Author: Tim Froehlich

adorable

This blog was given an award.

It wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

Adorable was perhaps the last adjective I had in mind in the creation of this blog, though Lauradid say it was given ironically. Social convention dictates that I accept and conform to the stated rules of this award:

  • Thank the person who gave you this award, and link back to them in your post.
  • Tell us 10 things about yourself.
  • Nominate your bloggers.
  • Contact these bloggers, and let them know they received this award.

The alternative to doing these things is that I embrace my inner asshole and analyze the shit out of a seemingly minor event. Can you guess which one I’m going to do?

Continue reading adorable

replay

In January, my friends and I embarked on a project that has become, for me, a serious creative outlet. We decided to start building a town on our Minecraft server. If you don’t know what Minecraft is, that’s okay – all you need to know is that it’s essentially multiplayer Legos. This post is an attempt at sharing some of the amazing creations and the process behind the town’s development.

We didn’t have any idea what would go on it and we didn’t set any rules for what could or couldn’t be made. We just started making stuff. The location we chose was nothing more than hills and trees. Sitting in the middle of nowhere, the first creation was a statue of a bug with a sword plunged through it, and some signs (note – these are all recent shots, unfortunately I don’t have any from the beginning days):


By Ben

Here’s what the signs said:

The Bug King as he was found in 1388, after having been slain by the Bug Slayer. The Bug King’s death marked the end of the Insectowars, and ushered in a century of peace and a new golden age.

Continue reading replay

existential hat trick

Vocation, con’t

“Jack of all trades, master of none, but oft times better than the master of one.”

This phrase, written first in 1612, was regarded as a compliment during the Renaissance. Renaissance humanists believed humans to be limitless in their capabilities, and as such should pursue knowledge and mastery in every possible manner. Also known as polymaths, these individuals would learn multiple languages and musical instruments, developing not just intellectual skills, but also their physical prowess, social accomplishments, and artistic capabilities. They’re the reason we use the word university (universities were once places of universal education) and why the liberal arts are called the humanities.

Not everyone agrees with this ideal.

“He who embraces too much, has a weak grasp”
“You aim for everything, but you hit nothing”
“Who chases two jackrabbits catches none”
“Seven trades, the eighth one – poverty”

The problem with quotes is that it’s easy to mistake a catchy zinger for valid truth, so here’s something a little more personally relevant. An extended relative of mine – a concept artist for a custom car designer – gave me a framed piece when I was sixteen years old of this wonky car doing a burnout, and he signed it with this oddly prescient quip:

“Tim,
Pick your direction,
aim it & GO!”

My point, I hope, is illustrated. There’s an approach to life that says being well-rounded makes us better at life as a whole, and there’s another that says exclusive dedication is the path to success. The truth, I suspect, is a mixture of the two.

Continue reading existential hat trick

more birthday manifesto

A big thanks to Ben Myers for the domain name suggestion. A few people said they would have liked oftim.net more, but I figured it was time to embrace the name of the blog. Maybe we’ll see oftim make a return somewhere else, though.

Relationships, con’t

As unpredictable and tempestuous as my emotional state can be, I’ve never had cause to question the depth the connections I have with my family and friends. Even at my most self-absorbed, I could never bring myself to say that no one in the world cares about me or loves me. Perhaps my greatest mistake over the past years has been giving legitimacy to feelings of loneliness. Which leads me to conclude that the loneliness I’ve experienced has very little to do with a lack of companionship, but a discomfort with being alone. It would be easy to pass that discomfort off as me just being a social guy, but I think the existential crisis demands a more complete explanation.

Continue reading more birthday manifesto

a birthday manifesto

For my twenty-second birthday, I decided it was high time I sat down and had myself a genuine existential crisis.

“What?” I hear you say, “Tim, you’ve been having an existential crisis since you were thirteen. Come on.”

Probably, but it’s my birthday and I’ll have an existential crisis if I want to. Stay a while and listen, kids. My intellectual struggles over the past few weeks have revolved around one question. What is my reason for living?

