Posts • Timo Früh

Letting the Big 'Un Rest

2026-07-19T16:49:55+02:00

In the last piece I have published, I mentioned that there was another post I had been working on, a slightly longer one. And that even said last piece was only an exception to my plan of finishing the longer one before writing anything else.

Well, another year¹ has passed since then, and I still haven’t finished it, though I have made progress. The thing now spans approximately 16'000 words — which is waay more than I would have ever imagined — and I would wager that I am around three-quarters of the way to the finish line. Which should excite me, I think, but in truth, it makes me anxious. There is a little voice in my brain, which has only grown more prominent over the last year, telling me that “I should be done by now”. That “I’ll be damned if I can’t get it done soon if I just hurry”. That “I shouldn’t be procrastinating”. That “I should just get it over with, so that I get get on with other things”. Which just makes it even harder to do. And harder to enjoy. It’s silly, I know. Because the only reason I am writing in the first place is joy. There is nothing to prove here. No one to impress. No exam to pass. No job to get. No job to keep. But still. If it were as easy as just telling that voice to shut up, that’s what I would have done.² The world would be an easier place. For many of us, I would imagine. But I digress …

Additionally, my list of post ideas has had time to grow quite a lot. And while none of those ideas make me itch to put them onto a page quite as much as the one last summer did, the thought of writing about something else for a change sounds really appealing. Even more so because the topic of that long post is a rather heavy one for me. Not that this is generally a bad thing, I would even say that having to order my thoughts enough to shape them into a paragraph about those kinds of things is a big part of what I like about writing, but I think doing something a bit more light-hearted would be a good change of pace.

And lastly — and most importantly — when, a few days ago, I reread the last few sections I had written, I did not like them at all. They felt hurried. Forced, even. And empty. I had produced a whole bunch of words, without ever truly saying what I had to say. Or much of anything, really.

All of which is to say that I need to lift that restriction I have imposed on myself. Because a piece such as that, on a topic so close to my heart, doesn’t deserve to be rushed. I need to give it the time it requires. To ripen. And denying myself the possibility for anything else to happen in the meantime feels rather foolish.

So I will not do that any longer. I don’t need to do that any longer.

There. I said it. Even better, I have written it down. And man, does it feel good to have some options again when taking up the pen.³

When the other one calls to me again — and I know in my heart that it will — I will be ready. Maybe to finish it, maybe simply to nudge the word count along a little bit further.

Only time will tell.

And that’s all right.

Crazy, right? At least to me, that concert in the summer of 2025 still feels like yesterday. ↩︎
Though maybe I would have been a bit nicer about it than saying “shut up”. I mean, that’s still a person on the other side there. Me myself, even. ↩︎
Well, when opening up the editor, rather. But that doesn’t sound as nice, does it? ↩︎

Live Rock 'N' Roll in 2025

2026-05-04T20:40:43+02:00

I’m currently working on a longer¹ piece for this blog and I originally intended not to post anything else until I’ve finished that one, but there is one thing that is on my Might Write a Post About This™ list which I’ve been reminded of a couple of days ago and can’t really keep my fingers off right now. So I think I’ll let the big one rest for the moment and squeeze in a little one in the meantime. Might even to it some good, getting my head off it.

So, with nothing else to do, let’s get right into it.

I love music. Always have. Both listening to music and playing it myself are two of the great joys of my life. And one of my absolutely favourite kinds of music is rock music. Naturally, though, “rock music” is quite subjective, the borders of music genres aren’t set in stone, after all. So, to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a quick list of the artists I’m listening to the most:

AC/DC
Poison
Guns N’ Roses
Bryan Adams
Foreigner
Journey
Huey Lewis & The News

You get the gist, I think. And you might also notice something else, which is something that never sat quite right with me. This music is old music. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, don’t get me wrong, but it always seemed to me that the glory days of this thing that I love so much ended a good chunk of time before I was born. That I’d somehow missed something, and was never going to be able to really partake in it, experience it.

So, about two years back, on a cloudy afternoon, when I was sitting on the couch of my mum’s living room, I decided to open up a web search and look for “new” rock music. And with “new” I don’t mean music that was recently published. Many of the old greats are still producing new records every now and then, and great records at that, but I wasn’t really searching for new music, exactly, I was searching for new musicians. Musicians which were going to carry the torch — or, well, the guitar, I should say. And so I scoured the various “top fifty modern rock bands” sites of the internet, but, to my disappointment, I found the results to be rather disheartening.

Now, don’t misunderstand me, many of the bands I found on there were genuinely great, no questions asked. But none of them really seemed to fit to me. It’s really hard to put into words, but I’ve always felt that rock music isn’t about whether there is an electric guitar on the song, or whether you think that what the singer is doing can’t be good for the health of their vocal chords in the long term. Or whether it’s … well … loud.

To me, it has always been about the feeling, I think. For music to feel like rock music, it needs to make me close my eyes and grin uncontrollably. It needs to make me tap my feet and play air guitar no matter how many people might see. It needs to make me feel a little bit like my heart was on fire.

