I met Davin a number of years ago in normal time, but long, long ago in the speedy and ADD-riddled "rave-time". It was a tumultuous time, the late 90s. I was phasing out any possibility of going to normal nightclubs playing top 40 music, and spending more and more of my weekends at the electronic music bars - first Rumors, then the Limit, then back at Rumors which had become Hush. Actually, Hush didn't come into existance until after 2000, but that's hardly an issue here.

It was somwhere in June, and somewhere in Duncan, and I was at my very first party. To this day, I have no idea what it was called or who was playing. All I know was that it was near the end of June and Forrestry Pools. My first party was amazing - the music, the people, the outdoors. It grabbed me, spun me round, and thrust me headlong into a life I had never dreamed.

After that first party came another and another. Soon it was September, and I was searching for something I could do to contribute to this new community with which I was already in love. It struck me as I searched for websites with party info on them that though there were probably 4 at the time, none were totally up to date. I decided that as I was so web-oriented myself, that I would take it upon myself to start my own site, with a cool design and located on a good URL - instead of the geocities-type things I had mostly seen. Further, I would commit myself to staying on top of the flyers located in certain stores, and ensure that the site was always populated with the freshest info.

I put the word out at a couple parties, and soon I felt the first twinges of success - a few people were starting to visit. I even convinced a friend who threw some pretty famous house parties to put my website address on one of his flyers. After that, I had a regular little following.

It was around that time that I received my first email from Davin. Davin's was one of the sites which I had dismissed for being too outdated, and had mentioned as much in one of the first news postings on my site. Davin had read the news and felt the jab as unfair, since he had previously been very diligent at updating his site, and had unavoidably been unable to update his site when I was looking. I never meant to arouse anyone's ire, so asked to meet up for coffee to discuss our differences.

Once we met, however, our differences seemed few and we liked each other at once. We left that initial coffee with unity of direction and purpose. We would work together to bring the island the best damned underground party website ever!

So now it's almost 5 years later and things are pretty amazing. Rave Victoria has been thriving for that long, and though there have been a few little ups and downs, we currently run as an electronic music community website, and run about half a million page views a month. The core team has had to expand from just Davin and me, just to be able to keep on top of everything.

Through all of this, i feel Davin and I have not really seen enough of each other. Sure, I was in Seattle for 2 years, and we saw each other a fair bit when I was back on weekends, but I've been back for 2 years now, and since we don't hit up parties quite as often as we once did, we aren't seeing the most that we possibly could.

I keep saying to myself that Davin and I need to hang out more, but it just never seems to happen. Perhaps now that he has a dedicated post in my blog, things will get better. I wonder what Davin's doing tonight? I have a couple things I'd like to chat with him about. One of them I mentioned very surreptitiously in a previous entry, and Davin's blog that sparked this entry reminded me of it.