Author: Tim Froehlich

It Won’t Be The Same (O.o)

I bring to you the fabled Colorado post, minus one picture (which happened to be the one I looked forward to seeing full-size the most) which my dad deleted. This is what I get for letting my dad touch that camera. *grumble* All my mom and dad’s pictures turned out like crap – they’re barely worth putting up. It ticks me off a lot – the scenery is completely ruined by a crap disposable camera and poor photography skills. *more complaining*

We left Sunday, landed in Denver about dusk, picked Christopher up from Clair’s (cousin’s widow, for those who forgot). We drove on over to the Johnson’s, which was a two hour drive with 20 lbs of luggage on my lap. It’d been years since the 5 of us had been in the same car, so this was something to be savored, in that bitter kind of way. We got there about 1 AM, greeted by the Weimeraner known as Tenzing (after the mountain climber).

Entrance:

Driveway (that’s our rental in there):

Tenzing (poor picture, apologies):

We slept, and spent Monday adjusting to the elevation of 10, 800 ft.. Christopher ran out and bought a Gamecube on a whim, and rented Mario Kart, which supplied Jonothan and I some amusement. He had a Gamecube, but it was stolen a little while back. Poor Christopher has a hard history with robbery – all his possessions were stolen from a storage facility when he was 18 and had just joined the Army (that was a lot of stuff). Not too long ago his laptop and other major appliances were stolen.

Yes, we woke up to this view every morning:

We stayed in the bottom portion of their house. Their house by the way, is custom, completely wood, and disgustingly nice. Not rich kind of nice, but non-standard kind of nice. Retirement kind of nice. The bottom portion has two bathrooms, two bedrooms, a den (with TV, VCR, DVD).

The downstairs main area:

The upper portion is wide, lots of windows, and shockingly bright in the morning. I took most of the pictures around dusk, so it’s not bright, as the mountain blocks the sun.

The living room (there’s a huge wall of windows to the right (you can see them on the east side picture), but for obvious reasons I can’t take a picture of that):

The kitchen (facing out the south side):

The entry (facing out the north/west side, with my back to the windows):

The outside is very much like a log cabin. Pictures tell more than words, though.

The north side (the outside pictures are going in something of a circle, you should be able to get something of an idea of what the outside looks like if you follow it):

The east side (this ones a jump, sorry):

The south side (you can see the porch that’s in the east side picture on the right, for reference):

I won’t supply many skiing pictures, simply because it’s a lot of work for something that isn’t going to tell much. So, skiing. We skiied Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I didn’t actually ski though. Christopher, Jonothan, and I all snowboarded for our first time on Tuesday, and stuck with it the entire time. It really hurt the first day – you fall down a lot, it sucks. You run out of breath so fast at 11,000+ feet, we were sweating up a storm that first day.

Tuesday was Copper, which is the biggest resort in the vicinity of 1.5 hours. It has about 125 trails, a dozen or so lifts (speed lifts, at that. if you didn’t hear this last year, they’re lifts that go about 3 times as fast as normal lifts. they detach onto an alternate rail at mount and dismount, which goes about half as a fast as normal lifts. the convenience of this is indescribable). We took a lesson that day (and only that day) to make sure we got the basic techniques and stuff. The lessons were so much better there – it’s amazing. Greek Peak’s instructors do this “do this, no you’re not doing it, you have to do this” kind of thing. Our instructor, Jeff, gave us all kinds of tips for how to do all the stuff, it was really nice. We found that when we applied the rules he taught us, everything worked, it was amazing. We just did the bunny hill that first day – and that was hard. It hurt. It hurt bad. When the lesson was over I decided to go attempt a green, and wow was that a mistake. Apparantly Copper stops grooming about mid-season, so on the mildly steep parts of greens, there are moguls. Understand, moguls are completely different on a snowboard. If you don’t know what you’re doing (me), you can’t do crap, whereas on skis you can at least run over the moguls and ruin them. I fell about 30 times on the run, and I wore myself out badly pushing myself across the straits. I was about ready to go back to skiing the next day, but some encouragement from Brian and the brothers kept me at it.

Wednesday we went to Cooper – the smallest resort, but the highest at 13,000 feet. Towards Cooper is about the size of Greek Peak in terms of amount of lifts and runs, and even layout. The runs are still about twice as long, though. I forgot to mention – the runs at Copper are generally half a mile to three-fourths. The green path I took made for a 20-minute run, with a 4-5 minute lift ride. That’s about four to five times as long as Greek Peak’s. And about half to a quarter the lift ride. Amazing, yes? By the end of the day we braved a mild blue. Two days, and a mild blue!

Thursday we went back to Copper to meet up with Clair. We spent half the day floundering on these really bad greens – most greens had “traverse” zones, where snowboarders have to detach their back foot and push for a few hundred yards. This is really tiring, and just frustrating. We managed to get some advice from some seasoned Copper-goers and took a few nice and steep blues, which really made up for the first half of the day. The last run, though, we went to the top to try another blue to discover that it’s really, really steep and had moguls. We actually did ok, but we split when it came to a fork in the path. I went down first, and stopped at the fork. It forked between a blue and a black. The plan was to take the blue, but Jonothan and Christopher missed the blue and went down the black. Jonothan did ok, but Christopher wasn’t feeling too hot and just detached and walked back. Three days, and harder blues!

Copper, at the top (crappy camera):

Friday was Monarch, the middle-range between Copper and Cooper, but all the trails are of far greater difficulty. This is by far the best resort, IMO. It has a lot of unmarked forest trails which are really fun and challenging, they all have huge jumps, lots of powder, huge moguls, all created by skiiers. We did one trail, called “Turbo” 6 times. It’s about the equivelant of Olympian on Greek Peak, the hardest black on the mountain, and yet it’s blue. The first four times were pretty tough, we didn’t know how to handle the moguls. By the 5th and 6th time, we had it down to a science of jumping and braking, it was far more dynamic than it is on skis. FOUR days, very steep blues with a lot of moguls!

Snowboarding has it’s perks, but I think I’ll stick with skiing. Skiing has a lot of conveniences, like poles, seperated feet, and is generally more mobile. Also, you can’t really do back-trail snowboarding around here, as you’d have to push yourself everywhere. Anyway. Monarch had a few ok pictures. There was a professional photographer at the top taking pictures, so one is good.

That was our last day of skiing. Saturday was nothing, I just ran around taking pictures and such. There are a few left of views of the scenery. These are the good ones.

This is of Buena Vista, from the windows:

Night time:

View to the west:

View to the north:

We packed up and cleaned the rooms Saturday too. I ended up vacuuming with a vacuum older than my parents. So old, there was no date on it, anywhere. I took a picture to immortalize this antiquity.

The trip wasn’t just fun, though. It was (and this is said at the risk of sounding corny) a really good family bonding experience. Every time I spend time with my brothers, I realize how much alike we really are. It helps that I’m old enough to really have fun with them now, and not constantly be left behind. Our family sat down for about 3 hours just talking about problems we were facing and prayer requests, it was nice like that. It’s a little weird looking past the outside stuff that bothers me about the family and seeing what’s really worth looking at. It wasn’t gooey, soft, and pretty, but was definately heart warming. Anyways.

And a poorly taken picture of our final feast:

[2012 edit: lost forever]

We left Sunday morning to Denver airport, sent Christopher off to San Antonio, and moved on to Denver. We checked in at the hotel and just…sat, basically. We didn’t do anything until we saw Tim and Joyce Hume (this is the guy I’m named after, remember). It was really good to see them back together (they’d been seperated), and with a child no less. I really enjoy my time with Tim, he’s an awesome one. No pictures, for some reason. Monday was pretty boring, we just kinda sat around, had dinner with Clair, and that was it. We left Tuesday morning, and got back to Ithaca at 12:00 AM Wednesday. They lost Mom’s and Jonothan’s luggage though (after the flight was delayed, too), so we didn’t get home till 1:30 AM. For obvious reasons I didn’t go to school, and that was my trip. Exciting, to be sure.

Death’s Sharpies (^^)

How geek is that – I almost had a semicolon at the end of the tital. This is here to inform you that no, I am not dead, and a post will come soon. Two things will happen before I do this: Jonothan will leave for Iraq (thursday) and I will get the camera from my dad. Apparantly the pictures I took came out spectacularly (I’ve grown fond of taking digital pictures), so that would be rather nice. No later than Friday – I promise.

Very quick details – I got back wednesday morning, did not go to school that day, Paul spent the night Friday, got some time in with Daniel Saturday evening, went to Greg’s for dinner yesterday, lot’s of staying after school working, grades are horrid.

Things will get finished on this blog over the weekend, I promise, but there has been a lot of stuff happening. I’m actually busy, so NYAH!

