow minded that I refused to listen to any other Prog because I liked ELP so much that I didn't want to change my mind on that. By the time I graduated high school I listened to so much ELP that I was starting to grow tired of prog. I was working at a carwash one afternoon during the summer, and I heard Roundabout on the speaker (I didn't know it was roundabout at the time). At the very beginning of the song I recognized it as "From the Beginning" by ELP since the guitar bit is the same. But then I was very disappointed to hear that it wasn't one of my favorite ELP songs. Then I heard the next bit after that which I recognized as the: To be continued meme. I was astonished! So I went home afterwards and listened to Roundabout, and I loved it immediately. I know that I betrayed my promise to ELP, but at that point, I had already heard all of ELP. That's where I started listening to Yes, and I recognized Yes from Owner of a lonely heart (I was and still am a pretty big 80's pop/rock fan). From listening to most of Yes, I branched out to a couple of different bands such as King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, Camel, and a small amount of Genesis (I don't particularly like Peter Gabriel's voice). That's where I really grew to like Prog as a larger genre, and not just ELP. Also in regards to my last sentence there, anyone want to share with me the best examples of Peter Gabriel's voice and explain why he's a good singer? I just don't get it, and apparently he's regarded as the best or at least way up there as far as prog singers go.
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LAM-SGC
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Joined: December 26 2018 Location: se Status: Offline Points: 1544 |
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Posted: April 28 2020 at 06:30 |
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How did I get into prog? Like many other people, through the front door marked Dark Side of the Moon.
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progaardvark
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Posted: April 28 2020 at 21:15 |
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Yes, Gettysburg isn't too bad a drive from here. The slowest part is through Camp Hill on Route 15. I never had a chance to go to Rosfest. By the time I found out when it was, it was either sold out or I had a prior commitment. It's been a long time since I was in Bucks County. I have an uncle that lives near Doylestown.
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i'm shopping for a new oil-cured sinus bag that's a happy bag of lettuce this car smells like cartilage nothing beats a good video about fractions |
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AFlowerKingCrimson
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Joined: October 02 2016 Location: Philly burbs Status: Offline Points: 18244 |
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Posted: April 30 2020 at 09:04 |
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I actually lived in Doylestown at different times when I was younger(much younger). It's a nice town. There's actually a really good record store there called Siren Records. It's one of the few places in the area(another is Positively Records near where I live now)that sells vinyl and cds.
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chameleonday
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Joined: April 25 2016 Location: Ohio Status: Offline Points: 4 |
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Posted: June 03 2020 at 14:45 |
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MACHINA / The Machines Of God: Glass And The Ghost Children 9:56 |
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Tapfret
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Honorary Collaborator / Retired Admin Joined: August 12 2007 Location: Bryant, Wa Status: Offline Points: 8581 |
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Posted: June 03 2020 at 15:40 |
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I don't know that I could ever be described as "getting into prog". Probably the best way to describe it is a sort of musical Stockholm Syndrome.
I have it more or less written in my outdated bio.
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Psychedelic Paul
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Joined: September 16 2019 Location: Nottingham, U.K Status: Online Points: 39915 |
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Posted: June 03 2020 at 15:58 |
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The first prog album I ever bought was Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells in 1973, although I didn't recognise it as being prog at the time. I just knew it was a great album.
I remember Camel and Renaissance as being the first two bands that really introduced me to prog. I used to buy their albums as soon as they arrived in the record stores without even needing to hear the album first. It wasn't until going online for the first time in 2010 that I heard Caravan and Canterbury Scene music for the first time though, as well as discovering 1001 other artists and bands I'd never heard of before.
Edited by Psychedelic Paul - June 03 2020 at 15:59 |
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The Dark Elf
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VIP Member Joined: February 01 2011 Location: Michigan Status: Offline Points: 13049 |
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Posted: June 03 2020 at 16:27 |
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One doesn't get into prog; rather, prog gets into you. It's sort of like a virus, except for the vomiting. Some prog actually lasts longer than a virus.
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...a vigorous circular motion hitherto unknown to the people of this area, but destined
to take the place of the mud shark in your mythology... |
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Snicolette
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Joined: November 02 2018 Location: OR Status: Offline Points: 6039 |
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Posted: June 03 2020 at 16:29 |
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"Into every rain, a little life must fall." ~Tom Rapp
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progaardvark wrote: