Hello everybody, long time no chat. I’ve had quite a busy life since the last time I updated anything, and honestly, since I don’t even remember what I said last time I posted on here (it’s been THAT LONG for me, with way too much stuff going on), I’m not even sure what I should update on. I guess I’ll go through a general rundown before I get to the main meat and potatoes of what the title is about.
I’ve recently had a small panic with my web host suddenly hiking up prices in a crazy bait-and-switch, so I had to take a couple of days to hectically move over every single website that I own, to the point where I cut my losses and completely deleted some websites that I personally knew I wasn’t going to have the time or energy to keep track of an update. So if some of you noticed that this one in particular was broken for a little while, that’s why… and I actually just have to rebuild it in general because the builder that I was using on the back end has fallen victim to bloat, spaghetti code, and the dev team being too full of themselves to recognize that functionality comes before brand name. It’s been an eye-opening experience trying to figure out what aspects of… essentially myself… I wanted to stick around and which ones I wouldn’t mind getting rid of.
For example, among a number of other things, I decided to fully delete my portfolio website for my personal art and take all my old artwork offline. And no, it didn’t include art made for this website, like what you can see in the screenshot above. I’ve had that website since I was a small child, and I’ve made endless iterations of it over the years. I had artwork there that was full of happy memories for me, as well as professional projects that doubled as a portfolio when I was looking for new jobs. Basically everything from sketches and mixed media paintings to industry graphic design projects. I have been with the company that I’m currently with for over 6 years at this point, and I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else, so that entire section of my life would pretty much just take up electronic real estate for no reason and have some database somewhere store something of mine that no one would ever look at.
Since I didn’t promote anything on social media, I can’t imagine anyone visiting that site. And it’s not like it was some sort of project like this one that others could potentially get involved in and share as a point of pride for being part of or seeing the itty bitty beginnings of. So I made the tough call and told myself I didn’t need it anymore. Besides, digital images of my art never really do it justice. The art that I make has to be seen in real life to be fully understood and appreciated… that yes, I indeed made XYZ with a ballpoint pen and lived with every single mistake that I made on that paper and turned it into something else that’s different and awesome. But another reason I decided I don’t really care about taking my artwork offline is that I don’t want it to eventually be used to train different AI agents and make, in seconds, a copy of something that would normally take me hours to days to make by hand… I’ve honestly been going through a crisis of self with the rise of AI… in which I don’t really want to make art anymore in the traditional sense, nor show it off. I’m very behind in this sense compared to most artists, I know. It does take me quite a lot of time to come to certain decisions and realizations in my mind from going back and forth and mulling things over a million times and exploring different options constantly… not just with this but a plethora of other things…With the creation of AI I suddenly realized that it naturally made me pivot and start to only care about my art having greater meaning and function, beyond being a pretty image to look at. Precisely because AI can now make in seconds what it takes a regular person hours and days to achieve. So I pivoted over the past few years of my life to learning how to code (I originally thought R.A. would exist only on this website, but I’ve moved away from that since then) and use Blueprints with Unreal by making tiny little projects and giving myself little homework assignments in a sort of self-guided self-education kind of thing.
This is my main project now, and alongside all the different nonprofit organizations whose websites I manage, this is the main thing I put all my energy into. And it’s really good to consolidate all of the areas where my energy is going. Simplifying my life is going to be a very complex and ongoing process that will take me forever, but I’m very set on going through with it.
Like I mentioned before, the idea that my information sitting in some database somewhere is draining the Earth of its resources has been important to me ever since I was a kid obsessed with Earthships and sustainable off-grid living. Every day I grow more and more conscious of where I leave a footprint. I’ve removed my personal accounts from most social media not only because I got stalked on random platforms, as I’m pretty sure I mentioned in some previous post, but because I don’t want unnecessary resources to go to keeping track of some ancient data that I left on the internet somewhere and for somebody to potentially come along one day and start using that information against me or impersonating me or anything along those lines. And I’m not the only one I know who’s been doing this, as the Dead Internet Theory becomes more and more of a prominent reality in our online existence. Anyway, I’ve been trying to leave less of myself available for corporate advertising and more of myself free for meaningful, worthwhile interactions with other people willing to go down deep rabbit holes with me.