While I’m Gone…(O.o)

I’m headed to Colorado tomorrow, I’ll be back Tuesday (not next Tuesday) or Wednesday. I didn’t get to all the site improvements I’d hoped to yesterday, and I probably won’t get to them today. I’ll conduct a list of all I did for you, not that you care. 😛

  • Aligned top sidebar border and top post border
  • Made the main column wider.
  • Moved main column higher
  • Divided sidebar into 3 sections.
  • Added Profile section to sidebar.
  • Removed that dumb blogger image at the bottom.
  • Changed title from “Of Tim” to “And The Lack Thereof”.
  • Made IE generally happier.

I also have a list of things I’m planning on doing in the future! Again, not that you care, but…

  • Get the profile area done.
  • Clean up my code a little more, it’s good as is but could be better.
  • Find a new place to put the comments. I’ve found that the current place it out of the way, and easy to miss.
  • Improve the color I have set for the post dates and blog title.
  • Test out some different border styles.
  • Improve for IE, again.
  • Get a better statcounter.

And a little bit further in the future, once I’ve learned PHP and javascript…

  • Set up a server and host the blog on it.
  • Remove the archive.
  • Bring back the multiple style sheet interface (the red, green, and blue templates)
  • Make an option for automatically emailing new posts to you.

I’ve got a lot of hope for this thing, I’ve been really enjoying slowly improving it throughout time. I’m glad to see how much I’ve improved this thing. It looked pretty darn horrid back in the day.

Anyways, I have some packing, and some burning to do. I need some music for the trip, and I don’t have a MP3 CD player (I really need one), so I have to convert everything to .wav and burn it, which just isn’t cool. Oh well. While I’m gone, go check out Aireline, Built to Spill, Muse, and Sunny Day Real Estate. Good stuff. Off I go to pack.

All That and a Bag of Chips! (O.o)

This week would not end. I beat it with sticks, clubs, pencils, and shoelaces, but it would not relent. I’ve had about 25 less hours of sleep than I need this week, and it’s been so very rough. The week in totality has sucked – at least three teachers are highly displeased with me, my grades have been awful (it’s weird, I have like an A+ in global and english, but i doubt i’m even passing in chem and math), and I’ve just been perpetually tired. I can say this for a fact: I have never experienced a week this long.

Tuesday was the Bible Study, which again failed to meet muster. I’ve promised Daniel I’ll go another time before I give up on it, so we shall see how things go in March. Wednesday was…nothing. Thursday was ski club, fun stuff, except for some damage I did to my trachea. I was attempting to grab Colette’s poles using my poles, and I pushed down a little hard and one of my poles stuck in the ground, and before I knew it I had stopped myself going rather fast by having a pole jammed into my throat. That hurt. Of course, in my delerium, I fell over standing up once I got to the bottom. Today was Ben’s birthday (technically tomorrow, but today was more convenient). We went to his house and laughed at Sho’s chick flick, The Notebook. The name is bad enough, but the movie was worse. This was either a case of major plot revision at the last minute, awful editing, or just retarded plot transition. Let me describe the general mood of this story.

Ben: “Something needs to explode.”
Tim: “Why hasn’t anyone died yet?”
Sho: “…”

[queue main character lamenting the absence of his girlfriend]
Narrator: After she moved, he sent a letter to her every day. After one year with no response, he gave up, and became an ensign.
[queue main character running across a battle field with lots of explosions for 10 seconds, and finds his best friend dead. without providing any emotional response and experiencing no emotional change, he returns home, his dad gives him a lot of money, dies, and he begins building a house]

This is in the space of 1 minute, and I am not exaggerating. Even though it was bad, it was most hilarious to mock. I call that a happy birthday.

As for the rest of today, it’s been really, really nice. Not having school is just so delightful, I cannot express the emotion therein. I was watching Jonothan play Halo 2 (he played it for about 18 hours straight yesterday, he couldn’t sleep, so he just played), and he’s improved a lot. If you know my brother, he’s not a real gaming kind of guy, and we’ve never really shared a joy in playing these things, so it’s cool to see him get excited at learning and getting better at a game I really enjoy. We were also playing LotR Trivial Pursuit, while watching the LotR: Fellowship EE, with my dad, too. I haven’t played a board game with my dad in….ages. The last time we did was at least 4 years ago, so that was really nice. My dad went to bed, so Jonothan and I are in the midst of a game of Monopoly (we’re taking a break at the moment).

So, at 4:31 in the morning, Jonothan owned me in Monopoly. Took us three hours. Off to sleep I go.

Justice, the Product of Perspective (O.o)

An arguable statement, but at least partially true in a non-religious context. My recent days have been overly sober, not as spontaneous or as wantonly enjoyable as I normally keep them. Jonothan’s time here has been a reality check for me – recently, I’d begun reducing life to simple equations, which, if worked, Einstein would have found them already. Jonothan told me how the big things right now are really actually small – no matter how mature or how smart you handle matters or approach them. A quick glance at my past and those of my friends has proven his point. I’ve been struggling with this in how I treat these seemingly big matters – should I treat them with any less delicacy or ferocity? My postulate: no. They’re big matters now because there are no matters bigger than those I’m facing – you take things in proportion.

With this in mind, I was blown away when Rachel called Jonothan on his cell, and he picked up. When he was done with a short conversation with her, I asked him why he picked up. His reply: “We’re adults.”. You have no idea how much that scares me – I’m afraid to pick up the phone when my lawn mowing customers are calling to get me to mow their lawn one more time. I guess this is where that proportion thing comes in.

What do you do, though, when something out of proportion enters in the fray? Amanda told me about a friend of hers, who’s being abused, but nothing can be done because he’s about to turn 18, and his parents are habitual liars. It’s times like that I wonder “where’s the justice? no, really, where’d it go?”. When all I can do is pray for him, I’m reminded that God does have a plan here, and that plan may not include me saving the day. A frustrating concept, to be sure.

Saturday night Daniel came over and we watched the rest of Fullmetal, talked, etc.. Sunday was normal, Benjamin came over, we played around in GIMP (I made a few that I found particularly cool – 1, 2, and 3). Today, I stayed home sick (I do have that flu, you kn0w). I woke up to Jonothan handing me a plate of bacon and an egg + cheese + english muffin thing (they’d call them egg McMuffin’s at McDonald’s, but I dunno what they’re actually called).

Beyond that, my musical tastes have been expanded a little bit – I’ve grown keen on two bands recently. Aireline and Muse (I doubt anyone’s heard of the former, but Paul’s heard of Muse, so maybe someone else has heard of it). In any case, I still like the techno, I just like some other stuff too. *cough*

A Darker Side of the Moon (-.-)

Jonothan got here last night, hearing him detail all that’s happened wasn’t exactly uplifting. The thing I didn’t realize is that there’s a reason he’s going to Iraq. He moved to North Carolina to be with Rachel. He wouldn’t be going otherwise. He ended up with nothing, and then some. We laughed at some of the really stupid stuff about playing games online (I’ll explain later, Daniel), though, which was kind of nice. One of the recurring themes that came up while talking to him which kind of dragged my mood down was how all of high school is just a trifle, relationships end up becoming nothing. This wasn’t new information, but being told that the vast majority of those I know, unless they’re really true friends, are just going to fade away once high school is over. Hopefully this really…depressed and nasty feeling will go away, I hate it, I want it gone. It sort of feels like an intruder, it broke in during the night and won’t leave. I guess the seed was planted while talking to a friend of mine (who’s now 24 or 25) a few weeks ago. I think I may spend too much time talking to those who’ve been through high school.

Friday was spent at Amy’s house (that was just a little weird, 5 girls, one guy) for a few hours after waiting for Gwen to finish her Spanish test. I got to meet her teacher, Mrs. Craig, whom I must admit was a very cool teacher. I was talking to her about my German class – or lack thereof. I didn’t mention the name, but she seemed to have noticed the same things as I have, which was rather uplifting.

I’ve ranted about her before, you don’t need to hear me again. Meanwhile, I’ve caught the beginnings of the flu. Jonothan and Brian were up playing Burnout till 4:00 (meaning, in my room) so I didn’t get to sleep nearly as soon as I would have liked.

One last thing, which is Daisy. She just galloped down the basement stairs, which she’s not supposed to do (bad for her bones). As I tried to shoo her back upstairs, she fell back down (this dog’s getting old, she’s 13 now). Upon further inspection of the dog, I noticed one of her paws was worn down and sore, she has two lumps of irritated skin on her legs. I keep telling mom and dad to take her to the vet, but they just say “We’re working on it.”, and that’s that. I realized why Daisy was so excited to see Jonothan (she’s been following him everywhere). Jonothan’s always been the one to treat Daisy the best – he takes her on walks and pets her a lot, generally just a little more attentive. I try and do that, but it’s really time consuming. It’s not that Daisy’s mistreated, but that she doesn’t get the attention she deserves. Normally the amount of attention we give her is fine, she’s happy, we’re happy, it’s all good. I guess as she gets older it’s not enough.