Like “Nothin’ But A Good Time” by Poison. Or “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC. Or “Old Time Rock & Roll” by Bob Seger. Or “Rock And Roll All Nite” by Kiss.

And, now that I think of it, I feel like there is something more, something beyond the “simple fun” of these tracks above. A rare kind of melancholy I’m having difficulties putting my finger on.

Something that says “I know”. But also “Everything will be all right”. Full of sorrow and longing, and yet, somehow, soothingly hopeful at the same time.

The feeling of gazing upon a late summer sunset.

The gentle touch of your lover’s hand upon your shoulder.

A singular tear, rolling down a smiling face.

Catharsis.

Like “The Boys Of Summer” by Don Henley. Or “Summer of ‘69” by Bryan Adams. Or “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty. Or “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison.

You don’t always hear it, but I think this is what lies at the heart of it all.

Anyway …

Let’s just say that after quite some time, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for, and had begun to lose hope.

But then, at the tail end of some website, I came upon a band of the name “Dirty Honey”. And just as I’d done with all the other names of the hour before, I typed it into the search bar, hit enter, and clicked on the first song that popped up:

Rolling 7’s

And there it was. That spark. Everything about it just felt right. I was tapping my feet along and bopping my head the whole first part of the song, and by the end of the first hook I was grinning like a fool.

I was ecstatic. I’d found living evidence that one of my favourite kinds of music has, in fact, not died on me, at least not completely. I could live with that.

So I listened to the band’s music up and down on the way to the barrack and back.² They even released a new album later that year, called “Can’t Find The Brakes”, which, in the form of “Coming Home (Ballad of the Shire)” and “You Make It Alright”, showed me that in addition to the “stupid fun” kind of rock ’n’ roll, they could also do the other kind.

If that had been the end of it, though, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. This post idea would still be merely bullet on a list. But you see, a few months back, I saw that they were coming to Zurich for a live show.

So I bought a ticket. And I went. A handful of days ago. It was phenomenal.

Let me just set the scene here. I walked up to the venue³ and it was a relatively small club⁴ at the riverside. There was a HUGE dude in black at the entrance, eyeing everyone mistrustingly, and past him, on the inside, I could see another (less huge) guy, checking tickets. So I went inside, got my ticket scanned, and was guided to the third floor (not before going to the bathroom, though, which was, as is customary, covered in graffiti and stickers to a degree that it was literally impossible to see the wall), where I could see a bar, and beyond it, a room that opened into a medium-sized hall. So I got myself something to drink⁵ and walked out towards the stage to find a good place to stand. Which wasn’t difficult to do. There were maybe a dozen people in there who had arrived before me, as I’d, notoriously over-punctual, arrived about twenty minutes too early.

I know. Moving on.

About twenty minutes later, just as the event was due to start, a group of people whom I didn’t recognise walked onto the stage, and the crowd started cheering. I was confused for a second, already afraid that I’d somehow gone to the wrong place, but then I remembered that opening acts are a thing. So I settled in, ready to enjoy the show.

And that I did. While they don’t really evoke that distinct feeling I’ve described, these people, called “James and the Cold Gun”, absolutely did satisfy my “damn that’s good music” feeling, so I genuinely had a great time⁶.

Then, after James and the Cold Gun went off stage, enjoying their last applause, there was a short break. Everybody was standing around, some of us went back to the bar, or to the toilet, but after a short while “Rock ‘N’ Roll Damnation” by AC/DC started playing. The entire crowd perked up their ears and slowly pivoted towards the stage. And there they came, Marc LaBelle, John Notto, Justin Smolian and Jaydon Bean, in the flesh.

Now, I’m fortunate enough to have been to many other of my favourite artists’ live performances in the past. I saw Roger Hodgson and Bryan Adams when I was a boy, Elton John in 2023, and Toto just last summer. So, to keep the rest short; When the show began, a familiar kind of euphoria bubbled up in my chest, the one characteristic to listening to live renditions of some of my favourite music. If you’re lucky enough to have experienced something of this kind, then you’ll know what I mean. And if not … well … I regret to say that I’m not sure that I could describe it to you and do it justice. It’s simply glorious.

And this time, there was something else. Something beyond just that. This time, these people up there on the stage, the ones playing for us, making us sing to their songs, they weren’t cherished memories of a bygone golden age, but its spirit, drawing new breath.

So, yeah. Fuck yeah. I enjoyed myself tremendously during the next hour and a half.

And then, after the last encore, the crowd — me included — bid the band farewell with one last furious applause and then trickled out into the night. I took the train for home, processing what had just happened. I’d just seen Dirty Honey live. And it had been as fantastic as I could’ve ever dreamed it to be.

Which leaves me with very little left to say. Only that I’m very sure now that rock ’n’ roll is, in fact, alive and well. And if I get any say in it, that won’t change anytime soon.

Actually … now that I think of it … I might go out to try and find a guitar for myself. At a second-hand store. Some beat old six-string.

It can’t be that hard, can it?