I’m hunting for something that justifies my continued existence. I reject the tautology that we can just live for the sake of living. I need something more. I don’t mean more in any kind of supernatural or extraordinary sense – just something more than myself. I’ve been attempting to explore all the options for what that can mean. These posts will be a part of that exploration.

Continue reading a birthday manifesto

domystify

The most recent issue of National Geographic featured an article on animal domestication – in particular, that of foxes. I highly recommend reading it (there’s also a great Radiolab episode that discusses this topic), but for the purpose of this post I’m going to quickly summarize some of the most important details so that I can dive into making my point, which I’m hoping will blow your mind. Fingers crossed.

In the 1950’s, this guy in Soviet Russia started breeding foxes for domestication by selecting the friendliest ones to breed. Just nine generations of breeding later, he had foxes that were completely in love with humans from birth, without any conditioning. They weren’t just friendlier foxes, though; they adopted a whole suite of behaviors and many of their physical characteristics transformed as they became more domestic. Here’s a short list of changes that appeared:
– Multicolored/spotted coats
– Floppy ears and raised tails
– Tail-wagging, face-licking, barking, and whining
– Higher intelligence, more able/willing to learn human social cues and commands
– Can breed twice as often

Some of these qualities are present in wild juvenile foxes, but are quickly lost as they reach maturity. In domesticating the fox, researchers essentially ended up making foxes that are, in many ways, permanent adolescents. There’s two quotes in the article which I think will help illustrate where I’m going with this:

“‘…they remind me a lot of golden retrievers, who are basically not aware that there are good people, bad people, people that they have met before, and those they haven’t.’ These foxes treat any human as a potential companion…”

“‘They didn’t select for a smarter fox but for a nice fox,’ says Hare. ‘But they ended up getting a smart fox.’”

Continue reading domystify

second-hand

On a regular basis, the subject of whether or not I’m still smoking comes up among practically all of my friends (because they’re the kind of friends that care). I’ve legitimately quit twice since I started nearly three years ago, and made dozens of half-hearted attempts here and there (usually at the behest of a lady). I feel like it’s time I discussed how I even started, what’s kept the habit going, and how I perceive it as an individual and at a societal level.

I could try and say that it began because of the setting, and that might hold merit. I was in England, surrounded by people far beyond my age and wisdom who were introducing me to ways of thinking and living that I’d never before considered legitimate. I was an immensely curious teenager, impressionable and overwhelmed with new experiences, thoughts, ideas, and alcohol. Nights out to the pub were inevitably peppered with smoke breaks, and my curiosity demanded to know. But that wasn’t where the habit started.

Continue reading second-hand

unfinished and untitled, pt. 1

My mind scoured page after page of words, hunting for that most excellent descriptor to do justice to the elation of my senses. Delectable? No, this was not steak. Irresistible? I suppose, but there are men that would use this word to describe goats, and I would hate for them to carry such associations to this banquet of sensation. Glorious, stunning, phenomenal, awe-inspiring; so many were considered, and all were found sorely wanting. A mutter of defeat escaped my lips, and I resigned to enjoy this discovery without the company of the word I desired.

Continue reading unfinished and untitled, pt. 1

emulation

Video games have been a defining force in my life as far back as my memory goes. The relationship is complex and varied, but it has remained, for me, totally unexplained. What have the 20,000 hours of my life spent immersed in virtual entertainment done for me? Why do my friends and I find such continued delight in them? Are they really just abstracted pleasure buttons, isolating us from the real world? Do video games actually have anything to offer society aside from escape?

Continue reading emulation

the tenets of my bleeding heart

edit: The first commenter made a very salient point, that my train of thought is quite incomplete at the end. There were a few paragraphs missing – hopefully I’ve managed to remedy this.

I have not often strayed into discussing the directly political, but I am gradually understanding that if I want to pretend to be an agent of change, I have to face facts. The slow, creeping resignation that changing society means more than just changing minds has forced me to stop and take stock of what I really believe when it comes to the role of government and the purpose of law. Politics isn’t easy conversation, but I’ve found that practice truly does make genuine discussion more viable over time. Primal emotions are accessed very rapidly as core values are placed at odds, and my knee-jerk response to toss away respect for others has to be tamed in light of the very constant reality that I really won’t find many people in the world that agree with me about everything. It’s the joy and curse of individuality.