In the same vein, it’s been pretty difficult, but I’ve been slowly deleting things from my emails and trying to “de-google” myself as much as I can. Because I didn’t know it before, but, I read something online recently that told me just how much keeping old emails in your mailbox wasted energy. And I didn’t even know this was an entire movement until I came across it online and found a whole society of people offering alternatives to popular Google products. This has been a more painful “breakup” for me, so to speak, because while I’m not comfortable with Google Maps tracking my location 24/7, I’ve used it over the years to prove to certain unsavory individuals where I was on given dates when they came at me with accusations, and in order to find places I’d visited but forgot the names of, but that I wanted to recommend to someone else or visit again.
Aside from trying to clear out my emails, I’ve been going through a lot of old documents saved in Google Drive. I know I’ve complained in the past about how I was unable to find a lot of website pages that I used to have here and thought I had saved in backups of this website, to the point where I was even going to the Internet Archive to try to retrieve them… Well, I found two of the pages I thought I lost!!! (Actually three, but I’m going to make one of them a video-game-only thing). (Okay, who am I kidding, I found four, but the fourth is a massive mess that is going to take me years to untangle, but it also belongs in the game so it doesn’t really need a mention here but I can go into it a little bit anyway…)
Since I’m not sure when I’ll be able to upload them and make them an active part of the site because I’m going to have to do that while doing a full rebuild, I’ll just show you previews of them here for now. I’m super excited about this 😁🎉🎉 so while it’s not anything new, it’s still a return to what used to be a more complete whole of something that was broken apart in the past. If I finally upload the pages, I’ll be sure to go back to this post and update it with links so you can see them straight from here!
I have Babbling Brooke, a page that shares magical quotes from a variety of my favorite authors and others. I thought the best starter project for me at the time for learning coding was making a random quote generator, and instead of making something that spits out some quick random variations of “Hello World”, I wanted it to be ~spectacular~ and worth all the effort, so of course, I went a little overboard as per usual.
This one was very, very fun to do because it took me days and days of train and subway rides on my commute to work (when I used to work in the city), of going through Goodreads and a variety of websites to collect all of these. I know that massive lists of quotes can be generated at the press of a button now with AI too, but these lists were all incredibly fun memories for me and something that I did to keep myself productive and away from boredom in my younger years. Back when this website was my main creative outlet because I didn’t really fully know what I wanted to do with Rune Academy yet. That commute was 2 hours one way, by the way! So I had a lot of time to compile pages and pages of quotes!
The entire quote generator has 777 entries (yes, absolutely on purpose)! So you can imagine that it took me quite a bit of time. And I even went and started recording the lines of everything I had in the document when I eventually solidified in my head that I wanted to make a 3D game. Don’t ask me where those are, though. It’s a miracle I found these pages at all. I’m slowly getting back to a good spot in life and sifting through the mess I life had inevitably become post {insert random tragedy out of many here} and throwing out what I no longer need and keeping what I loved and missed.
I made the artwork for both of these pages myself in Affinity Photo, using compiled photos and my own hand at painting, but at this point I couldn’t remember the process, even if I tried. (I dreadfully dislike Adobe to the point where I would happily use the evil “H” word “HATE,” hahaha, so I’m all for Adobe alternatives!). I believe all the photos (except for the cat herself) came either from my own provate photo collections I’ve upkept since childhood of every place I ever traveled, or free-to-use stock images submitted by small users to places like DeviantArt etc. I used to go on that site quite a bit as a kid and would dig up stock photos that were explicitly tagged as free to use as you please and keep a collection locally for some awesome flow-state art making without spending hours scrolling looking for the perfect thing to add to the picture. I don’t even know if I should keep any of that stock anymore either now… since AI can make everything in seconds yet AGAIN. Might be something I can delete to free up some space on my hard drive and in my life as well. Who knows. All I know is that these images and pages were a ton of fun to make and full of memories of being trapped in a basement while sick with one flu or another and trying to capitalize on the time spent indoors with no obligations other than getting better. I believe this was before the pandemic, so I made them in scraps of spare moments here and there, not during a robust lockdown when I had nothing but time. They would both brighten up a gloomy situation. And oh boy, there was nothing gloomier than the situation surrounding the second page’s image…
This second page, which I lost and then found, was about Midnight, a cat I loved very, very dearly who had passed away, and I wanted to make a shrine to her so she could be remembered forever on the internet. I made it between sobs and some very serious grief. And looking back, they weren’t just sobs for the cat; that was also about the time (also pre-pandemic) my life basically started to unravel and fall apart. It was a very slow process, but every moment of it was painful. So I guess the sobs were an outlet for pretty much everything, not just the cat.