Well, longer may be a bit of an understatement, it already spans around 4'000 words and I’m nowhere near the finish line. So, yeah … ↩︎
If I’m not completely mistaken on the timeline here (tough I might be) this was during my time in the army. ↩︎
It was at Dynamo Zurich, if you know the place. ↩︎
They call themselves a “Jugendkulturhaus”, which literally translates to “youth culture house” in English. ↩︎
For the record, I got myself an iced lemonade. Yes, I am boring like that. ↩︎
And, to be perfectly honest, I might have a bit of a celebrity crush on the bassist. She’s so cool. *imagine me blushing right here* ↩︎

Semester I

2026-05-04T20:40:43+02:00

Hello there.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve last sat down and written something. In fact, it’s been about as long as I’ve been studying at university, and not without reason. I simply haven’t found the time to write much during my studies. But still … It’s high time, the first semester is over now, and I have some much-needed time for relaxation and contemplation. So I thought as a first, and hopefully not last, piece of writing during what short break I’ll have until the second semester begins, I’d start with a little look over my shoulder at the last few months at ETHZ.

Well then, let’s hope that all this time writing mathematical proofs hasn’t robbed me of the ability to write not precisely and coldly but colourfully and with feeling (maybe even a bit poetically sometimes), and take a look, shall we?

Though exhausting at times, it’s been wonderful. Really. Just absolutely mind-blowing. I’ve learned about so many amazing things. I’ve been introduced to the fields of set theory, (linear) algebra, logic, dynamic programming, graph theory and algorithmics in general. I’ve constructed binary search trees, layered graphs, broken insecure RSA systems defined on additive groups, watched a professor prove the completeness of the resolution calculus (with respect to unsatisfiability at least), listened to another one explain why the n-th power of the adjacency matrix of a graph contains information about paths of length n in that graph, been walked through Johnson’s incredibly genius algorithm for all-to-all shortest paths by yet another one, and so much more.

If all of that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry; I myself would have been just as confused a few short months ago. But now, I feel like a vast ocean of knowledge lies before me, and I have just started to wet my toes in its waves.

I had a great time, as one can probably tell.

And I do have the answer to some of those questions I’ve asked myself at the very beginning, in An Open Road. Not to all of them, but to some.

Was I prepared enough? Well, yes, that I was. The first few weeks were a breeze, and I already knew most of the things we were taught. After that, it got hard fast, as was to be expected, but I was able to keep up just fine, thankfully.

Did I find new friends? Yes, indeed, I did. I made a great many new acquaintances, and a few of those do actually have the potential of becoming friends of mine.

Was I able to maintain old friendships? To this one as well, I can answer with a sincere yes. I’m still in touch regularly with my closest friends from before, and that is something I cherish so much. There are few things better than that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you meet an old friend, and you can see by the smile on their face that they enjoy your company just as much as you enjoy theirs. It’s the little things, you know?

There is, however, one question I don’t have an answer to yet. It’s the one about being good enough. You know, after starting gymnasium¹, which was the last big step in my academic career (if you can already call it that), it took maybe a few weeks to get past the first tests and obtain some feedback on whether my approach to the whole school-thing was still working. And then it took me maybe another half of a year or so to figure out a strategy that I was sure would carry me to and through my Matura². I was fortunate enough that my grades were as good that I never really had to consider what I’d do if I failed.

But now, I don’t really have that certainty any more. I’m studying at one of the most renowned universities in my country, and failure has become a very real possibility. You can’t really mess up an exam and be like: “Oh well, I’ll be able to get the grade up with the next one.” Everything hinges on your performance in a handful of exams over the course of a few weeks.

So, I’d say that I’ll know that I was good enough when (or if) I’m holding my master’s degree in my (probably trembling) hands. And that won’t happen for quite some time. Hell, this semester’s results aren’t even out yet, so I can’t even tell you with certainty whether I passed these first exams. I really hope so, though. I wouldn’t want to miss all the other new and interesting things this course of study still has in store.

But you know what? That doesn’t matter for now. Now is the time to relax, the time to read, the time to write, the time to make some music, the time to play video games, and the time to do stuff with my friends. It’s the time to spend a week doing things I love doing³.

And so I’ll be doing just that.

Gymnasium is a kind of grammar school here in Switzerland. → Wikipedia ↩︎
The Matura is the diploma you need to obtain at gymnasium in order to be able to start at university. → Wikipedia ↩︎
Well … You know … Things I love doing other that uni-related things. ;) ↩︎

An Open Road

2026-05-04T20:40:43+02:00

I’m starting my studies at the ETH in Zurich today — in about an hour, in fact, I’m sitting in the train as I’m typing this — and I couldn’t be more excited, but I also couldn’t be more terrified.

Today (finally) marks the definite end of the military intermission to my life, but it also marks the beginning of a new era with new chances, new pitfalls and new uncertainties, causing me to ask myself all the same age-old questions.

Will I be good enough?

Am I prepared enough?

Will I find new friends?

Will I be able to maintain old friendships?