Perfect Squares (^^)

Who knew something could be so square?

That video contains possibly the most square piece of cloth ever to touch this earth. It’s more square than 3-piece suits and 36. I won’t go on so as to keep this post short, I’ve been posting too much lately.

Two things about Jonothan: he’s arriving tomorrow night (he’s driving all day tomorrow), and his car situation is somewhat improved. He had to shell out the money to the towing company to get the car back, but the tenant who had it towed is being emo. Real emo. The landlord is a pretty cool guy, and sending the tenant through the runs for “giving a guy who’s fighting for our country such a hard time”. He’s a real patriot, I say, and I give him my props for the day. The landlord is mad enough at this girl that he pulled out the lawyers to get her to write a simple check. He calmly requests that she pays, and she goes ballistic. After this phone call, Jonothan gets home to find three cop cars outside his place, investigating claims of death threats from him to this tenant (whom he’s never contacted, seen, met, he didn’t even know her name before today). He won’t have to be around to see the mess through, thanks to his landlord.

Skiing was excellent. Add several adjectives adverbs on to that, including but not limited to: excellentely, awesomely, amazingly, superbly, wonderfully, hugely, highly, very, really, exceedingly. School was also very good – I ended up not having to do the German conversation (by grace of God alone, I swear). Today, was a good day.

His Car, His Girlfriend, and His Job (…)

Jonothan’s on a roll. First his car is TOWED (he found out that it was in fact not stolen, but towed at the consent of an intendant, even though he had permission to leave the car there, but he’s now fighting some beaurocrats over it). Then his girlfriend (fiance, but the title fitted better with girlfriend) walks out on him. Now he’s getting an all-expenses payed trip to Iraq.

I’m not worried, although it did help for me to have previous knowledge of this. Eavesdropping on Christopher’s conversations (not really eavesdropping, but I had my headphones on while he was in the room…) has saved me some shock value. When I say previous knowledge, I knew it was gonna happen a year and a half ago, when he was checking out the prospects on National Guard units. My parents, of course, were not informed.

Like I said, I’m not worried. I know his chances are quite good (he has like a .00001% chance of even being injured) due to the marvelous army medical technology and the now somewhat safer Iraq he’ll be heading to. I’d be a lot more comfortable with this if I knew he was going there to make a difference. Christopher’s accounts left me with little faith in our Army’s officers and tacticians. I don’t disagree with the war, for the most part. I’m not stupid enough to try and think we’d get oil out of this, but other facts on the case don’t match up.

Since I’m already into this post, I might as well account for my day. School was not worth detailing, but I stayed after school with a few others, but I got bored after Amy left, so I found myself being rather unenthused to do much of anything. I went to Gwen’s house until I got picked up, which was an hour or two ago. A rather unenthusiastic day.

EDIT:

Looks like Jonothan’s gonna be on Convoy Patrol. He’ll be accompanying convoys going in and aorund Iraq. He’s also gonna try and get him and his stuff up here, meaning I’ll see him before we leave for Colorado – possibly as early as Monday.

Death.

I was prompted to do this from a post on Eileen’s blog, but for different reasons than hers. This was also encouraged by an introductory thing we did as we’re starting Macbeth in English. We listened to famous audio clips from musicians who died young, while showing pictures of them and explaining how they died. I mused to myself how much it would suck to be them. I’ve never wanted fame or fortune (although money for the random things in life would be great), just from examples like all these people who chased after really retarded stuff in a vain search for happiness. I didn’t make this to mock those who have died in useless pursuits of satisfaction, though.

As I was pondering a comment to Eileen’s post, I got thinking a little bit. I’ve never really talked about death on here before, I figured it was long enough and fit for this context. Death has never really scared me. I look forward to it, in some ways, but that desire comes out of my faith, not from some emo self-preservation issue. In the same way, death around me doesn’t really scare me either. It may be a callous look on things, but I get tired of people saying the same things over and over again when it comes to others dying. National or international tragedies leave me highly unsympathetic due to the reactions I see around me. Very few people actually care, most pretend, or care out of obligation. This is not to say they shouldn’t care, but some elements of the facade could be done without. For me, dropping a dollar in the bucket for a charity just doesn’t make me feel like I’ve done my duty to help those in tragedy. I remember the school-run charities during Middle School when 9-11 hit, and giving a few dollars to get the neat-o red-white-n’-blue ribbons they were handing out for donations of more than 10 cents. Perhaps it’s the only thing I CAN or COULD do, but it doesn’t change that “I want to do something a little more” feeling. I doubt that will ever change. When/if I donate, I don’t do it out of a guilty conscience, but out of duty and the knowledge that it would help.

Back to the real point. Death. I don’t know about most of you, but death just doesn’t phase me. I don’t hold a lot of attachment to this life – most of it is spent working so that I can rest. Ironic, no? If anyone I was remotely attached to died, I’d be sad, don’t mistake what I’m saying for a lack of caring. What I would NOT do, is make bad resolutions to not make the same mistake most people do, which is not to live life to their potential. I’m not a fan of cheesy (no matter how dire or set in stone you may seem at the time) resolutions, either. The only thing I fear? Pain. A gun to the head doesn’t scare me, but drowning has the potential to make me quiver. Why? It would be pain that can’t even be soothed or aided, unstoppable, while you get to contemplate what happens to you in three more minutes. Another good example for this? Cancer. Cancer doesn’t scare me. The treatment does. The stories I hear about chemotherapy and radiation therapy really don’t sound pleasant to me. Sure, the cancer itself aint a walk in the park, but I somehow doubt it would cause the same kind of pain.

Enough of my musings, go do something else.

When Three Doors Is/Are Not Enough! (…)

I just got back from “bible study” with Daniel and Benjamin, which ended up pretty boring, but may supposedely get better next time. I might go again, we’ll see. We didn’t really do anything (nobody had anything prepared). :-/ I spent most of the time daydreaming while they argued over random stuff and asked dumb questions.

Today actually didn’t go really great, it didn’t quite hit me till now. I failed (actually failed, -65% failed) two quizzes, one for chem and one for math. My grades came in, and for the first time in my life, I am not on the Honor roll. I had a 3.06. That’s the lowest GPA I’ve ever gotten. Definately not a high point in my academic history. I can’t even remember how to spell correctly, though that’s mostly due to sleep deprevation. Gah. My dad hauled our kitchen screen door into my room so he could fix it, but hasn’t finished the job yet. For now, it’s sitting there, waiting for me open a portal to the netherworld, where moose and cows roam freely.

Monday was far better, as it was spent with Gwen and Amy after school. We walked to Gwen’s piano lesson, while Amy and I sort of did homework. She has this thing about not being able to study while I’m around, I can’t figure it out. It’s a strange occurance, to be sure (insert generic “*grin*” statement). My legs were actually really hurting that day from doing some 150 squats on Saturday night, and they’re still a bit tender. I also had Scouts that night, which was equally lacking in interestingness.

The other important thing on the list that really hasn’t been helping things is Jonothan’s current plight. He got back from his 7-week retraining (boot camp all over again), to find that his car had been stolen, and then Rachel walks out on him. In case you didn’t know, they were engaged, and recently started seriously discussing details. This really makes me sad, not just for Jonothan, but that Rachel would do this. I liked Rachel, she was a nice. Definately not cool of her to just drop that kind of bomb after leading him on like that. Maybe I don’t know the whole story, but either way, Jonothan’s not doing great. It makes me look forward to this winter break trip to Colorado even more.

Set to the Tune of “Commercialization”

The TV is currently spewing out various noises and images related to football and commericals, as I download techno and talk to the few people on IM. I’m not a huge football fan – I can enjoy it in good company, and I know how the game works, but I don’t take time out of my days to watch it. I’m at least into it enough to be able to have a short conversation about it with the pizza delivery guy.

[geek] I spent all of Friday and Saturday building two alternate styles for the Boy Scout website I’m helping with. They wanted some alternate ideas for design, but I was faced with the issue of sorting through code I hadn’t written, and doing it in VI under the unix file system (which I wasn’t very familiar with). It took me about 12 hours to do, since I had to learn how to use chmod (all the files I ssh’d over to the server started with no read/write privilages), and then because of some confusion with the divs and paragraphs, it took me a few hours to figure out the percentages I needed to set (which were never really up to snuff). I also had to figure out a lot of stuff in GIMP (aka Photoshop), as I’ve never really been proficient in that. My second style didn’t work due to some problems in the PHP (that’s all I could find to be the problem in the 20 minutes I had to finish it). Definately fun though, learned a lot of stuff. [/geek]

Nothing else of astounding importance has really happened, though. I’m downloading a whole LOT of techno right now (14 different albums, amounting to about 30 or 40 tracks). During this process though, I’ve noticed something really, really creepy. All the techno forums (where I download the techno) are like…robotic, sort of like a ghost town. So far even the forum formats are the same (they both use phpBB, but the same style, different colors though). I’ve been 4 different places, all the same (including di.fm, which is the general go-to place for techno). All the music is in the same format – one track for each “CD”, with a 2 kb CUE file (i can’t figure out what these do), and usually there’s an option for a torrent or for direct dl. Maybe it’s just the industry standard, I don’t know.

