As a kid and young teen I used to be the kind of smartass aspiring nerd that I assume some of you were as well and many of you encountered at some point: smart, interested in technology, cool music, and anything non-mainstream, but with less than stellar social skills, lacking the knowledge and wisdom that you get by actually doing things instead of talking about them, and with not many friends, because few people around me shared my interests.

I did have some friends in the offline world who were quite similar, but they each lived in a different town and we only saw each other a couple times per year. The upside of that was that we valued every meeting all the more, where we talked, listened to newly discovered music (this was pre-Spotify but also pre-Youtube), played video games either in splits-creen or just by taking turns in an interesting singleplayer game, rode bikes around and did lots of more or less dumb shit.

Most of us grew out of this phase and became... well, we became nerds, but ones who were more or less well-adjusted and social, with our own friend groups, girlfriends, interests and hobbies that we actually participated in and not just talked about.

Nick was less lucky. He was perhaps the most stereotypical of us all, both in the type and depth of his interests and in his inability to meaningfully participate in them or to participate in society in general, really. Looking back, many things about him make much more sense if I think of him as autistic - not something you grow out of. Perhaps a diagnosis would help him accept this and adapt, but he had a dislike of any kind of institutions and doctors specifically.

I didn't mind though. He understood some of the things I liked, much more than the average person, especially a person my age. I used to hate electronic music, and Nick was the guy who gave me a CD with some early jungle and drum'n'bass, which was my entry drug.

Of course, the file called something like "jungle <date> <author>.mp3" was actually terrible early drum'n'bass, and the file called "drum and bass mix.mp3" was actually a brilliant jungle set - I'm quite sure it was Kemistry & Storm, sounded something like this, only without the MC and even junglier.

He also introduced me to some instrumental hip-hop like DJ Krush, whose music I sometimes listen to to this day, and Art of Noise, which I'm frankly not a huge fan of these days, but it served as a great counter-argument in the early-to-mid days of online nerdom when many otherwise smart people thought that all electronic music is stupid.

Of course I gave him music that I discovered as well. And we also exchanged videogames, old DOS games, new releases, but also some great shareware and freeware games often meant for hot-seat multiplayer, with up to four kids sitting around one keyboard, which was amazing fun for many hours. Being twelve years old buys with access to a CD burner, we natually exchanged other things as well.

The interesting thing is that despite his in retrospect likely autism, he seemed quite socially resilient. When he was I think 8 years old, his parents travelled from a poor, only briefly free and democratic Czechia, to a large city in Texas for a year, where his mother was to teach at an inner city high school through an exchange programme.

That year brought a ton of interesting stories, it was a shock for all of them, but that's a different topic. He returned with drastically improved English skills, prejudice against obese people and mild racism towards black people. Hey, don't look at me, I'm just telling it how it is.

The interesting thing is that racism was very much alive and present in Czechia at that time, but not against black people. Our history is completely different in that regard, so it was very common for people to say "I hate Gypsies, but I have nothing against Black people, Black people are cool." This changed later as we basically imported American racism as a side effect of importing more and more American media, though we still neither commonly practice nor truly understand (likely applies to me as well) this kind of racism.

As we grew up and stopped meeting twice a year, for new year's eve and during summer vacation, we lost touch. The last good thing I did for him was sending him an invite to my favorite local discussion board, which is to this day the only general purpose discussion board I know of that is much better than Tildes.

I think I hadn't seen him for at least a decade when a friend of our parents', whom we also knew well, unexpectedly died. We all met at a memorial party some time after the funeral, talked and played board games. Nick was invited to play table football, but couldn't join because for some reason he was losing the ability to grip things firmly and accurately.

It was quite new, so he nervously joked about it. Some of the other people present tried to get him to a good neurologist early through their connections (and failed). It took I think about a year until he got his diagnosis: not a rare, aggressive type of multiple sclerosis, but ALS, the thing with the ice bucket challenge, the thing Stephen Hawking had. He was 32 years old.