Those are all good questions, but none of them are answerable right now. And that’s good. I mean, life would be quite dull if we already knew what the future held, wouldn’t it?

So … All I can say to myself is this:

Let’s go and see.

To quote an old favourite of mine:

So let the engines roar
Push the pedal down
I want the white lines on the highway
To lead me out of town

I’m rolling on and on and on
Who knows where I’m goin'

Life is an open road
It’s the best story never told

– Bryan Adams, Open Road (Room Service, 2004)

Why Don't I Write More Often?

2026-05-04T20:40:43+02:00

While writing my last post On Making Sense, I asked myself, multiple times, why it always takes me so long to start writing again after having published a blogpost. It is a weird thing that has always tended to happen, ever since I started this blog at the beginning of the year.

It feels strange to me, because I really enjoy writing. Ordering my thoughts and emotions and putting them into words seems to have an almost therapeutic effect on me. I always feel a lot lighter and more at peace after doing it.

But I think I’ve now figured out the reason why, or at least part of it: Every time I finish a post and am happy with it, I seem to lose the confidence that I could ever again write something like it in terms of quality or ingenuity. Not that I think that my posts are exceptionally high-quality or particularly ingenious, it’s rather that I think to myself:

“That actually wasn’t half-bad … It can only go downhill from here.”

And then it takes me weeks, or even months — depending on how quickly I discover a new topic I’m excited to write about, or revisit my “post ideas” list — to progress from:

“Hm. Should I write another post? No. I don’t think so. I want the next one to be at least marginally as good as the last one, and I don’t think I’m capable of that right now.”

to:

“Damn. I don’t know … I might actually be able to write a decent text about this.”

Which is, as a whole, not a particularly positive mindset to have, I imagine.

So yeah, I think I need to remind myself from time to time that if I stop doing something for fear of failing to become better at it, I will actively manifest exactly this fear. If I do, on the other hand, continue to do the thing, thus accepting that mistakes will happen, have to happen, in order for me to improve and to grow … well … then I will, in all likelihood, one day, be able do the thing in a way that is not only as good as, but possibly even better than “half-bad”.

On Making Sense

2026-05-04T20:40:43+02:00

Note: This post contains some philosophical passages about religion and nihilism. Those are not, in any way, intended to convert, condemn or offend anyone, merely to show my personal view on it all. And mind you, I certainly do not know anything more about the way of the world than you do, so please take everything with a grain of salt. And if you want to chat with me about any of it, I’d love to.

A few months back I was talking to a girl at the birthday party of a friend of mine and, after conversing about making music and creativity in general for a while, she asked me whether I did any writing. I (awkwardly) answered something along the lines of:

“Yeah, just a little bit, though … I’ve started a blog¹, but there’s not a lot on there … Nothing that makes much sense …”

She looked at me with a chuckle, amused by my apparently quite noticeable embarassement, and proceeded to ask:

“Ha, okay. What then, does make sense to you?”

Now, this is a topic I have actually thought about quite bit, and I would have liked to say something terribly well thought-out and philosophical about it, but, alas, my conversational eloquency has suffered a lot since I graduated gymnasium² and went through my mandatory military service (or at least that’s how I excuse these things to myself), which led to me saying something stupid, like:

“Playing the piano, I guess?”

Yeah. I know.

So I thought I might as well write a post on reasonability, which would hopefully help in ordering my thoughts on things of this nature into some coherent picture again, after they’d been so violently jumbled about by worries about troop morale, combat exercises, and the incredible inexperience and incompetence on both my and my superior officers’ parts³.

Maybe I’d even find a smidge of wisdom or two that might be floating around in this still troubled mind of mine. Who knows.

Let’s see.

Now, I have great respect for religion and I agree with many of the basic notions of protestant christianity I grew up with, things like “love thy neighbor”, “thou shalt not murder”, “thou shalt not steal”, et cetera, which I percieve to be keystones of all that is good and right. But what I do not do anymore is believe in any higher power or purpose to life.

Stopping to believe⁴, losing the certainty that there will always be someone who has a plan for my life, losing the certainty that there is a sense to it all, losing the certainty that everything will be alright in the end, was quite frightening. It can feel quite lonely, and seems quite sad, to believe in nothing.

But, I have to say, it is extremely liberating. Because, like this, with there being no inherent sense, no plan, no order, to anything, we ourselves get to decide what the sense to our lives is for us. And this fact, knowing (or believing, I should say) that ultimately, nothing matters, except to ourselves, can relieve quite a lot of pressure and anxiety⁵.

Which leads me to the original question: “What does make sense to me?”

Or, maybe more precisely: “What makes sense of me?”

It’s a tough one. I once thought I knew, and I think I did know once. I think I could’ve expressed all of it in a single sentence, but right now, I feel like I know nothing anymore, like whenever I look into my heart, nothing but a silently malicious black hole stares back at me, grinning and waiting to devour the next emotion that might have the audacity to start growing in there. Sometimes I even have a hard time telling right from wrong, and that scares me. A lot.