Colette burned me the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack. She had me listening to it on the bus home from ski club, it’s pretty good. Some of it’s a little too…singy, but it’s not bad as far as musicals go. Ski club was pretty good, it was nice and warm, so there was room to have some fun. They had signs up telling people to hug the people monitoring the ski lifts. I was running around stealing everybody’s poles (mostly Colette’s, cause she was the easiest to steal from :P).

And, I can’t think of much else interesting to say, so I shall return to looking around for Superbowl commercials.

Perspective, the Product of Intelligence (O.o)

I just read Ben Stein’s final article for a column he did on E!. Not knowing he was not only a Republican, but a Christian, I was rather pleasantly surprised as I read this. I have great respect for Stein in general, so I found this rather interesting. A nice read if you don’t mind the Christian “propoganda” as some put it.

Stein’s Reflections

Today was really….relaxing, a little boring. I didn’t have school due to Peer Mediation (I’ll explain in a moment). After school I journeyed with Amy, Gwen, Kerry, and Paul to the Library, where we attempted homework and lesser forms of slave labor. I was shown Ranma (….I think I’ll stick to anime, manga isn’t my thing…) and we parted from Amy and Gwen and had pizza, then Paul and I shuffled up to my house. The walk up was annoying, as everything was frozen. Speaking of which, our school is still iced, but they keep you from going on the ice. Rather frustrating.

Peer Mediation was generally boring, I don’t completely agree with their ideals, but I severely doubt this will go anywhere. The concept of Mediation is rather simple. A Mediator gets two people who have some beef with eachother, and acts like a moderator. The Mediator makes sure certain rules are applied to the discussion (no interrupting, flaming, basic stuff), and will interject at points with reflections or observations to assist the argument. It’s completely reliant on the two people being smart enough to solve the problem. The Mediator isn’t allowed to have an “agenda” or try and push them towards a solution. Not my style, (I discussed this with Kerry during the boring parts) as I believe humans are naturally evil, and therefore not inclined to come to a proper solution. Anyways, the actual meeting was better than being in school, but not very fun. At first it was good, we were having interesting discussions, had some nice snacks, did a little ping-pong, but it eventually degraded into bad demonstrations (I mean BAD, like, not even good analogies) and concepts that were so boring and so easy to grasp, that I did fall asleep for a few minutes (hey, it was about the time I would have been having Chemistry). Ah well, it’s worth missing two days of school for.

EDIT:

Well grounded, you are able to be realistic and rationalize.

On the inside, you have a hard core. It’s tough to phase you.You are super productive, and you are able to think anything through.

Focused and super charged, your instincts are a good guide for your next step.

Your Element Is Earth

You excel at planning and strategizing.

You could be a champ at chess or Survivor.
What’s Your Element?

DOUBLE EDIT:I like quizzes, they’re like a way to measure my progression and how I grow up. That is, good quizzes. Bad quizzes aren’t. This one is pretty accurate…that’s what I feel like anyways. I used to be really wishy-washy. Every day after school I had to have three hours of “me-time”, no less. I was always complaining, whining, I could go on and on. I feel far more stable now, in control of how I feel and understanding why I feel whatever I feel. Recently I’ve spent a lot of time talking about all sorts of things with a lot of my friends. As I’ve talked, I notice I’m far more open-minded. I used to be highly averted to changing how I view anything (politically especially), but that’s changed a little bit. Having an open mind exposed my ignorance and lack of knowledge in many areas, it forced me to beef up on those areas. It made me a lot stronger in the end.

Most of all, I’m confident. That’s probably the only noticeable outer change to most of you. In reality, I haven’t changed as much as I make it seem. I feel it, though, and it makes life a lot more….interesting.

[/random deep inner thoughts]

TRIPLE EDIT: EDITACULAR:

Just to make some clarification here, all those reflections were NOT based off the quiz. More clarification: I enjoy quizzes for the questions. Those are the reflective part. The results are usually nice because they have pretty pictures. Pictures define a good quiz result. Are we clear? Good. Don’t make me have an EDITACULAR EDITING FRENZY.

 

Three Trees Can Only Be So Interesting (O.o)

Another day-by-day breakdown of the recent events, brought to you by yours truly.

Thursday was cold. When I say cold, I mean -30 cold, as well as harsh cold. I did indeed ski in that -30 wind chill, while missing a movie with those smart enough not to ski. It was one of those lose-lose situations…either way, I’d miss hanging out with a few people, but the added weight of “you already missed one day of skiing, don’t waste more of our money” is what truly tipped the scale. The skiing itself was, at best, marginally bad. All the powder had been robbed from us honest skiers by the bloody snowboarders, and we were left with the rough equivelant of an ice rink, except you had the occasional snowblower freezing your face, which are lacking in most ice rinks (to my knowledge).

Friday was mildly good. I went over to Ben’s for his party thing, which sort of turned out sub-par because nobody showed up. It was kinda fun though, cause I got to see Eddie Izzard (that was a shock, I was expecting some funky and lanky dude, reminiscent of Chris Rock, but I recieved instead, a transvestite with leather bellbottoms and a face akin to a woman I shovel snow for).

Saturday brought about the Klondike, which is a fairly big Scouting thing where Troops compete for the District award (dubbed the Klonduck, as it is a red & white barber pole with a duck nailed atop of it). For the third year in a row, our troop (troop 2) won (absolutely no surprise). We had 77 points at the end of the day (after being shafted at least 5 points total for retarded things), the next highest had 64. That was pretty fun overall, although the pushing a very heavy sled (I’m guessing 70 pounds, I’m really not sure) up a very large hill with considerable amounts of snow. Hopefully the pictures of me on fire (it’s hard to explain, but I was so hot and so sweaty that every inch of my body was steaming, it looks pretty awesome) turned out well, but I doubt they did since he had to do a long exposure to get the steam.

Saturday night we slept outside (no shelter, the logs we were using snapped after we got 50 or so pounds of snow on top of it), it was about 15, at most 20 out, but it was pretty warm. Benjamin, Daniel, Jesse and I all stayed up talking to eachother for a good 5 hours, and boy was THAT weird. The tree analogies and random word-connection games we played definately got odd. The title refers the the three trees I was forced to stare at for 3 hours as we talked, which never changed, and got awfully boring to look at. For those of you about to say “so turn over”, remember that it’s 15 degrees out, and I had to be in a rather specific position to maintain the perfect temperature.

Sunday I got back home about 11:00. I wanted to go to church, but I smelled and looked awful (consider: no shower saturday, plus campfire and extreme amounts of smoke, plus sleeping outside in a sleeping bag, plus that gigantic workout going up the hill, plus random food, makes for a less than stellar smell), so I opted to get a shower and such. [geek] I spent my spare time searching for Gameboy and N64 emulators (which I found, although I have yet to find N64 ROMs). I’ve almost beaten the Gameboy Zelda (I spent a lot of time being really bad at this game as a younger child), and this of course brings up the desire to play the Ocarina of Time (upon remembering the game, it may rival FFVII as the best game ever created, but I’m not completely sure). [/geek] I also talked to Sean from Young Life a little bit, which is always nice.

Today has been very pleasant, and perfectly filled with events. I’ve had enough to keep me busy, but not so much as to get me frustrated. I went to a 30 minute Young Life thing-doodle at Wegmans (easy access to cheap food), met and re-met a few of the guys in that (They’re all seniors, I’m the only underclassman), talked for a bit, nothing out of the ordinary. From there I went to Chili’s with mom and dad, ate, went to Scouts, home, and that’s that. Somewhere in there I also talked to Christopher for 15 minutes, which was spectacular. We’ve challenged eachother to see who can learn how to snowboard faster while we’re in Colorado. We’re both moderately good skiers, he’s been skiing in Canada a number of times, maybe in Colorado once, I’m not sure, he’s been here a few times too.

In unrelated events, I have a few things as well. I finally found and used a crack for the Windows activation thing (just a few hours before Windows would strangle me, too). I talked to Jonothan for 2 or 3 hours the other night (Thursday, possibly Friday I think) which was quite awesome. He told me some of his military stories and stuff he’d heard from comrades of his while he’s been down in Military Police Training Camp (he got called up for training, as did a bunch of random people, in no specific order). I’ll probably post those later, I told half a dozen or so people in my awe at the coolness of them. For now, the possibility of school tomorrow calls. There’s a chance school won’t be in due to some serious flooding in certain parts of the school. One can always hope.