It’s strange to rediscover what it feels like to have a moral zeal for something like, say, global warming – an issue I once believed wasn’t happening at all – and to now find myself gravely concerned for the future of the human race because of it. I’d changed my mind about it a few years back, but I didn’t quite get the “big deal” factor until more recently. It started by watching nature documentaries (if you want to feel emotional about global warming, watch a polar bear try to hunt walrus because it can’t find land), but relentlessly consuming TED talks and working with brand new ecology manuscripts every day has exposed me to a lot of really potent research. Statistics are cheap, but having a glimpse into the excruciating amount of detail and thought driving the process gives meaning to otherwise anonymous numbers.

Continue reading the tenets of my bleeding heart

eulogy

I delivered a eulogy today. This is what I said.

I’ve never done this before, so I apologize ahead of time if I’m young and stray too eagerly into the unorthodox or worse, the cliché. Death is still mostly foreign to me.

I only experienced a short window in Nana’s time with us. Seventy-two years of her story do not include me, and a lifetime of practice, mistakes, and learning preceded my interactions with her. Whatever her challenges were, I was not privy to them. As such, Nana will exist eternally in my mind as the pristine vessel of the best kind of grandmotherly love. On any given day, she would fulfill with gusto the roles of guardian, tutor, correctional officer, and friend. She made possible a wealth of excellent childhood memories which I look forward to reminiscing on for the rest of my life; the ride home from school in her glorified go-kart of a car, the bacon sandwich she’d make every day while I sat down to watch afternoon cartoons (starting with Thundercats), the countless hours spent doing puzzles and playing word games. All of that was beautiful and lovely, but I think it would fail the depth of her character to limit my eulogy to youthful nostalgia.

Which presents a problem for me.

I realize, as I trawl through the annals of my biography, that my memory is not good. I have this collection of scenes from my childhood, but the details are so blurred. In these memories, her mannerisms and demeanor are perhaps the clearest of what remains; I can recall the lilting style of her voice when she would admonish me, or how her lips would purse woodenly while she read a story, or the way it seemed like every wrinkle on her face would contribute to her smiles. But ultimately, I can’t remember a lot of what she actually said to me. I forgot, kind of like loose change through a hole in your pocket. I was too young, incapable of understanding the myriad subtleties that no doubt accompanied her old-fashioned sensibilities and warm companionship. I want to say I know who she really was, but by the time I was beginning to develop an identity, she was losing hers to Alzheimer’s. I am stuck knowing her only through the murky lens of early grade school.

Continue reading eulogy

grain

Early morning found me awake, so I decided it was time again to see how my old church was faring. As I hoped, the visit brought forth a slough of new perspectives on ancient paradigms. This time, my ponderings focused on the concept of “living by faith”, a phrase often employed in many religious contexts.

I’ve learned that a critical part of the process of reevaluation is finding a functional definition of the concept at hand – one that shies away from vagueries and can be envisioned practically. To this end, I felt this description accurately described the act of “living by faith”: engaging in any behavior where the outcome is uncertain or unknown. By nature of going forward with an action where there are a high number of unknown and uncontrolled variables, the risk of a negative outcome is much higher. Uncertainty naturally engenders much anxiety, which is why this concept is often paired with a call to trust in god to provide a positive result.

Continue reading grain

hiphopscotch

Let’s start this with a primer.

Until recently, I must confess that I held no special love for America. It wasn’t a hate, but more a boredom and lack of hope for progress. Having witnessed first hand the incredible amount of history and tradition that forms the backdrop of European culture, anything in America just pales in comparison. Prototypical American practicality and efficiency do not leave much room for what we largely consider to be the frills of society: artistic expression, creative thinking, and serious introspection.