But I’ll try to write an answer. Right now. I think it will do me good.

falling in love

helping a friend in need

helping a stranger in need

marvelling at the beauty of a late summer sunset

bonfire conversations beneath a starry sky

sitting inside during a thunderstorm, a cup of tea and a good book in hand

learning something new and exciting about the world

teaching someone curious about the world exciting things about it

creating something that makes someone else’s life better

making music

listening to music

Those were more than one answer. But I’ll take it. Because I think what it all boils down to, eventually, is something along the lines of this:

“I want to do the things I love doing, be with the people I love being with and I want to leave the world with just a little bit more good in it than there was before I happened to come along.”

That is the sense I make.

Phew. That was something. Terribly sorry for the lack of direction and the tough topic, but this was one that just had to get out. And I think most of it did. Not all of it, but most of it. And that is enough.

This was in March, I believe, which means that this blog had about two or three posts at that time, which is, admittedly, not a lot less than it does now. ↩︎
Gymnasium is a kind of grammar school here in Switzerland, which one has to complete before being able to start university. → Wikipedia ↩︎
That’s a different story, albeit one I still can’t seem to shake. It’s one of those ones I will have to get out of my system and onto a page at some point, I think. But it’s not ready to be written. Not yet. ↩︎
Losing my religion, one might say. ;) ↩︎
All these thoughts touch on a specific group of philosophical views called “optimistic nihilism”. If you want to learn more about this, there is a good video by kurzgesagt you can watch. :) ↩︎

One for the Horror Fans

2026-05-04T20:40:43+02:00

I haven’t written anything in quite a while, despite now having an ever-growing list of things to write about. It’s quite hilarious, to be honest. Back in May, I was very motivated to sit down and type away, but I didn’t have any good idea what the hell to type about. So I started a list. And now this list has quite a few entries, and there were indeed some moments in the last two months at which I thought to myself: “Hm, I really should write something for the blog. And I do actually have some post ideas on my list, so yeah, why not.” But I never got around to it. Maybe the “really should” part was the problem.

But anyway, I’m rambling. To ease myself back into it, I thought I’d start with a rather easy one and write about a piece of cinematography I enjoyed tremendously.

I watched Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities some time ago, and while I liked almost all of the episodes / short films / whatever you want to call them, there was one that really stood out to me: The Autopsy, based on the short story by Michael Shae.¹

It is set in the aftermath of a peculiar mining accident. One of the miners seems to have brought some kind of weird explosive with him one day, detonating it in one of the tunnels, killing himself and a score of his colleagues. Following this incident, the local police launches an investigation into the matter, discovering more and more strange and disturbing details. In an attempt to shine some light onto this grisly case, a coroner is consulted by the local sheriff to examine the corpses of the miners. And so, this coroner, an old friend of the sheriff’s, begins his autopsy at sundown, dissecting the bodies one by one, audiotaping his every move, and, as of yet, utterly ignorant of the unspeakable horrors the night would come to hold.

This short is one of the very few visual works of horror fiction that really appeals to my particular taste in the written version of said genre, combining the suspense and mystery of a criminal investigation with elements of truly Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Instead of losing itself in gory visual details, as, in my opinion, many horror movies tend to, it manages to create and maintain an eerie atmosphere from the beginning to the end, telling a compelling and wonderfully intricate story about friendship, death and otherworldly horrors from beyond.

So, yeah, if you are, like me, an enjoyer of weird tales whispered in the darkness (and if your stomach is strong enough to withstand several autopsies and some self-mutilation), I’d highly recommend you give this one a watch.

I haven’t read the story myself, as it seems to only be available as part of a collection contained in a book, which I’d have to buy first, but I might do so in the future. ↩︎

A Little Something From the Archives

2026-05-04T19:09:31+02:00

While rummaging around in my memories of the “good ol’ times”¹, I remembered a speech I held some time ago. We had been tasked by our English teacher to write and perform a speech about literally anything and I’d just begun reading “The Tao Of Seneca” by Tim Ferriss² a short while before that. So I wrote a speech about Seneca.

After rereading it, I thought it’d be cool to upload it here. To make sure I don’t lose it, for one, but also because this blog is a space for my writing, so why shouldn’t I put some of my old writing on here as well? (And maybe I also want to remind myself that I didn’t always struggle so much to assemble these thoughts and feelings in my head into sentences that feel like more than just a heap of dead letters to me.)

Imagine a fine spring morning in the year of ‘22, the kind that makes you feel like everything is just the way it has to be. The kind that makes you take a deep breath and smile at the rising sun with all the peace and tranquillity humanly possible. Imagine a classroom full of laughter and good humour, all my old classmates taking their accustomed place in the classroom. There is one exception, though. One student, a tall young man, just a few weeks short of nineteen, makes his way to the lectern, clutching his notes nervously, his fingers shaking ever so slightly. And then, the bell rings³ …

Hello and good morning to all of you.