At the End of All Things (-.-)

The title refers to the final chapter of Lord of the Rings. Today’s been a rather active, mentally and emotionally. After the Math A (piece of cake) I went home, and watched the last 3 episodes of Fullmetal. I watched 23 episodes last night (that is, Monday, as this is 1:16 AM on Wednesday morning) in a row. Having finished it, I am wholly reminded of endings, particularly, the end of good things. Books, movies, shows, I hate getting to the end. If the media did the job correctly, I am left with a gaping hole where it once stood, and I grasp for something as a replacement. This is especially painful with this series, as the character of Edward Elric was…incredible. No, I won’t spoil anything for those who valiantly choose to watch it on TV, and by valiant, I refer to the utter frustration you will want to wreak on your television set when each episode ends, and another does not begin. And yet still, I feel the desire to wreak havoc upon my surroundings in the futile hope of recieving another episode.

Besides finishing Fullmetal, I jumped into the job of helping create the Troop 2 Scouts website. Benjamin’s doing the PHP, Daniel’s doing the CSS, I’m doing the content, and the three of us together decide what’s happening graphically. It’s a fun project – I’ve learned a lot about the Unix file system, SSH, and vi.

The true point of this was to express my utter…helplessness to the feeling I have after finishing Fullmetal. I just, argh, when something that good ends, I just wanna scream, and there’s nothing to replace that empty feeling I have. It’s no surpise, really, as I filled my last week’s nights with watching the episodes (heck, it only took me 5 days to watch 51 episodes, so less than that). I should stop ranting at this point, I suppose.

Monday was the first time I’ve been back to Boy Scouts for a good many months, they were rather happy to see me, and my timing seems rather good, considering the rather…inparticipative older scouts (coughBRANDONcoughPETERcough). I’m sort of obligated to go on the next two camp outs, I guess. I wish I hadn’t said yes for the most recent one, as the timing is inconvenient, but backing out would be rather, shall we say, detrimental to the amount of trust placed in my motivation to show up.

I think I may go re-watch a few episodes now, I’m not sure, but we’ll see.

So THIS is What Sewage is Made of! (O.o)

And no, sewage does not contain money or candy, it’s just as bad as the movies say. Our house has a bi-annual thing is does where some mythical object gets stuck in a pipe, and so the sewage backs up into this gigantic metal sink we have in the basement. Half the time we can plunge it out ourselves (boy is that fun!), the other half we are forced to call Roto-Rooter. This is the disadvantage of living in the basement by yourself. My room doesn’t smell, but whenever I walk out the door, it’s like getting trout slapped, several times over. If you don’t know what being trout slapped is, Google it, or have someone take a trout, and proceed to slap you.

I “overslept” for church today, again, but I believe it isn’t me that’s oversleeping. I have no problems waking up for school with no sleep, I should not face troubles with church. My mom also seems to stay home whenever I “oversleep”. To spell it out for you, I think my mom is just covering for herself.

Apparantly my dad’s coming home with KFC, and Jesse and Benjamin. I am determined to show them, and make them love Fullmetal. By the end of today they will have seen good anime. And they will be better for it. On that topic, my next 29 episodes are 54% done. I left it on overnight, so it should be done tomorrow if I do it again tonight.

The Chaotic Theorum (O.o)

I’ve experienced a rather excellent week, and next week promises to be equally excellent, as it is Regents, meaning two days lacking anything related to school, and two short and relatively painless tests.

After a full 2 weeks (approximately 150 hours of downloading) I got the first 31 episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist downloaded (I uploaded over 50 gb worth of data), and I’ve watched them all (it only took me 3 days), and the next 29 episodes only have 43 hours more left to go (keep in mind, each episode is 175 megs, it makes for 9 gigs total for the series). I introduced it to Daniel last night when he was over (he strolled in as I was watching it) and he ended up watching 12 episodes (remember that these things are 25 minutes each). I have deduced this to be the best anime, and even show ever created. The unique and creative genius of the plot, characters, and the world is astounding. The animation style and quality is akin to Trigun (which I should also download). Sick of the parenthesis yet?

I’ve also gotten around to playing Rome: Total War, and it is, to my delight, the best strategy game ever created. Ben and I keep talking about playing online, but we never get around to it, but it isn’t as if I don’t have things to keep me occupied. I still have yet to beat Neverwinter Nights, and all those SNES games.

In the mean time, I’ve also been tracking Splinter Cell 3 and Elder Scrolls IV (three new screens came out today, in fact). I had been on the look out for Jade Empire and KotOR II, but after having played KotOR and NwN, I’m not sure if the same formula of game would still be all that fun, as I tend to get over-manipulative of the system. I’ll stop talking about games now.

I was thinking to myself earlier about Macs in general – and why they’ve become comparable to PCs in the recent year. I did myself a Google, and discovered a number of things, from reading the most intelligently disguised Mac-PC flamewar, on a Linux forum.

Linkage

I have long argued over the inferiority of Macs compared to PCs, but recently much of my argument has blown up in my face, due to the de-retardation of Macs. It still hasn’t answered as to why I find them so awful (I use G4’s at school on a daily basis, just so my experience is not in doubt EDIT: apparantly my experience is in doubt. i’ve also used powerbooks on multiple occasions, and OS9’s fairly regularly, but i admit that i have not used a G5). A number of posters on the previously stated site brought up extremely valid points as to why the experience varies.

  • Macs are preferred for the software capabilities. PCs are preferred for the hardware capabilities.

An owner of a server put it quite well. His needs do not revolve around multimedia. His three PCs don’t even have sound cards, and use very low end video cards. In place of those, he needs massive storage. PCs allow you to do that infinitely, they don’t have a cap on how much of what you need. Macs cannot be built from scratch (technically it IS possible, but the amount of work and experience involved surpasses that required for a PC by far), you have to buy a pre-made from Apple. You CAN upgrade it, but that does not allow you to specialize in certain areas, but not sacrifice economics. Macs simply have superior software. Some of their formats have better, faster, higher quality compressions and decompressions (for video or pictures). That’s always been true.

  • Macs are inevitably more expensive for those who have special wants or needs.

Because you cannot just sacrifice in one area to add to another, you have to go for the more expensive package. PCs end up being cheaper for those with special needs. PCs may or may not be expensive when it comes to a rounded-out machine. Generally, if you build a PC from scratch, it’ll be cheaper than an equivelant Mac or pre-built PC. Macs have been known to be more expensive since the beginning – this has been studied dozens of times, results are neutral according to bias, but for the standard machine, Macs will cost more.

  • Benchmarks and power comparisons are inconclusive.

I’ve had several people tell me that the newest Macs would rip apart a Pentium 4 – this is meaningless, as the power of a P4 can range immensely, from < 1.0 to 5.0, and the clock cycles per operation between mac and PC procs vary as well. This also doesn't consider that AMD chipsets are far faster the P4's, (I have the evidence to back me up), and most benchmarks are run on Dells, which certainly do not run high quality hardware. Anyways. Skiing was cold. It was about 5, possible 0 degrees out, with a wind chill of like -5 or -10. Fun, but cold. The bus rides to and fro (the irony has just now struck me) are actually one of my favorite parts, I have to say. I was wearing so many layers – I had 6 on my body, three on legs, two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, two goods, a turtleneck, and earwarmers. I still froze. I had no goggles, so every snowblower was like “OH SWEET HEAVEN THE PAIN! AHHHHHHHHH!”, but was otherwise, just cold.

“Winter” and Other Such Ironies (O.o)

Spectacularity! I’ve just got back from church, which was good. Sunday school started up again, and the list of topics we have is looking really good. I still have yet to get Kerry or Ben to come with me (I honestly think you guys would enjoy it), but all good things come in time.

Thursday was skiing, which turned out okay. I really like the group of people that we have going, there’s Amy, Colette, Zach, Jared, and K2, as far as I can remember right now. It was mostly fun except Zach and I got stopped because we didn’t have the retarded color tags after two or three hours of skiing. I wanted to just smack the girl and say “You see these tags? These are from Colorado. You want me to go ski down Illiad for you? I’ll do it!”, but of course I settled with “This is bull.”. While that is something of an emo reaction, and there is a reason for the system, it’s just beurocracy. The system is really only worth putting on little schoolchildren, because they don’t know better. Let people judge for themselves. If they can do it, then let them do it, if they can’t, they probably won’t do it again. In short: let the stupid people weed themselves out. Anyways.

Friday can be dubbed as “tim is stupid” day. I was all like “meh” and Amy, Gwen, Paul, and Julia were all like “you must!”, so I was forced to give in. I went down to Amy’s house (where the aforementioned persons + Crawford were residing) and from there, we strolled over to Fall Creek and saw Finding Neverland. It WAS a chick flick, but I regret to admit that it was a good chick flick. I was then pulled from the group at my Dad’s hands, after a failure to understand the words “I’m gonna stick with them, Julia can give me a ride.”, which transformed in his mind to “I already have a ride.”, to which he responded “Uh, I’m already here.”.