Continue reading hiphopscotch

naturally

Even when I was still a consistent driver, I never paid much attention to bumper stickers. Aside from the minority that provide a cheap laugh, they seem to me like the most cowardly and ineffective way to make a statement. Every victim of the bumper sticker is left unable to make any sort of response; the argument starts and ends on a 12 x 3″ adhesive pad. The ultimate last word.

While I doubt the bearers of the stickers I saw while on my most recent monthly errand run really understood the philosophical and theological ramifications of their banners, some old concepts were brought to mind. A simple “JESUS is GOD” sticker brought a flood of memories of my childhood bible camp. Another “Jesus SAVES” led me on a long chain of thoughts; I’d nearly forgotten that the whole idea behind Jesus was that he’s meant to be saving us from something we cannot save ourselves from. Most people think of that something as being hell, but the more technically accurate answer is sin.

Continue reading naturally

metamorphosis

I’ve done it. I have produced another podcast. When I was failing for the third time to complete a decent written post, I realized that it was time to resort to drastic measures.

I’ll say it straight out – this isn’t my best, and I think there’s another direction I could have taken it that would have resulted in a more coherent point overall. However, I think it’s important enough that I keep at this, regardless of the quality of each individual creation. Hopefully it is worth your time.

#2 – Growing Up
The song at the end is B Complex – Beautiful Lies. Hint: it’s probably techno. I haven’t found enough new music recently, so some of you might have heard it in my presence before.

It’s a lot harder than it used to be to do this. I feel less confident in my ability to communicate at the level I think is required to demand the attention of my little handful of readers. I’m also certain a portion of it is my current creative ability has been surpassed by my capacity for critical analysis. Makes it hard not to agonize over every sentence. Lastly, I worry quite constantly about offending in a personal manner. It’s not so much that I fear controversy, but that I don’t wish to damage my trustworthiness by saying too much.

veer

I love conversations that spin wildly out of control. One moment can be spent talking about something incredibly mundane, but an off-key observation sparks a fast-paced back-and-forth and a solid fifteen minutes are spent hashing out the finer details of the disagreement, ensuring that no logical paths have been left unwalked. The ever-present danger in such a conversation is that things might get too complicated to enable a strong and coherent analysis and response at each turn. Creative thinking has to be applied within the box that the initiation of the conversation set. The best conversations make use of all the space within that box before expanding outwards as may become necessary, and they end when enough has been said, regardless of whether a consensus has been found.

Continue reading veer

offensive perhaps

To anyone who is deeply insulted by the mention of poop, feces, or the act of defecation, I sincerely apologize for this post. It is rife. Really, really rife.

Of late, I’ve found myself pondering a large number of bizarre alternate reality scenarios, spurred on by my increasing awareness of how arbitrary many of the things we do are. There are innumerable ways in which the world could function differently. The differences might even be sub-optimal for efficiency of purpose, but the same could be true of our world as it stands now. A huge number of our actions are fundamentally born of tradition; they aren’t necessarily based off of a rigorous formula of logic, effectiveness, or functionality, but often times can instead be traced back to tradition. Easy example: very few people use forks and knives because they’ve analyzed all of the various eating utensils and have deduced that forks and knives are the superior tool for consuming food. Tradition and convenience are ultimately what have lead us to forks and knives (among many other things), in the 21st century.

Resisting the forces of conformity is arguably the most inconvenient choice we can make. People often use conformity as a dirty word, but it’s just an easy way of describing the least disruptive path of action in any given situation. Disruptive can be good or bad – it’s all contextual. Social pressures aside, even the physical infrastructure of society enforces or discourages practically every type of behavior. With this in mind, I once asked of my friends while we sat in a food court eating our dinner: what if societal norms dictated that we ate alone and pooped together?

Continue reading offensive perhaps

what if

What if men of the future run for president decades in advance

What if they would troll forum after forum, talking themselves up and saying their name over and over again to the rhythm of a popular pop song

What if they would viral market themselves into popularity

What if presidential candidates’ names turn out to be consistently similar to the sound of the word for a kind of rare species of giant squid and land-faring dolphins

What if parents started naming their kids after obscure things to increase their chance at achieving the presidency

Continue reading what if

sandy

This is a post that I started (but never finished) last August, shortly before I departed from my job at Optimal Purchase. It struck a rather potent chord with me, now that I can reflect on what that choice eventually led to.