When we were told that we would write and hold a speech I was very unsure about what mine should be on. But when I browsed my own mind for something to the likes of inspiration, my thoughts suddenly snapped to Seneca, a roman philosopher who lived over two thousand years ago. I discarded the thought pretty quickly, because I was quite sure that even if I were skilled enough to do this topic justice, I’d definitely not be able to do that in three to five minutes. But for lack of a better idea, I’ll try anyway.

So, Seneca, who is that guy? Well, as I already mentioned, he was a philosopher of ancient rome and he was also tutor to emperor Nero. And if we think about philosophers, usually an image of an old man with a long white beard and an ancient book in his hands springs to our minds. But Seneca wasn’t simply a thinker, he was a doer, too. For him, his philosophy, stoicism, wasn’t just the study of existential questions, not a science of mere thinking, not something to do half an hour per day sitting in an armchair. For him, philosophy was something to take with you all day, something that must be studied and acted out for it to reach perfection. For him it was the guide of life.

And Seneca also very much liked to give this guidance to others, for, as he himself once said: “I am glad to learn, in order that I may teach. Nothing will ever please me, no matter how excellent or beneficial, if I must retain the knowledge of it to myself.” Because of that, he often sent letters to a student and friend of his, Lucilius. Well, there is no real evidence that anyone of this name existed in Seneca’s life and it might even be that those letters were never sent to anyone and were written merely for the lack of someone real to send instructive letters to. But, I think, if that were the case, it would demonstrate Seneca’s love for passing on knowledge even more. Anyway, one of these letters, which I’m going to tell you about now, shows beautifully, how practical Seneca was and how much he liked teaching his ideas to Lucilius.

In this letter, which is the third of his collection, by the way, if you want to read the whole of it later, he tells Lucilius about true and false friendship. He does this, because Lucilius seems to have sent him some confidential information in a letter trough the hand of a “friend”, as he calls him, but then warned Seneca not to discuss any of the contents of that letter with said “friend”. And Seneca does not like this, at all. He tells Lucilius: “If you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means.” And later, he also states: “When friendship is settled, you must trust; before friendship is formed, you must pass judgment.” Pretty commanding, right? Well, yes, but I personally think that this directness is part of why Seneca has maintained such an actuality even into modern days. He doesn’t hide himself behind his words, doesn’t throw around empty phrases all day. Instead, he makes his opinion clear and opens up his mind for us to see, so that we might pluck some thought or idea from it to carry with us.

So, if you like to think about things and find the time, read a letter or two, I’m sure you’ll find something of interest in there.

Now; I want to end with a quote from a modern thinker whom I know pretty well, but who is still quite unsure about his ideas and shall therefore not be named here. It goes as follows:

I love words. Not just because they are words, not just because of their legacy, not just because they are waves which carry information to our ears … I love them because of the ideas we can build from them. That is why I am no linguist, but a philosopher.

Thank you very much for your attention.

I find myself doing that waaay too often lately. ↩︎
If you’re interested in philosophy (or also if you’re not, but considering learning more about it), I’d definitely recommend you read it. It’s a collection of Seneca’s instructive letters, translated into English. You can download PDFs of all three volumes for free on Tim’s website. ↩︎
“The nostalgia is strong in this one”, I know. ↩︎

Why English?

2026-05-04T20:40:43+02:00

If you’re a reader of this blog who knows me personally, you might have wondered why I chose English as the main language for this website. This was originally a topic I’d wanted to put on the About page, but I kind of forgot to include it when I was writing the text for said About page. This fact came to my attention recently, when I was reviewing some of the stuff I’ve written since the beginning, so I figured I’d just write a full post about it, in which I’d also be able to go into the details a bit more, which I thought would be nice.

Now, there are two distinct reasons for my writing this blog in English, I think. For one, English is almost always the language of choice when talking about IT online. Take GitHub, for example, or almost all documentation on popular pieces of software or APIs. So it kind of just felt natural to start writing in English when I first opened the file that was to contain my first blog post. And in addition to that, I can now also practice my English, which is really great, because it has become quite rusty in the last 1.5 years or so, during my military service.

The second reason is a less technical one. And it’s a bit hard to explain, to be honest. But I’ll try, nonetheless.

I guess that I have some kind of a different connection to English than to German or to my mother tongue, which is Swiss German. My not wanting to write in Swiss German I can kind of understand, because, in my opinion, it is just really not a pretty language and I generally dislike Swiss German writing or poetry. I’m sure that some people enjoy it, and there are certainly many talented writers, poets and musicians who practice their respective arts in Swiss German, but it just isn’t for me.

It becomes a bit more complicated when I think of German (or High German, more specifically). It’s not that I dislike the language in general or that I don’t like German texts. I loved reading Goethe, Hoffmann, Zweig and all their peers in school and all of the reading of my early teens I did in German. Mostly, though, I read German translations of fiction like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Skulduggery Pleasant, which is part of the problem, I imagine. Something always gets lost in translation, just like when you see a mere picture or photocopy of a great painting. You can see its colours, discern its motives and grasp its meaning, but it is still not quite the same as if you were to marvel at the original’s beauty while standing at arm’s length from the canvas the original artist brought to life with careful and measured strokes of the brush. Since having realised that when re-reading a book I liked in its original English edition, I generally try to read all books in their respective original language (if I happen to be versed in that language). And because almost all of my favourite authors¹ write their books in English, it is also the language I read most of my books in. So it kind of makes sense that I’d prefer writing in English … I guess? Does that make sense? I don’t know, to be honest. It’s difficult to put into words, but there’s just something about English writing that scratches the itch in my literary mind in a way that German writing can’t. Or hasn’t yet, I should say.