Saturday was laxidazical, I wanted to do something but nobody else was around to do anything. I just lazed about and did nothing of particular amazement.

Now with a Smooth Marshmallow Core! (O.o)

This week can’t end soon enough. At this time, aI’m frustrated at the utter lack of time I have. I’ve been taking the bus home just so I can get more time at home (it gives me about an hour more), but that has a side effect of disconnecting me, but of course all my time at home is spent working or vegging as I play Halo 2 or my other newer games, so it’s a ruthless cycle of disconnectivity.

Speaking of Halo 2, I’ve gotten back into it recently, but I’ve found I have a 1/2 chance of either doing insanely well or sucking. I can’t figure it out – there are those games where the battle rifle is my baby – all my kills are headshots and no deaths, and then I have those Banshee moments, where I’m evading the rockets. And then I have those Banshee moments, where I hop in three times in one game only to be rocked by the rockets. And then I have those games where I can’t get the Battle Rifle, and I’m stuck with an SMG. I think I need to work on my strategy. I THINK the problem is my skill is too reliant on my team. If my team mates keep the rocket out of play, the Banshee is my home. I’m not sure though, as that doesn’t quite make sense when it comes to some weaponry (the battle rifle in particular). It’s taken me this long to realize it’s a team game, though. For all practical purposes, it’s a tactical shooter – you either work with the team or against the team. It’s actually that simple, too. If you aren’t sticking together and talking with your team, you end up dying, giving the enemy valuable weaponry, vehicles, and easier shot at the objective, more points, the whole basket and kaboodle. For so long I’ve been frustrated at how I can be better than the guy I’m fighting by a long shot, but still die, and now I understand. Anyways, no more video game talk.

Speaking of which, I wrote a report on video game violence for English. It’s technically the 1st draft, but it’s close enough.

Report – Video Game Violence

[2012 edit: lost forever]

I believe I sufficiently pwned that argument.

Speaking of pwnage, I had this crazy killing spree with the sniper rifle on Ascension. It was 4v4 Team Slayer – I had a fully loaded Sniper Rifle at my disposal, and they just kept on coming up the ramp, and out of the base, they didn’t stop coming. I was kind of toast when one of they shot me with the sniper after all my team had died at point-blank. I had two of those experiences actually, one on Burial Mounds at the base tunnel. I wish they had the headshot sound from UT. It would make it so much more satisfying.

Speaking of satisfying, I discovered my mouse has a battery life of like 5 days, with just one overnight charge. I am quite pleased, to say the least.

Also speaking of satisfying, we finished season 3 of 24. It was, to say the least, not satisfying. The biggest problem was that instead of twisting the plot, they kept extending it. The last 5 or 6 hours were completely unnecessary plot-wise, they just stretched things out for the last few hours, which is why they were far less interesting than the rest of the season. The season started off weakly. The first two discs were poor. The next two were excellent, but then the next two were poor. I have high hopes for season 4 though, especially with such a gigantically new cast (that should be a hint to how many people die). On a positive note, Kiefer Sutherland (the one that plays Jack) is an incredible actor. His skills really shine when you have a lot of bad extras and minor characters running around. I mean…bad. I could act better than some of these people. Oh well.

And the Cow Says, “Moo” (O.o)

My recent days have been filled with a lot of KotOR, Halo 2, and 24. I’m almost done with KotOR, I’m on the last planet, so, anyways. We’re on the 19th episode of 24 now, and as usual, the writers of 24 have outdone themselves. The first two discs just plain sucked – the script was boring, the plot generally lack-luster,and the characters inconsistent. However, toward the end of the third disc, things start picking up (as in, important characters started dying). If you haven’t watched 24, you really really should. It’s probably the most suspenseful show ever created, and the quality of the acting, the plot, etc., surpasses that of your standard movie.

I should probably explain exactly what 24 is. 24 is a show (on Fox) that plays in real time – there are 24 episodes, each spanning one hour of time, and the season consists of one day. Because of the whole “real time” thing, people don’t just miraculously jump back into action and people don’t just appear at the destination. This will obviously require multiple threads and plots running simultaneously – generally about 3 different situations are running at once. 24 is notorious for killing off all the characters that are even slightly expendible. I thought a lot of people died last season (2), but even more have died thus far, and more are going to die in the future. But I’m getting of track – the real-time element is the first essential part of the formula that is 24. Then you have lots of death and gore. Then you add excessive suspense and multiple plot lines. And last, but not least, you have a major threat to America. The first season was about an assasination attempt on the primary presidential candidate (there were about 3 other plot lines, but that’s the main driving plot), the second was about a nuclear threat (again, there were more plots intertwined), this time it’s about a weaponized virus. Overall, it’s very realistic. There are some dramas that would no longer occur with our current technology (like tracing calls – they still use the standard required amount of time to track the source of a call, even though it can now be done instantly, and various indescrepencies with military policy, but otherwise it works quite well). Just go watch it, we have all 3 seasons on DVD if you want to borrow them.

In other news, school has been highly standard. Nothing special, beyond that my grades are fixed. I really enjoyed that snow day on Thursday (I slept until 3:00 that day). Today I overslept, and missed church, which really sucks. The problem is, Fullmetal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell are on at 12:00 and 3:00. I always miss the first showing, so I have to wait until 3:00. Fortunately my download of FMA is 57% done, and reporting 30 hours left till it’s done, so that shouldn’t be a problem by the time Sunday rolls around again. I’ve grown tired of Ghost in the Shell – it’s a good anime, but the animations can be distracting (they are not of stellar quality), and the plot makes, well, no sense. The most recent episode was 20 minutes of listening to 6 people discuss the main antagonist, in a chat room. It was obvious they did this to try and help the viewer understand what exactly was going on, but none of it really made any sense. They spend too much time using big words and complex phrases and too little time on making the plot logical. I suspect the movies or the manga would be far better, but I currently have no money with which to investigate such ventures.

Oh well.

Deja Vu, Again (O.o)

And here I sit, on this New Years Eve, not a one bit sad about not being at a party or other generic New Years gathering. New Years has never been a favorite holiday of mine, as the true retardacity of people is shown in full force, on public televesion, as they count down to 10:00, for some reason beyond me. I hold in my hands an coke float (a favorite snack of mine, you know).

I’m about hal-way through KotOR, knee-deep into NwN, and Doom is on the shelf. Rome is waiting its turn patiently. I managed to get myself back into the loop of life, and that’s sort of calmed me down about school. My current mood is readily prepared to take it on.

And now…

…

A SURVEY! Muhahahaha, yes, I shall make you suffer through yet another one. Not in order of importance, mind you.

10 things that scare me:

1. Being talked about behind my back (Colette wrote that one, i agreed)

2. Losing

3. Rejection (Colette wrote that one too)

4. Old Age and/or Senility

5. Being stuck or cornered (not having any options or choices left)

6. Horror movies

7. Spiders

8. Really huge heights (like grand canyon tall, not two or three stories tall)

9. Silence

10. Me? 😛

9 things that attract me to the opposite sex:

1. Knows and understands herself (this is a big one, it counts for a lot more than 1/9)

2. Honesty

3. Conversationalist

4. Courageous (not afraid, isn’t scared of new or different things)

5. Slender

6. Logical

7. Optimistic

8. Strong (doesn’t give in to pressure, especially peer pressure, firm in what she believes)

9. Open Minded (Colette had this one down, but this ties in with strong too. firm, but willing to see the other side of things)

8 things I love:

1. God

2. moi computar :-O

3. Anime

4. Attention

5. Friends

6. Compliments

7. Games

8. I can’t think of anything else…food? life? marshmallows? donkeys? you choose…

7 things I hate:

1. Retards

2. Hicks

3. Retarded Hicks

4. Stupidity

5. Ignorance

6. Spiders

7. Preps

6 random facts about me:

1. What kind of question is this? No, really? Random should never be placed in a question on a survey.

2. I can’t do this 6 times in a row, you know…

3. I have glasses. HOW ABOUT THAT? IS THAT RANDOM ENOUGH FOR YOU?

4. Get ready for this randomnization: I was born in Mississippi. Pretty random, I know. See, this is why I hate “random” questions.

5. I like techno? Am I random yet?

6. You know, random isn’t random unless it’s in response to a non-random statement or question. Random is not an element of text or conversation that can be produced on command!

5 things I plan to do before I die:

1. Get married, do the love thing, maybe have kids, we’ll see.

2. Probably live. I wouldn’t call the time from birth to high school living, persay, more breathing and doing lots of meaningless work.