“Zefrank had a rather delightful little question recently:

‘You partake in a medical experiment. In the experiment you are given one of two pills. You don’t know which one until after you take it. One shortens your life by 10 years, and the other lengthens your life by 10 years. You have just found out which pill you took. The question is: which pill do you think will increase the quality of your life the most? Would one make you change the way you live your life more than the other?’

The answer is rather slippery. The obvious “trick” to the question is that most people would be pressed to make more of the time they have if they discovered they had less of it available to them; thus, the life-shortening pill would be more beneficial. This assumes, however, that the person is not already making the most of their time. What is “making the most”, then? Certainly, there is no limit to how well one can spend any given amount of time, so we can’t say that such a person wouldn’t be further enhanced by the life-shortening pill. Yet it’s a difference of twenty years that’s at stake, and a great many things can be accomplished and experienced in that time. I feel strongly that I am making excellent use of my time, currently – but will I look back in a decade and say the same?

Continue reading sandy

transform

It’s been a long time since a classic post. Forgive me if I’m a bit rusty.

Every few months, I go back to church just to see how it compares to the last time I went, and each time the experience is more bizarre.

The service itself has become increasingly uncomfortable for me. When the congregation speaks in unison, the chorus of mumbles precisely imitate what I imagine hypnotized zombies to sound like. I still enjoy the singing, but the emotions involved are more akin to singing along to Rihanna than anything else. The lyrics are distant and meaningless, simply being a mechanism by which to carry the tune. The sermon is a long series of statements that I just don’t agree with; where once I felt great confusion over how I felt about the implications of the content, I now simply see totally different interpretation of our existence. The crowning moment of awkwardness is when I lift my hand to deny the communion plate. The server pauses for a moment, as if to make sure he didn’t just imagine that I did what he thinks I just did. The guy sitting next to me stares at his piece of bread with absurd intensity. Every time. I remember how I looked around to see who was and was not taking communion, and I know that a very large number of eyes took note of my choice. I know that single decision molds the interactions I experience thereafter. I can sense in each conversation a careful tiptoeing and delicate probing to see where I am, and how I am doing.

Continue reading transform

hurry

A few quick technical things before I start crafting a new playlist for tonight.

– I’m 90% certain that this is working in every browser now. A few people were having issues accessing my stylesheet from work, but I think I’ve tweaked Apache to resolve that. I still want to know if things are broken for you.
– Comments may or may not be acting weird. I haven’t figured it out yet. It doesn’t help that Blogger’s code allows very little customization of the commenting engine.
– The sidebar is gross, I know. IE won’t render the margins correctly, so I have to leave it looking halfway ugly for everybody (for now).
– I’m working on another background, primarily one that doesn’t cause lag. Slower computers are not having fun with the transparency, and that’s because of the background. This background was originally 1024×768 (which looked significantly better), but I opted to shrink it to 800×600 for the reduced lag. Even now, it’s not all that smooth.

I’ll leave it here, for now.

Fool’s Gold – Nadine (Memory Tapes Version)
– youtube
– download

Really hits its stride around 2:30.

consummation

Welcome, my sweeties, to what is (by my count) the seventh incarnation of this blog’s physical form.

I felt it a fitting way to begin writing with regularity again. I am simply too hip to allow myself to wallow in a default template. My words must be emphasized by a glorious, fixed background.

If you are experiencing visual aberrations, please let me know. This is all still a work in progress, and I expect problems. In particular, if it seems really slow or stuff is jumping around on the page, I am eager to hear the details of your internetting apparatus. As for the site, the header and sidebar are in for an upgrade, and the comments section is definitively under construction, but it all functions to a minimum level of coherence.

