I remember exactly where I was: at home, on a computer, and I read "Mike Portnoy & Dream Theater - 1985-2010"
I was shocked.
Mostly because when you see dates like 1992-2008 or 1965-2005, it means someone has died so I literally thought, "Did Portnoy fucking die?!"
Obviously Mike wasn't 25 years old at the time, but I clicked on it before I had a chance to process anything else and then I saw he quit. So a shocking 5 seconds of my life turned into a slightly less shocking but very surreal day.
A day later he changed the headline so I guess I wasn't the only one to think that and one or more people probably told him, "Dude, thats what you put on a tombstone...you should probably change that"
Funny thing was, he was on the Eddie Trunk show sometime that year talking about who owns what band's names and they asked him who owns the rights to DT's name. I always thought it was owned equally by the three original members or maybe even just JP and MP but Mike just paused and said, "Well, we never had to worry about it." I thought he just didnt want to get into it but from the lawsuit that almost happened it seems like it was really just an equal share. Part of why I was so shocked is that I had wrongly assumed he owned more of the name than he did so I didn't know what it meant for Dream Theater.