3. Acquire and use explosive and/or automatic firearms.

4. Visit Sweden and Finland.

5. See a volcano erupt!

4 things I want to do right now:

1. Get back to playing games.

2. Talk to people, but nobody is online.

3. Listen to more techno?

4. Fly!

3 things that annoy me:

1. Druggies

2. Illogicalities

3. Canada

2 things I can do:

1. (this space has been intentionally left blank)

2. (this one too)

1 thing I can’t do:

1. That clover thingy with my tongue

STOLEN FROM COLETTE!

Last One Out, Hit the Lights (…)

In a manner of 6 hours, the entire household is empty, oh so empty. I have that standard post-fun syndrome, which I get after any extended period of time which I enjoyed thoroughly. It didn’t help when shortly after they’d all left that Mom came down to inform me of a horrid letter upon my 5-week report, commonly associated wiith “failing” or “flunking”. I knew I hadn’t been doing well in Math, but she refused to let us see our grades until the reports had been sent out. It’s the first time I’ve had an F on any report (this isn’t a report card, mind you, just a 5-week report). The thing that baffles me is that it’s not that I haven’t been focused on school. It’s not that I haven’t been doing my work (I have a 100% homework average in there). It’s her. It’s her tests. So many people fail them, so very many, I don’t understand this woman. Was she never in high school? Is she just stupid? I honestly don’t know. All my other grades were left intact (excepting German, surpise, surprise).

The thing that really gets me is that now, because of her inefficient and awful methods of teaching, I have to spend extra time and effort to try and raise this grade. My personal belief on school is that no time outside of 8:00 to 2:37 should be forcefully spent in there. Everything I need to get done should get done inside that block of time, if the teachers are doing things right. The real clincher for me is this: I know if I were homeschooled right now, I’d be getting twice the education, and spending half the time working on it. It’s times like this that I remember why I chose to be homeschooled before. Oh, curse these public schools. Curse them.

That being said, I don’t look forward to Monday much.

Behold, the Power of Froehlich (O.o)

This week has been, in many ways, a week of…discovery. This is gonna sound cheesy, but I think I discovered the meaning of family. I had a long, long talk with Christopher, about a LOT of things, which we’ve never done before. I was already sort of “bonded” with Jonothan, but I think Christopher and I are so much closer now. I never understood why I was so much like my brothers and cousins, until I realized we’re all Froehlichs. If there’s one thing I want to remember in life, it’s that I’m a Froehlich, and I always will be. Most people don’t take much notice or pride of their name, and I didn’t either until recently, when my teachers and friends started calling me Froehlich instead of Tim.

The thing I find so astounding about this is that I, a 15 year old kid, can have such similarities with a 50-something year old uncle, two cousins over 15 years older than me, and two brothers, all who have a generation apart from me. That bond, as I have learned this week, is family.

In light of this revelation, I’ve grown a lot closer to my family over the past few days. My uncle and my only other male cousin, Josh (29 or 30) arrived on Sunday. We haven’t done anything spectacularly amazing, but we have spent a lot of time relaxing and enjoying oursleves, watching movies, reading, talking, sleeping, eating (lots of eating). I was watching the new Star Wars DVDs with John (they didn’t make it any better, they stupified more stuff, but some parts are much clearer), and we watched Beautiful Girls the other night.

In other news, we got Windows XP Professional installed, and I now have about 2500 dollars worth of software on this machine. My Uncle Jim gave me Neverwinter Nights (Platinum), which is another game to add to the pile. For some reason Trillian has gone haywire, and Gaim too, so I have to reinstall Trillian before I can get back on IM, for those of you wondering about the lack of my presence on IM. Actually, I just fixed it, nevermind. I think we’re about to watch the extended version of RotK, so I’m gonna go join them.

The Final Fantasy (O.o)

[edit]Oh, and Merry Christmas everyone![/edit]

Ah yes, Christmas. I truly enjoyed mine, I hope you enjoyed yours. Christopher’s here, he’s been giving me all kinds of phat l00t for my comput4r. He’s loaded a few thousand dollars worth of programs, music, and stuff onto my computer in his few days here so far. He still has yet to supply me Nero, some Moby, and Windows XP Pro (it’s isntalled, but we need a serial key). It’s pretty amazing – his song collection outgrew his 40GB mp3 player – he now has a 120GB External USB2.0 (Seagate) for his song collection, which is clocking over 16,000 at this moment. Yes, that’s a whole lot of songs, with which I am partaking in the love. My cousin John (28?) just arrived, which is cool. He’s not a geek, he’s actually an actor, or rather, in theatrical college of sorts. He’s pretty cool.

I woke up at 11:00 today, did the presents routine, ate our tradition Christmas breakfast (we don’t do Christmas dinner, we do Christmas Eve fondue, which beats any Christmas goose by a mile) of Sour Cream Eggs (best breakfast ever, it may sound gross but it really is good). We watched a few episodes of Arrested Development (hilarious) and some Season 3 of 24 (so far it’s the worst of the three, but still quite good).

Yesterday Christopher and I went to get my present, which happened to be in the vicinity of Best Buy. We were originally getting a hardrive, but my dad called Christopher in the middle of the searching process to inform him that he already got me one. So we decided to go for the Logitech LX700, the sexiest peripheral to ever exist. It’s a wireless keyboard (About 2 dozen extra programmable buttons, black, soft-keys, solid, all around awesome) and mouse (7 buttons – technically 5, as there are only three “buttons” that are extra, persay, but the mouse can press down and tilt from side to side, useless, but hey, whatever. the battery is rechargable – you just stick it on the charger when you’re not using it (most important to do when you turn it off), it has at least a 12 hour life, if not more, i have no clue, but it’s Logitech, so, i expect a lot). These rock, which is good. To make life simple I’m making a bulleted list.

  1. Logitech LX700
  2. Western Digital 80GB IDE Hardrive
  3. KotOR
  4. Doom 3
  5. Rome: Total War
  6. 2x Sour Altoids – Apple
  7. Blue S-Type XBox Controller
  8. Barnes & Nobale $25 giftcard
  9. Blockbuster $50 giftcard (this came from my grandparents, which is actually probably a miracle of epic proportions. you see, my grandparents are probably the worst giftgivers known to the world. their most famous gift was a plastic statue of liberty AM radio – that’s ALL it did. it was that nasty copper-green. they gave them to my parents before I was born, so I never got to see them. the next year they got the same thing. in the same way, my grandparents have completely failed in getting me logical gifts. for the past 5 years, i got model cars. they came in variations, sometimes like hot wheels, or sometimes in wooden versions. suffice to say, i don’t even like cars. i never told them I did. we could never figure this phenomonon out. they also have a 15 dollar limit. my grandparents aren’t poor – they aren’t rolling in the green, but they aren’t strapped financially, so it was always amusing to see what they managed to do within those limits. we were disapointed in a sick sort of way when we discovered my present to be, well, good. even if we don’t have a Blockbuster within 15 miles of us, it’s definately a milestone for my grandparents.)
  10. Every album from about 10 or 15 artists (I asked for Coldplay and Modest Mouse, but Christopher gave me a few others he thought i’d like).
  11. A lot of programs (Microsoft Office 2003, Outlook 2003 [which, for the record, is better than Thunderbird, Eudora, or any other POP3 client], SSH Tunneler, PGP Encrypter, and eventually Nero, Visual Studio.net, XP Pro, and the Pro version of ZoneAlarm)
  12. Fuzzy Slippers!!
  13. Fleece Robe
  14. A picture frame + scarf (from Colette)
  15. ZSNES + a bunch of games (from Ben)
  16. Two chocolate turtles (from Jared)

My Uncle will be here tomorrow, and apparantly is bringing his gifts along to save the expense of unnecessary shipping.

Now, about this whole Final Fantasy business, I’m gonna have to smack a few people up who don’t think FFVII is the best of the Final Fantasy series. Best game ever? Purely my opinion. The thing about FFVII is that it’s not actually overrated. The fact that 5 people just said it in my comments proves me point. Outside of the RPG realm, the entire Final Fantasy series is looked down upon, even though most people have not played them. The strange thing about Final Fantasy and RPG’s in general is their scope is limited, hype is minimal, the general audience of small. Despite this, they receive no less shame and humiliation from those who have not even played them.

Why is FFVII the best in the series? Graphically, it’s visual diahrrea. The cutscenes and battle graphics were good, but most of the time you were in the world map or running around and such, and none of the models were rounded – everything was at right angles. It was good in its time, today it just sucks. It was THE FIRST 3-D turn-based-combat (TBC, also referred to as classic) RPG ever. Few people grasp this, but it was not done before FFVII. That’s why the graphics sucked – it was an experiment visually. If you STILL try and knock the graphics, go back to your hole. It also had the disadvantage of being an early release on the console. The PS, if you remember, came out before the N64, and lacked certain anti-aliasing technology and other minor things that gave the N64 a graphical edge.