I must say that I am very excited.

aliens

Halloween takes on an entirely different meaning as I get older. Growing up, it was one of my least favorite holidays. I’ve never been a fan of dressing up in costume – I find myself uncreative due to a dearth of motivation, and I always feel stupid running around in anything half-assed. The candy was lovely, except that most of my Halloweens were spent trick-or-treating alone. While this meant I could go at an extremely fast pace and hit up a large volume of houses (several occasions saw me end the night with fully two or three grocery bags of candy), there was little joy to the process, and certainly no artistic expression. Mostly I just dressed up in black and called myself some variation of ninja or wraith.

More recent days stress the elements of costume parties mixed with copious alcohol, and it was a rather sudden realization to find myself anticipating the weekend and its associated festivities. While I continue to lack any desire for costume-wearing, I delightfully found that there are enough others in the same boat so as to eliminate any of the social awkwardness involved with being the only one not in costume. I can instead enjoy the spectacle of silliness and broken social inhibitions of those around me.

While it might be considered irresponsible or immature to embrace this sort of tradition, American culture necessarily depends on these holidays. Having no long-term traditions or rituals from our heredity or locale, we need the sanction of a holiday – however obscured from its origins or overtaken by marketing schemes – to do what humans need to do: interact. We find ourselves devoid of good excuses to get together and celebrate our existence, and the grind of the day-to-day brings us to forget that our lives are worth delighting in. Halloween is certainly a weak band-aid for a problem that runs far deeper than one holiday, or even a “holiday season” can attempt to address, but for now, it’s the best that we can manage.

a little break

I’ve been doing some writing by my lonesome recently, but I figured it would be healthy to share a little something on the less creative side.

I don’t consider myself a particularly gadget-crazy person, but I do read a large volume of tech and gadget news week-to-week, which keeps me up on the new and pretty things that I will never buy. I did, however, make one exception to this pattern in buying a Zune HD. I pre-ordered one a few months back, payed the extra two bucks for release day shipping, and got to participate in the communal excitement that occurs with the release of something new and delightful in the world of technology.

It’s not that I harbor anything negative against Apple; I hold little regard for blind brand-maligning on every side of the fence. I am, however, quite disinterested in the iPod line. Though highly functional and decently stylish, I know my tendencies, and I am certain that I would find myself becoming quickly bored with something I’ve used hundreds of times without ever having owned one. My vanity is also quite consistent; the thing simply looks far prettier than its competition, and if I’m to be using something each and every day, I would expect it to meet a minimum standard of fashion.

Thus far, my choice has served me extremely well. It achieves a level of design that I think exemplifies where the user experience should be going: it executes its intended purpose without flaw, and I daresay that the experience of that execution is so smooth that it borders on the feeling of pleasant and calming. Something that gadgetry to date has failed to emulate is the sense of responsive tactile fiddling. A book’s pages can be idly flipped to and fro. A pen can be clicked again and again, until the person sitting next to you shoves a sock down your throat. Even something as simple as a piece of string occupies your fingers, delaying a feeling of idleness. Similarly, the Zune HD’s interface is so well designed that I find myself flipping through menus and exploring the mass of stuff I’ve put on there without even thinking about it. It leaves me excited for where technology will go from here, and that’s a nice feeling to have.

It also happens to be an immense upgrade from my previous mp3 player. For years I’ve been carrying around an 8gb refurbished Sansa that would freeze up several times a day, had barely ten hours of battery life, and looked slightly worse than Frankenstein on a Monday morning. It served its purpose nobly enough, but the massive gap between what I had and what I have certainly feeds a bit of the glee I feel over the Zune HD (I’m careful to include the HD portion, as I was no fan of the earlier Zunes). The fact that I can charge it for less than an hour and go for four days of constant usage blows my mind. Being able to fit (just barely) all of my music on it is also a delight; I’ve been slowly discovering portions of my collection that I never even knew existed.

I’ve heard high praise for its integration with the Zune marketplace, but not being one to buy music very often, I haven’t investigated it much. The browser is good enough for what I do (almost solely Google reader), and the apps thus far are mildly entertaining – though the fact that they throw ads at you is certainly infuriating.

A worthwhile purchase, for my own.