To this day I have no idea if there's any medication that can at least slow it down, because his personality and "social resilience" meant that he rejected all institutional help. This made it quite hard for his aging parents too. He hated having his hair touched but also later couldn't really wash it or brush it himself. He hated getting help in general, so he dressed himself for as long as he could, even when it took him two hours to put on a t-shirt.

This is all irrational and stupid. It was also all granted to him untill the very end, and so untill the very end he was allowed to keep his dignity in that way.

The sad part is that I only know all of this from second-hand information. I can't say I was indifferent, but when he was diagnosed we hadn't been in any contact for a decade, we weren't friends anymore. And through all that time I have been battling a chronic illness of my own that is unlikely to kill me, but that limits my life a lot, and when it doesn't, I have so many things I want or need to do when I suddenly can. I also live on the opposite side of the country, however small it is.

That said, of course I could have messaged or visited him if I truly wanted to. By the time I thought about it, he was barely able to speak and at that point I frankly didn't have the balls to do it. Of course, he normally refused to see anyone, he did not want to be seen like that, but he did sometimes accept people he knew from childhood.

A few months ago, he started having breathing problems. It may not have been the ALS progression yet but an infection, so despite his hate of doctors and hospitals, his parents managed to convince him to get hospitalized. He was just barely able to swallow tiny bits of food at that point, so he still had something like a breakfast with his parents, very underweight but without a feeding tube.

During the night he died, aged 38. If you know about ALS, you know there is some mercy in this. Dying at home with your family is always preferable, but with ALS that commonly means gradually losing the ability to breathe and slowly suffocating.

The saddest thing about Nick is that his life was marked by unfulfilled potential. He was not very socially competent and very impractical, but also quite intelligent and undoubtedly capable... of something. But he never managed to find the something. Worked a basic tech job for which he was not overqualified exactly, but certainly sharper than the job required (though I'm not entirely sure how he felt about it). Didn't really build anything for himself. As far as I know he never was with a woman despite almost certainly wanting to. I don't think he was particularly happy with his life either. And he never got the chance to change that.

Seeing myself in the slideshow of photos from his life during the funeral only made it more apparent how important our group of friends was in his life. The funeral took place in a neighboring town because the town where he lived only has a church next to the graveyard, not a secular ceremonial building, and he wouldn't want to have his funeral in a church. We all came, his family came, and so did his work colleagues, some of whom cried as well.

After the funeral we talked and ate and drank in his parents' flat. One that they will be forced to leave soon after probably nearly 30 years, moving into a smaller one and getting rid of some of their stuff. Through a slit in the door I saw a glimpse of what I assume was furniture and/or machines designed to make care easier, obtained despite his hardheadedness.

Okay, wipe your tears.

When I was a kid, Pornhub didn't exist. At some point we got Shoutcast, online radios and TVs thanks to which you could literally watch porn in Winamp, but before that me and my classmates sometimes watched a porn VHS one of us found in their parents' bedroom, and we also swapped CDs with porn. Those were hard to come by (no, don't say it), so each was precious, and during breaks in school we would talk about who's hotter, whether Amanda or Natascha. We were probably 12 years old when this started and I think we all turned out fine despite that.

Well, the one thing I got from Nick and never returned is a CD with his handwriting saying "P.vids .mpg open". When the three videos he burned on the CD didn't fill it entirely, he didn't finalize the burning process so that more could be added later, he was practical like that.

After remembering that something like this probably exists, I went through a box of my old stuff at my parents' house and actually found it. I still own an old laptop with an optical drive, so I put the CD in, but it failed to read. I tried cleaning the laser lens with a q-tip just in case because it looked dusty, and it really worked. VLC, one of the best free applications ever, naturally came (no!!) through as well.

The "last modified" date on each of the three files said December 19th, 2003. Obviously I looked at the videos, and it turns out that we were completely normal heterosexual boys with completely normal tastes. Not surprising, but nice to have a confirmation. One of the girls had Garfield socks, something that I remembered and laughed when I saw it so many years later.