So, yeah, to summarise, I think I’d say that, despite my deep appreciation of High German literature, I chose to write this blog (and this website) in English, because it is “The Language of the Internet”, because most of my favourite writing is in English and because sometimes, English just kind of inexplicably feels right.

Like Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, only to name a few ↩︎

Site Optimisations

2026-05-04T19:09:31+02:00

During the last few days, I’ve had some time to spare, but I didn’t really have a good idea for another post yet¹, so I set about optimising this website as thoroughly as my current knowledge about the web allows me.

Quick side note: If you’re not very interested in all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of this website and you’re here for my writing about other things, this post might not be your piece of cake. But don’t fret; While I will probably write more technical posts like this one from time to time, I don’t intend to make them the norm. As interesting as they are, I enjoy writing about general life things a lot more.

So, let’s get started, shall we?

General Improvements

The first thing I did was type “website tests” into my search engine and click on the first sites (namely https://www.webpagetest.org and https://nibbler.insites.com) that popped up. Those two suggested some nice optimisation opportunities and the following were the ones I went for right away:

Optimising my HUGO code, so that it doesn’t generate as many empty lines in its HTML output.
Adding a language attribute to the <html> tag.
Providing titles and descriptions to the menu bar icons, so that screenreaders know what they are supposed to represent.
Adding descriptions to all pages.

Additionally, I also converted all fonts to WOFF2 (they were TTFs previously), which can also improve performance.

There were, of course, many more suggested improvements, but when thinking about the rest of them I either didn’t really understand why it would be an improvement or plainly didn’t have any idea at all on how to implement it using my GitHub Pages / HUGO setup, but I was satisfied for the moment nonetheless.

Styling my RSS Feed

Now, there is another thing that I find really cool and wanted to attempt:

Styling my RSS feed’s XML file using XSLT.

Sounds cool, right? And it is! Imagine yourself visiting a website. You click on the RSS icon and instead of being presented with raw XML (or even worse, your browser downloading the XML file), you see a neat web view of the feed. I learned about this from Robb Knight², but I used the guide on w3schools as a base for my own stylesheet.

So, to give you the gist of it: In this context, XSLT is used to transform XML content into HTML content if need be. To do this, a separate XSL file is needed, which can then be linked in the XML file like so:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
+ <?xml-stylesheet href="/xsl/rss.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>

This separate file the contains the XSL. Mine looks like this:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />

<xsl:template match="/">
 <html>
 <xsl:attribute name="lang"><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/language" /></xsl:attribute>
 <head>
 <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1"/>
 <meta charset="utf-8" />
 <title><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/title" /></title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="../css/stylesheet.css" />
 </head>
 <body>
 <div class="top-flex-div">
 <main>
 <p>
 <strong>This is a web feed,</strong> also known as an RSS feed. <strong>Subscribe</strong> by copying the URL from the address bar into your newsreader.
 </p>
 <hr />
 <h1>Web Feed Preview</h1>
 <p>
 <p><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/title" />&#x2002;<a><xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/link" /></xsl:attribute>&#x2192; Visit website</a></p>
 </p>
 <hr />
 <h2>Recent posts</h2>
 <xsl:for-each select="/rss/channel/item">
 <p class="summary-timestamp"><xsl:value-of select="pubDate" /></p>
 <a>
 <xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="link" /></xsl:attribute>
 <h3 class="summary-link"><xsl:value-of select="title" /></h3>
 </a>
 </xsl:for-each>
 </main>
 <footer>
 <p><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/copyright" /></p>
 </footer>
 </div>
 </body>
 </html>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

To make this work on iOS, however, I’d need to set a custom HTTP header (as noted by Robb and, by extension, the comments in pretty-feed-v3.xsl) and that is currently not possible using GitHub Pages. This is obviously less than ideal for mobile users, who won’t see the online feed preview, but there is unfortunately nothing I can do about that (or at least nothing I could think of) except hosting this site myself³.

But if you’re on a desktop browser (that is not Safari), you should be able to see the styled feed if you click on the RSS icon in the top right corner. :)

Open Graph Information

When I shared my website and this blog’s first post on Mastodon last week, I noticed that the link previews didn’t look as detailed as they do when other people share stuff from their websites. So I set about digging around on various websites and I found some interesting og:something meta tags. It turns out that these are connected to the Open Graph protocol and that this Open Graph metadata was exactly what I was missing. So I jumped into my graphics editor, created the images I needed and added the necessary meta tags to the <head> of my site, which was really easy to do with HUGO.