And this tiny little quote generator page, small as it was (I made it with whatever mental capacity I had left), was a healthy creative outlet for me at that time. The quotes here were more heartfelt and genuinely made me cry when I found them all over again. And nothing could replace such a wonderful living creature. The grief was real with her. She is also visible on the About page in the section that reads ” In loving memory”. She was a very good cat and a great comfort to us all when we needed her the most. Mrs. Kitty never disappointed.
The third page I found was called the “Divination Station,” and it’s a testament to what my many obsessions with random quote generators culminated in (though not the final form, by any means). All of these random quote generators were from my era when the website was supposed to be everything that I wanted the game to now be. So at the time, I was learning JavaScript just so that I could make the website more interactive and fun, and the Divination Station was supposed to be like the final project that I was going to make in a class curriculum I created for myself. It was, and still is, a MASSIVE, MESSY document. (Except, ~foreshadowing~, yet once more, I got even more ambitious and made an even larger, messier document later on.)
I basically made an incredibly long document for this third page, but I never designed a visual for it because, in my eyes, that massive, messy document was never done. Which, after finding it now in the very same Google Drive I’m trying to clean out to hopefully get rid of some stuff to de-{insert-random-massive-corporation-name-here} my life, I realized I started making this file from sheer boredom-fueled ambition… because this appeared to have been at the height of, if not just at some point in the midst of, the pandemic. Which makes sense with the timeline of all of my little quote generators. Those smaller ones came first, and the more ambitious ones followed.
Finding all of these instantly threw me back into a series of memories that I’m ever so grateful to have re-experienced… this whole project was supposed to have multiple variations of sentence fragments that would go together in a cohesive manner that would later generate an incredibly unique reading similar to the readings you get from “Zoltar”, which was the direct inspiration. I’d encountered those “Zoltar” fortune-telling machines a few times in my life at different fairs and such and always thought they were the niftiest little things. I wanted to make my own version with my own little fortunes, being positive and uplifting and funny in some areas.
I’ve recently completely gone over everything in the document and cleaned it up where errors and typos existed and where sentences didn’t flow quite too well together, and added a ton more little sentence fragments written in my own silly little voice and speaking pattern. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously at all… but I did start running out of inspiration after mentioning some silly food items in the readings and started using the storytelling capabilities and meanings of Tarot cards as inspiration for some of the sentence fragments. So if anyone were to be inclined, they could also use this as a semi-legitimate fortune-telling toy… for people into getting their readings electronically. This was a massive effort and basically 6 years in the making. Which I wouldn’t have even remembered myself unless I saw it with my own eyes in the Google document version history. is inclined, they could also use this as a semi-legitimate fortune-telling toy… for people who like. I’ve recently completely gone over everything in the document and cleaned it up where errors and typos existed and where sentences didn’t flow quite too well together, and added a ton more little sentence fragments written in my own silly little voice and speaking pattern, and organized everything in a spreadsheet. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously at all… but I did start running out of inspiration after mentioning some silly food items in the readings and started using the storytelling capabilities and meanings of Tarot cards as inspiration for some of the sentence fragments. So if anyone were to be inclined, they could also use this as a semi-legitimate fortune-telling toy… for people into getting their readings electronically.
This was a massive effort and basically 6 years in the making. I wouldn’t have even remembered it myself unless I saw it with my own eyes in the Google document’s version history. And since I have everything in a spreadsheet now, my next step is to figure out how to get it into Unreal to make an interactive little quote generator there. I guess my obsession with quote generators lives on 6 years later! But as it stands now, that spreadsheet is finally done in my eyes. After making hundreds of sentence fragments, some over 200 per column and most meeting up at a weird 117… I got incredibly sick of looking at that spreadsheet and couldn’t bring myself to make each column 222 entries, no matter how cool I thought it would have been. Even so, as the spreadsheet stands now, the unique combinations go so high that nobody’s mind can possibly wrap around the number, and that’s perfectly good enough for me. (When I asked it to do the math out of sheer curiosity, Google said it was “8.5 × 10²⁵ combinations, roughly 85 septillion. For comparison, that’s more than the estimated number of stars in the observable universe.”) I’ll actively be messing around with it in Unreal Engine now.