Moving on. The thing about FFVII was the plot, the characters, character development, and mood of the game. Unless you’re an FPS or action-ish gamer, you can agree that FFVII had a near-perfect plot and implementation of the storyline. The plot, if described to you in person, would not make sense, it would seem corny and silly. Play the game, my friend, from start to finish. Tell me you weren’t sad and surprised when Aries died, tell me you didn’t find at least one of the characters really cool, tell me you didn’t get bored of the game at any point. If you’re a gamer who doesn’t like Final Fantasy or RPGs, don’t go and tell me you think otherwise, because I don’t really care.

To be a little more specific, let’s look at the choices you have with each character when it comes to magic, equipment, and attacks. For only have three equipment slots, the system is highly complex. Your armor and weapon both have “slots” which can hold materia. Materia are magical items that are either a spell, skill, or stat modifier. You put the materia in these slots to use the materia, or allow the use of the materia. That’s not the complex part. It starts getting thicker by the fact that all materia change your stats. Magic materia make you physically weaker, and magically stronger. Skill materia will increase a stat related to the skill. The stat change doesn’t do much until you get stronger materai – which end up changing stats by 15%. That’s still pretty simple, right? Here’s where it starts really getting cool. The materia have levels of growth. They grow by gaining AP from battle (just a different form of exp). Growing allows you to use the magic more times in a battle, gives greater stat bonuses, or just allows you to use the spell. Weapons or armor may be set to let your materia grow at a double rate, or at no rate, so some weapons may seem better but not actually be. Now, here’s the final piece that makes the materia system awesome. Each slot is set one of two types – linked or single. Single materia are unaffected by other materia and do not change the result of other materia. Linked materia can add to the other materia, or change what happens. For example: If I have the “Counter-attack” materia, and i put it into one of two linked slots, and put the “Poison” materia in the other slot, I have a chance of poisoning the enemy on the counter-attack. The rate of success is dependant on both materia. If they’re both mastered, I’ll always counter, and the counter will always poison (succesfully or not is dependant on the enemy). You can come up with extremely complex combinations – it’s what makes the magic system so cool. It’s really complex.

Battle in generally really rocked (I can safely say, that if you really played the game, you would agree that it’s better than FFVIII or FFIX, again, I cannot speak for the PS2 games). As for the plot? Play it. The characters? Play it. Just play the game. Another specific thing I should mention is the length of the game. You could probably beat the game from beginning to end in 25-30 hours, if you really wanted to. However, you would miss out on 90% of the game. The game has tons of stuff to do, explore, and find everywhere in the game. Even at the very end, there’s loads to do. You can breed chocobos, you can race chocobos, you can play dozens and dozens of little minigames, you can level up your characters, get the ultimate weapons and final limit breaks for your characters, you can find all the materia, you can get the Knights of the Round Materia, its hard to describe how much there really is to do just at the end of the game. There’s just as much during the middle – you can get characters early, you can do side quests, the game easily has 100 hours of stuff to do in it. I have the clock maxed in my game to 99 hours , 59 minutes and 59 seconds. I aint joking.

Why would GameFAQs have more FAQs and guides than any other game, some of which have been added THIS YEAR (this game was made in 1997, folks)? Go find out, and play it.

As for FFVIII…

I consider it a black sheep of the series. Why? The characters were highly unoriginal and extremely unlovable or stereotypical. The plot was fine, I hold nothing against it, but it wasn’t superb. The combat was boring, as was leveling up. That’s actually what I hated most. The combat was so slow, so boring, leveling up was just so easy. I had Squall to level 80-something on the third disc. Why do I find that wrong? Leveling up should be a challenge, it should be hard, I don’t want it handed to me on a silver platter. Not to mention, there was no reward for leveling up. If you got stronger, the bosses got stronger, meaning you weren’t payed off for your work. There was nothing “inventive” about the gameplay – I saw nothing new or innovative about the implementation, only a poor attempt at mixing things up. The graphics were at times, more frustrating than FFVII. The textures were so low-res, so pixelated and bad, I can’t describe the amount of squinting I did. It hurt my eyes. At least FFVII was simple. The game was overall okay, but I really just did not enjoy it at all. I got to the third disc, and decided I had put up with it long enough.

And FFIX?

I consider just behind FFVII. It was a good game – the graphics were solid, the movement and feel nice and smooth. The general gameplay was akin to FFVII, in that you had a main, driving storyline that you could jump onto at any time, but there were always minigames you could go play or you could go level up or just have fun. That’s what I look for in an RPG – leisurely, go-at-your-own-pace gameplay. FFVIII forced you to jump ahead at points, simply out of boredom or otherwise. There were no side quests or minigames, for the most part. They had a bad version of the card game that was made in FFIX (which i still didn’t really enjoy, but I had a little fun with it), and that was about it. FFIX had a lot of funny moments – it was the lightest, most humorous of those I’ve played (FFVI – FFIX). I especially enjoyed the chocobo quests – I had a LOT of fun playing Chocobo Hot&Cold. The FFVIII version was also far more boring and didn’t even reward you for it.

I’ll end my rant now, but I hope you understand my view on the Final Fantasies a little better.

Woof Woof (O.o)

I have spent my week almost completely seperated from my friends, excepting those that have been playing Maple Story. I can say for sure that this is the best free game I have ever played, beating even the incredible Infantry. Yes, even Infantry. For those of you aghast at my lack of Halo 2-ing, I must state a fact that has remained true throughout my life: I am, at the core, not an FPS gamer. The first game I ever played and truly understood and enjoyed, was FF7 (this at the age of 7). I play FPS because I’m good at them and thus can enjoy them. I still maintain that FF7 is the best game ever created, and thus the upcoming movie FFVII: Advent Children has peaked my interest. I have found no easily accesible trailers to be downloaded, only streamed, unfortunately. Just do a Google for Advent Children. The CGI is outstanding, although the file itself or the actual animations suffer framerate issues for obvious reasons. In any case, I patiently await the arrival of the movie.

I feel like reminiscing about Infantry, so I’ll do that. Infantry was a third-person (bird’s eye) shooter. It was simplistic, yet really awesomely cool. It was set in the future, so you had your special doodad-taculars. Originally it was really boring – there were vehicles you ran around in and you just tried to hold these points in a boring King of the Hill form of a game. This changed once they introduced a very loose RPG system – you gained money and rank from kills and flag captures in these CTF-type games. You used the money to buy weapons, armor, or ammo. Most importantly, was the class system. There were dozens of classes, all unique. There were Heavy Weapons (not demolition, they used higher-powered rifles and grenades), Infantry (they were boring and noobular), Jumptroopers (Fast, Maneuverable, Light), Scouts (i think i may have the name wrong, but they were capable of being invisible and used the sniper rifle most), Engineers (they built turrets and defenses, which got their kills), Medics (infantry with healing), and a few others, as well as leveled up forms of those guys. Unfortunately, a few months after that version came out, it went p2p. It rocked.

O.o

This week has been pretty good. It started out meh, but it gradually just got better and better. Gwen’s, Paul’s, and Ben (Feldman)’s birthday party was last night, which was pretty fun. Other than that, I’ve spent a lot of my time doing make up and retakes for school. On Wednesday I discovered I had an F in Chemistry (this was gonna go on the 5-week report, and that just wasn’t gonna happen) which I resurrected to a B, possibly a B+ depending on the grade of an extra credit paper I did. I was frustrated many times by my English teacher. I had to make up this essay we did that I missed, so I told him I’d come after school on Monday, and then he wasn’t there. I told him I’d come after school on Tuesday, but he wasn’t there again. Even on Wednesday, he wasn’t there, but he left the door unlocked, so I had to go through the papers on his desk to find mine (he finally let me do it during class that day, for a whole 20 minutes *grumble*), which for some reason was labeled “never showed”.

Anyways, that’s about the peak of the excitement I experienced. In other news, due to an anonymous tip from Mike, I learned of a secret game that everyone plays called Maple Story. In essence, it’s a free MMORPG, with Gunbound-style visuals. It’s mucho fun, especially when you’re running around with a party of people and stuff. It’s well balanced, and all character classes are unique from eachother. Definately worth the 170 MB download, IMO. My Halo 2 fanatacism has waned for the moment. I still maintain it’s the most fun multiplayer game I’ve palyed, but my mood recently hasn’t been suited for it. As in, I haven’t been in a good enough mood to handle getting owned from time to time. I don’t like the ranked games enough to really want to play them alone, either. I just don’t enjoy the settings. I much prefer custom games, they’re more laid back and enjoyable.

My first Christmas present has appeared under the tree! Not a clue what it is, as my parents are really good at disguising stuff. They’ll usually stick easily guessed items (CDs, games, movies, etc.) in bigger boxes with lots of padding. Oh well.