delusional

Oh yes, I almost forgot to add my fuel to this fire. Real trials is done on a motorbike :op

No it wasn't. It's older than that! The Scottish Six Days first ran in 1909, so it's at least that old (the SSDT wasn't revolutionary either). Of course back then there was no marks for putting your foot down (just getting up the hills was challenge enough), but it was still trials. I guess the problem here is what you define as the inception of trials: is it the first use of modern rulesets, or the first time people competed to get over difficult terrain on bikes?

Fair enough :) As long as your's is comfortable it's not really that important. Having a correct way to do it != all other ways are wrong. It's more that the "correct" way is the safest and most versatile method. For those who are thinking about getting it done I should probably elaborate a bit more on what the correct positioning actually is: It's pretty simple, on the inside of your mouth you can feel the fat lump which is your lip, just below this where it starts to thin out is where the piercing should go. This means with a bar the ball sits comfortable and blends in with your face, with a ring it can sit snugly to your lip. It heals much easier than higher up and, most importantly, the jewellery on the inside of your mouth is in the least likely position for it to come into contact with your teeth and gums.

No it's not. They should be pierced in the same place no matter what jewellery you want in it. Labret is just another name for it (lip is slightly misleading as no piercing should ever actually go through the lip, or infact as close to it as some people seem to think). Unfortunately there are a lot of dodgy piercing places about where the people really don't know what they're doing, and this breeds quite a lot of incorrect knowledge among the general public. It's also the main cause of much of the problems people have with piercings.

:angry: The post directly above this deals with your question!

I've got a few piercings... 11 currently I think. Although I've had loads of others in the past that I've variously got bored off/given up on healing/lost etc. Currently got: labret, madonna, nostril, left ear x5, right ear x2, nipple. Previously I've also had: another in my nostril, scaffold in my ear, eyebrow, 6mm stretched ear, several random ear piercings. None of them really hurt. Well, except the scaffold, that f**king hurt. But only because that involved two opposite holes in the top of my ear, so one had to go through the flesh first and cartilage after... There are several ways of doing stretched ears, unless you really like scalpelling holes in your lobe though the easiest is to get it pierced first (properly, with a needle), wait until it heals and then buy a horn. A horn is basically a piece of shaped plastic that is pointed at one end and flares wide at the other. Essentially you slowly force this through your ear a little at a time over a period of several weeks until the hole in your ear is as big as you want it (it's important to do it slowly otherwise you could risk splitting your ear lobe). It's kind of sore, but by far the easiest way of doing it. If you ever want to close it up again you don't want to stretch it much past 6mm though - they can just keep getting bigger if you go much further than that. For the labret piercing, you can get them done with a ring quite safely (I did with mine) but I wouldn't reccommend it. The problem with a ring is that it gets in the way and you're always knocking it, which is really uncomfortable when it's healing. Best to go with a bar first and put a ring in when it's healed (and you're a bit more used to it).

A very scaled down (from 1600x1200) and quality reduced pic of my home desktop: My work desktop is pretty much the same, except the background's plain black and there's generally a lot more stuff going on.

Both Gaim and Trillian are free and ad-free. Gaim is OSS, so you absolutely do what you want with it (Y)

IMO MSN's default client sucks horribly (as does pretty much all other software written by Microsoft and most default chat clients). If you use MSN (or any other messaging protocol) then I reccomend either using Gaim or Trillian. The former is what I use, is available for *nix and win32, does nearly every messaging protocol under the sun and has a whole slew of really nice features (tabbed chat windows being the most useful). It's primarily a *nix app, but I think it's just as stable for Windows these days. Trillian is a windows only app (bleh), probably the most used multi-protocol chat client around. Supports all the major protocols, has lots of lots of skins available for eye-candy whores and I think has a few pretty tasty features as well (although no tabbed chat windows!).