Since I’m ready to delete the file from the drive, I’m not sure what to do with it other than post another little memorial of it here on my little website. This is a screenshot of the timeline for this third “page” that’s no longer a page. It has transcended simple page status. It’ll be a fun little interactive something-or-other in the game now, specifically. It’s a little sad to let it go, after having stared at it for so long over the years. Going from my notes app when I had no service to dumping everything into the doc and then back again… all of these things are so full of memories for me. But enough reminiscing, onward to greater and larger and more optimistically expansive things…
The very last thing that I want to share is the most unhinged and ambitious project I’ve ever taken on, as well as the most recent. It’ll, of course, be another random quote generator (there’s a pattern here!), and it’ll only be accessible in the game. And it’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever attempted. And to understand the full story of why I’d even attempt such a thing, I have to give you a little context.
Back in 2022, I divorced my ex-husband and went through an insane time. I was dealing with a massive amount of mental and physical health issues, from which I have thankfully mostly recovered. Some random things flare up every once in a while, but everything is now, thankfully, mostly fine. I did a huge variety of things to assert my independence and figure out who I was after being pressed down for so longand not feeling like a human with basic autonomy. Some of these things involved pretending to be much more confident versions of myself than I really was, and some included driving to remote places far away from wherever I was staying and trying out different extreme sports such as snowboarding, etc. One of the main things I tried to do to fill my time was reconnect with my Belarusian roots and appreciate the culture I came from. However, since I was dealing with extreme mental issues and feelings of guilt for even seeking out friendships with others due to the conditioning I’d had in my recently broken-off relationship, I wasn’t really joining local groups of other like-minded people or seeking out particularly Slavic friendships of any kind. Instead, I was burying myself in books and projects. One of the main things that helped me center myself was hearing my childhood language spoken and practicing speaking it in turn, but how could I get any practice without showing my face to the world in such a vulnerable and unstable time for me?
Well… here comes a book unlike any other… a compact but fat little book from around the time of the USSR which I found in my grandparents’ attic when I was a wee tween and they let me keep and take back to America with me. It’s a book full of just plain lists and lists of categorized by theme, Belarusian quotes and colloquial sayings. And I decided to go, through the entire book and practice reading it out loud, sometimes pretending to be some auntie or uncle passing a traveler on the road in some horse-drawn cart like they did all those years ago. And, of course, I’d come across some words I couldn’t quite understand. So I’d look for translations… and I started copying over into Google Translate so many of the phrases and listening to the pronunciations that I realized I might as well keep them all in a spreadsheet so that I don’t have to look up the same phrase over and over again… and I’m sure you can see where this is going. I got wayy too into the visual of hearing these phrases actually coming from some passing traveler and decided they’d be perfect for random dialogue in the game from NPC’s! But let me tell you, that csv is massive and terrifying to go through. And the translations are rough sometimes and don’t really capture the feel and true meaning of the original quotes. This is going to be the longest project I undertake, longer than making the entire map, because that spreadsheet is a wild wild mess, but as long as I’m in the mood for it, I love it!
I think I’m going to leave it there for now. I touched on a lot of things I already did and some that I’m going to do. Hopefully I can get those pages uploaded soon! I’m excited that I found all of these things!~
Have a lovely day/night everyone! Love y’all lots!
EDIT: I JUST realized, after already publishing this post, that I have yet ANOTHER random quote generator!! One that quotes wishes and can occasionally give quests in the game as well! Oh my goodness I’m too tired to go into this one though. It’s almost 2am for me right now😮💨🥱😪… All I can say is that they’re all works in progress and I’m working on them all slowly and steadily and carefully. A lot of great things can be achieved with sustained effort over time! 👍🎉 I need to update on here more… GOODNIGHT!!