The following lines in my baseof.html template:

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<meta property="og:description" content="{{- if .Description }}{{ .Description }}{{- else }}{{ .Content | truncate 150 }}{{- end }}" />
<meta property="og:url" content="{{ .Permalink }}" />
<meta property="og:title" content="{{ .Title }}" />
<meta property="og:image" content="{{- block "og-image" . }}/images/og-index.png{{- end}}" />
<meta property="og:type" content="{{- block "og-type" . }}website{{- end}}" />

render to the following HTML on the homepage:

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<meta property="og:description" content="I&#39;m a computer science student and a generally techy person. Lately I&#39;ve begun delving a bit more into the whole indie web thing and now I have my own website. All very exciting!"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="I'm a computer science student and a generally techy person. Lately I've begun delving a bit more into the whole indie web thing and now I have my own website. All very exciting!">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.tifrueh.ch/">
<meta property="og:title" content="Home">
<meta property="og:image" content="/images/og-index.png">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">

And if I ever want to have a different preview image or content type (like e. g. on a blog post), I merely have to override the corresponding HUGO block.

Syntax highlighting

Now, this came to my attention while writing this blog post, because I wanted to include some code and I hadn’t configured the site to show code properly just yet. This was quite simple to do with HUGO, fortunately. I just had to add some additional configuration to my hugo.toml:

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[markup]
[markup.highlight]
 lineNos = false
 tabWidth = 4
 noClasses = false

and then use:

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hugo gen chromastyles --style=onedark

to generate all necessary CSS classes.

I modified those a bit, added scrollbars, added padding and set a different background colour because the default one of the onedark colour scheme is obviously the same as the background of my site, as this is the exact colour scheme it uses.

There was a weird issue, where the font size on iOS wouldn’t be consistent across the code blocks, but I was able to fix that by adding -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% to the CSS of the flexbox containers Chroma (HUGO’s syntax highlighter) uses to display the code.

As a last finishing touch I then also added some styling to the inline code blocks:

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p code {
 background-color: var(--background-code);
 padding: 0.2em;
 border-radius: 3px;
}

Conclusion

I have to admit, it was really fun trying to delve a bit more into the smaller details of building a website. I was able to implement some things I already knew about and learned about some other, new things along the way, which is always great. And by no means do I think that there aren’t a great many more things I could improve still. I’m also not totally sure that I followed best practices for everything contained in this post, but I think that’s okay, I’m still an absolute noob when it comes to web development and I’m absolutely fine with learning from all the hilariously stupid things I’m probably doing right now in the future. But I’m quite satisfied with my hunt for problems for the moment and will fix the rest of them as soon as they pop up.

Well, actually, I did have a few good ones right off the bat, but I made the mistake of not writing them down immediately and my monkey brain obviously forgot all about them right away. ↩︎
Go read his post about this, too, he does a way better job of explaining this than me. → Styling RSS and Atom Feeds ↩︎
I might actually be able to do this in the near future, as I will probably start renting a VPS for my Nextcloud deployment in the next few months. There is also the additional benefit of being able to do redirections on this site properly as soon as I start hosting myself. ↩︎

Initial Post

2026-05-04T20:40:43+02:00

To be perfectly honest with you, I’m a bit unsure about what exactly I’ll do with this blog. I guess I just want to try out what one can do with this format. And I found some truly amazing blogs in the recent past, so I said to myself: “Why don’t you just give it a try?” So that’s what I’ll do.

There is also one additional thing that played into my decision to start this blog, namely the fact that I desperately need some writing practice. I finished gymnasium (which is a kind of grammar school which one has to complete before starting at a university here in Switzerland → Wikipedia) mid 2022 and underwent my military service (which is compulsory here in Switzerland) directly after. I truly didn’t enjoy myself during my 500 days of service and while I definitely learnt a lot during this time I also lost a great deal of academic and social skills I had acquired throughout my life. One of those skills I lost is the ability to bring my thoughts and feelings down on a page in a manner that satisfies me. Before I felt I could sit and jot down the content of every last corner of my mind in a linguistically pleasing and engaging way, all in the space of a few minutes, but now I seem to pause before every other sentence, trying to find the right words and formulations to express what I think and feel, words which before always seemed to be right in the palm of my hand. The same is true for conversation, even when talking to my closest friends. But that is yet another matter.

So, yeah … I really need to practice writing again. I think it might even aid me in finding some lost pieces of pre-military-me that I’d like to have back. I feel like even those few lines above already did some good, even if it took me longer to write them as I’d care to admit.

I think I’ll close with another thing I have given some thought to while building this site here. It is the question of whether anyone will ever even read this. But, frankly, I think I don’t care too much. I’m doing this more for myself than for anyone else. But please, dear reader, if you like what you are reading, do go on. Read my other posts (if there are any by now), and explore my site and the ones I linked on my /links page. I truly don’t expect the content of this site to be valuable to anyone but me, but if it is, I’ll be glad nonetheless. For if there is one thing I can always stand behind, it is bringing a little bit of joy to someone.