This CD truly is the only physical thing that I ever got from him, as far as I know. I mean, there may have been some small things we exchanged as kids, but those were lost to time, whereas the CD rested among CDs of 70s French avantgarde and old Manowar albums.

I really don't need to explain how sad the whole situation was. But this one stupid CD gave it a funny and honestly kind of cool twist, which also made it easier to share this whole situation with various friends of mine who never met him, and who very much appreciated the absurdity, wholesome and morbid at the same time.

So now you can too.

My son loves reading time before bed, but he’s only 3.5 so the books have mostly been picture books until now. Lately though he’s been getting more into stories with plots and an extended narrative, but entirely in the form of movies. There aren’t a lot of kid’s books to go around with the sorts of dramatic stories he likes, they’re more like “caterpillar eats food” and “train engine climbs a hill with grit and determination” type stuff. And whenever I’ve tried to have him just lay down and listen to me read a story without any pictures to stare at he has absolutely no interest. He really likes having pretty visuals to look at.

I know when I was a small child these sorts of board/picture books weren’t really a thing in India. The pre-sleep ritual was usually “storytime” instead, where my parents would tell us stories. I’m a little bit concerned that my kid has been so accustomed to always having visual cues presented to him that it’s stunting his imagination a bit, like failing to exercise his capacity to visualize ideas and concepts for himself without being anchored by some artist’s depiction.

So I’m curious to hear from other parents or caregivers/educators (@kfwyre?). Did you find there was a natural transition point between going from picture books to telling/reading stories? Was there any sort of work you had to do to enable it? Are there “exercises” I can work on to help my son exercise his imagination? I have been working with him to have him tell me stories about his day, which he does pretty well. But his stories are always quite grounded and he’s usually telling me what he’s actually done and seen. When my nephews and nieces were his age they tended to spin out a lot of random stories that pretty obviously did not happen, and I assume this is because they had more experience being told stories themselves rather than just factual reporting about the happenings around them.

The cutoff age would be different for different people. Early music shapes us. I have read that even people with dementia respond to music from their early life. I thought of a few for me, and I was curious about people here.

I'm 46 years of age. My childhood and youth and post-youth life wasn't traumatic or anything. I had an okay life. I guess I might even have had a good life. But for some reason, reminiscing about it just doesn't feel pleasant. Some folks find talking about their past highly enjoyable. So why don't I like it? Is this normal?

Through the years I have struggled with perfectionism, low self worth, and an overwhelming need to make everyone else happy at my own expense. Recently I've begun wondering if this is related more to my own personal upbringing (my mom and sister share a lot of these traits) or if it's a wider experience of being a woman in modern society.

Growing up in a world where women had successfully entered the job market, there was still an unspoken urging that I had to be better than my male peers to earn my place in the world. There still felt like there were expectations that women would follow all the rules, keep the peace, and maintain the home/workspace. Is this an off base interpretation of societal pressures, or do any of you find yourselves still struggling with some of these messages?

ETA: Also, what are some positive ways being raised as a woman has impacted you?

I have a new niece and I'm making a list of songs which we can play for her naptime when we babysit. I have some Raffi songs and my childhood lullabies (Edelweiss from my mom and Moonshadow from my dad), as well as some calm songs from my Spotify playlist.

But it made me wonder, what songs did your parents sing when you were young? Children's songs? Disney? Pop? Metallica?

I'm also interested in whether you think it's best to keep a small list and rotate through, for comfort's sake, or if it's also okay to have a wider variety of songs as lullabies.

I'm talking about silly harmless stuff like "I believed in Santa Claus till I was 13", and not deep existential stuff like "It took me till adulthood to realize that my parents were doing their best despite their their failings".

• An article on a parenting website: Guidance recommends no screen time for under-twos

• An article in Time magazine: World Health Organization Issues First-Ever Screen Time Guidelines for Young Kids. Here's What to Know

• The WHO's press release: To grow up healthy, children need to sit less and play more

I'm curious to know what you think your own parents (or the people who raised you) did right. What actions, mindsets, or philosophies did they operate by that had a positive effect on you? What techniques of theirs would you use with your own children? What important lessons did they teach you?