Years after he viewed the “Crazy Frog” meme, senior Taylor Ward decided he may as well learn piano, adding the instrument to his musical repertoire.
“This is probably the least inspired piano story you’ve ever heard, but it all started from the ‘Crazy Frog’ meme. A few years later I learned that the meme song was called ‘Axel F’ and I figured that was easy enough and decided that would be the ‘start somewhere.’ So I sat down and taught myself some music,” Taylor describes.
An online trend and a pandemic landed Taylor on the piano bench, and the rest of his experience with the instrument is history. He meets with a private tutor for lessons each week and has added a growing proficiency in the instrument to violin and saxophone, which he has been playing since elementary school.
Taylor says of his piano experience, “It’s nice. So far it’s gone from out-of-tune plinking, what sounds vaguely like Jingle Bells, to what I am learning—not classical pieces, but contemporary piano, like game scores and stuff.”
Music only scrapes the surface of Taylor’s activities. He reads textbooks on technology in his free time and tinkers with computer equipment. An aspiring writer, he satirizes the Young Adult genre and is an avid reader of The Onion. In the digital and physical fields, he is a creator melding his knowledge of the real world with the world-bending nature of platforms such as Minecraft.
Video gaming platforms, as implied by his music choice, occupy an important role in Taylor’s spare time. He runs his own Minecraft servers and even contributes to the game streaming of a Youtuber called FlankAttack. Within the Minecraft universe, Taylor continually perfects his building craft, and he is currently meshing the styles of bungalow and Victorian estate to build a new structure. Other projects he has developed include an authentic medieval castle, detailed with intricate carvings on the external walls of the structure.
“Outside texture is everything in building,” Taylor claims. “The best thing you can do to a build is detail. You can’t just pile a bunch of rocks and expect it to stick together in real life, so if you add that stuff, and sort of give the realism—yes, the rocks are floating in the game, but, no, that won't work in real life—so if you want to add the extra detail to make it look more believable, go the extra mile and add the scaffolding.”
Of course, online the artistic possibilities are nearly endless, but Taylor has plenty of experience in creative building with the material world, as well.
In several different years, Taylor has also been a winner in a local Lego-building competition called the Boone Brick Contest. In this event, Taylor and other competitors are given a limited amount of Legos to unleash their creativity by building whatever design they choose.
Taylor says the competition is similar to a baking show you might see on Food Network. “Instead of baking a cake you’re supposed to build something out of Lego with a certain number of pieces available to you, and the best execution of it is the winner,” he explains.
For one design, Taylor built an intense scene with figures frozen in the thick of battle during a castle siege. However, when he realized that he did not have enough Lego pieces to close in a wall of the display, Taylor quickly improvised an even more impressive arrangement.
“I needed a back wall for that castle siege to sort of round out the thing, but I didn’t have enough pieces to make a full wall, so I said ‘You know what, I’m going to make a movie theatre out of this instead,’” Taylor recalls.
Creativity burrows into the small details of Taylor’s builds. He says, “As an easter egg, in all of my builds that I submit for judging, I always include a Lego replica of my Minecraft skin. It’s my sort of unofficial signature.”
Inventive story building is thus a central component of Taylor’s experience with gaming, and this creative spirit spills over into his interest in creative writing. Taylor has solid plans to publish his own novels one day in characteristically ironic fashion.
“I would love to tell you about the book but you know how it is, you’re going to have to wait until it’s published to find out,” Taylor teases. “What I can tell you about it is that it’s a satire of the YA dystopian genre making fun of all the tropes.”
Taylor intends upon mixing satire with a gravity in his writing, wrapping readers into his comedic and creative talent. His goal is to push readers to realize that, in his words, “Not everything is as it seems,” which subtly reflects Taylor’s own person. Writing a book, building elaborate designs on Minecraft, learning the piano, and more all display the diverse range of activities in Taylor’s life.
After high school, Taylor plans to attend Caldwell Community College, eventually transfer out, and ultimately attain a degree in computer science in order to support himself while he is developing his writing craft. Taylor reads books on the computer science field in his spare time and also coded his own website.
Speaking about how his interest in computer science began to grow, Taylor says, “Sophomore year was ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.’ I ended up in a programming class, and I decided that I really like working with computers.”
Pieces of Taylor’s current identity—in music, in his prospective career, in Lego competitions—are a study in the way passing opportunities can become long-term realities.
For his last year in high school, Taylor has been enrolled in the Watauga Virtual Academy. The COVID-19 pandemic has paradoxically offered Taylor beneficial experiences in exploring his hobbies and struggles with social involvement, as he has been at home for nearly the entirety of the pandemic.
Regarding his experience in staying quarantined for the last year, Taylor says, “The joke answer is ‘Why, God, why?’ But I guess it’s sort of an interesting balance of both positive and negative. It’s given me a lot more time to pursue my interests and become a super nerd on the most obscure [subjects].”
Despite the way that time at home has acted in Taylor’s favor in the development of his skills in various areas, he also says that the hardest part is “being stuck at home and watching the world move on without me…. [It’s like] window shopping on humanity.”
Still, Taylor has taken his creativity to new heights in order to combat the isolated situation that the pandemic has for so long necessitated.
“There’s a lot of flair involved with improv in the right spots,” Taylor explains. While he was speaking at that time of his participation in Lego competitions, many areas of his life display the same message.
As his experience in music, Lego-building competitions, and video gaming shows, Taylor intimately knows how to dig deeper into spontaneous opportunities. In the statistical world, there is a major principle that identifies whether or not an event, given a certain condition, is significant by chance alone. It takes a calculator to find a significant value, but it takes a student like Taylor Ward to capitalize on the significance of improbable circumstances. His story is a lesson in the influence of chance upon our lives, and the ability we have to derive meaning from the situations in which we find ourselves.
Written by: Bethany Hicks
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