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Eastern Europe Horror + Tiny Update.

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Since I’ve started writing this update, a lot has happened. I’m no longer physically living in the exact location as before and can no longer be found spending my time with the same group of people. (My P.O Box stays the same as it’s not yet too much of a hassle for me to drive there.) This massive rift and move, coupled with the incredible stress in my home/family life situations caused by factors outside of anybody’s control and constantly keeping up with news regarding what’s happening in my ancestral home overseas, has broken my brain for a bit. After more months of turmoil and anxiety than I can count on both hands, life has finally offered me a fresh start, so I can now sit down and write for a bit.

It’s been hard trying to get anything done, but you have to keep chugging along and doing at least a crawl on your worst days. When I started this project, I made a pact with myself that I would have no zero-days, and I meant it… even if that means just writing down a tiny note on a napkin for something I have to do later. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy lately that most of my days have been looking like near-zero days. Still, I have to celebrate even the small wins to keep myself going.

So, since the last update, I’ve added:

  • A Music and Audio Roadmap for the project.
  • Buttons to help out on all of the roadmaps.
  • Added more content in general to all roadmaps and updated all progress bars with new progress.

Now that these snap updates are out of the way, I’d like to talk about what’s happening overseas a little bit and my fears about everything, and how I just tried to do my part.

I’m sure we all remember when we first heard about Russia invading Ukraine in the same way that we all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when The Twin Towers fell. Like the shot heard around the world. Same impact. At least for those of us who have family there and who legitimately thought this would signal the beginning of World War 3.

Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. As of me writing this now, the war has been going on there for about 100 days.

By simply typing into Google, “How many days has it been since February 24th, 2022”, we can all get horrible little spikes of sadness and anxiety.

The night it happened, I woke up from a crazy nightmare to a series of events that I still clearly remember to this day. It was 3 or 4 am or so, and when I looked at my phone, I saw backlogged messages from my mom throughout the night saying that her car alarm wouldn’t stop going off, and she wasn’t sure what was happening with it. It prevented her from sleeping all night, and suddenly, she looked at her phone and learned that war had begun and that Russia had invaded our brother to the south. Later, they discovered that the windshield had broken on the car with no real reason why, and it cracking under cold/pressure changes all night was what kept setting the alarm off. So maybe it was some omen or something.

I don’t really have a point in telling anyone this, just to share what happened amidst us learning the war had begun.

Since that day, Ukrainian troops have fought back bravely. Many people were lost, and many friends were gained. I’ve watched able-bodied people leave the States to go and fight to help protect their homeland. I’ve watched elderly people who’ve worked their entire lives here in the States to be able to retire back in their home country comfortably, don army gear, and fight for the beautiful land to which they’d returned after a lifetime away. I’ve lost contact with people, with no clue whether they’re safe or not/ alive or not. I’ve watched update after update from people who attempted to evacuate and stand their ground, hiding away in cities and towns amid bombardment. I’ve exchanged words of helplessness with friends and family regarding how we didn’t know what was going on and still don’t. I’ve watched attempts to contact friends and family in Ukraine with no reply. The same with attempts to reach those in Belarus, but this time, with the connection cutting out as soon as any mention of war was made. It’s been a wild ride.

Also since that day, I’ve watched communities here in the US come together in support of the troops there. For safety reasons, I won’t be going into any specifics on anything nor give any correct names on anything. But since that day, the government of Belarus has asked the Belarusian people to partake in something many of the Belarusian people themselves have been vehemently against. I’ve watched people leave here to help out with the war efforts there and I’ve watched them form battalions and fight alongside Ukrainian troops. Here’s an image of such a battalion that recently became incredibly popular online.

The people in this photo are from all over the place, but the guy front-and-center has the Belarusian flag displayed loudly and proudly. Because of his awesome mustache, he became known as “Warstache,” “Belarustache,” or “Freedomstache,” and he’s reached a level of fame that already has artists creating tributes (click here to see an example). If you’d like to learn more about his story and the conversation about everything, feel free to click here.

We here in the States among the community also began helping and supporting a battalion very similar to this one. We can’t do much, but we hold fundraisers every once in a while to help raise money for anything they may need. All we can really hope to do is offer monetary aid. At the latest fundraiser, we held an auction in partnership with a local Belarusan museum and historians’ center (one I’ll get into much later, as I’m actually exploring partnering with them for certain aspects of my project). Representatives from the organization Razom for Ukraine were also there to show their support and friendship with the community. At that auction event, details were given about the battalion we’re sponsoring, their current state of morale, and the exact breakdown of how all of the money was being used. It was incredibly disheartening to hear just how expensive some of the defensive and offensive gear is. I wish I could have given more, but I concretely gave as much as I could afford. I wish I were able to afford more.

All items auctioned off at the event were donated to the museum after the passing of some prominent Belarusian figures here in the US Belarusian community. Many beautiful traditional Slavic embroidery pieces were from their personal collections and pieces they’d made themselves. At least, those were the items that caught my attention the most. On top of everything else, these items belonged to the very same people who helped raise me when I was a child. Who helped shape my understanding of the world and what it should be like and what to strive to make it be like. They belonged to and were made by the people who gave me some of the best memories I’ve ever had in my life. I couldn’t stand to see these items be won by anyone else.

There’s a shirt in there that’s just a regular print t-shirt that I’m not sure if I actually got at the auction or not. Maybe for this one time we can just pretend that I did.

As you can see, the pieces are all absolutely beautiful and masterfully crafted. They’ll all be carefully preserved and digitized in some way or another to be a part of the virtual project here as a tribute to the people who’d created them, as well as the remaining members of the battalion still fighting aggression overseas in the homeland and those of them that have passed. At the very least, the memories they bring forth are absolutely irreplaceable. I just wish I had more money to give to the cause.

That’ll be it for the update for now. I have a lot to figure out regarding many things and a bit of rebuilding and reconnecting to do in my life as a whole.

I wish everyone love and peace.

-K

A Collection of Mostly Written Updates and an NFT Rant

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I’ll try to be short and sweet and to the point with the update here, as the rant afterward may get a bit long. Most of these updates made here are important to me specifically because they helped to clear off my desk and organize my thoughts. And they helped make the Roadmaps I placed on this site more fleshed out.

  • Updated all entries in the FAQ. Mostly adding more details to questions and providing links to make everything more fleshed out.
  • Added some more meat to the StoryWriting Roadmap. Not just in terms of filling in content for some of the “Coming Soon” status bars, but the details/explanations for some of the bars as well. I’m not using stock images for any of the roadmap details. I’m using real captures of everything I’m working on. Horray for transparency!!
    • For example: This is a Gif of one of my actual Google Drive Accounts that has predominantly Rune.Academy-related documents saved on it.
By adding real screen-grabs like this, I’m also holding myself accountable in reporting only on work that’s actually being done. Not just saying something’s done when it’s actually not. Hopefully they won’t be too spoiler filled!
  • Also added a wonderful new software to my computer known as “miMind” by CryptoBees (linked). It’s a pretty awesome and extremely easy to learn mind mapping software. One of the thousands out there, I’m sure. But it was one of the first ones I came across and, so far, it’s doing the trick. So I’m not about to swap it for anything fancier. With it, I was able to take some of my written and typed up notes and organize them in a way that allowed me to de-clutter my desktop, cloud, and physical desk. So I feel like I made enough progress there to report on it. Any future random pieces of paper I write on, I’ll just add to my already existing maps. (I like maps.) I’m not sponsored by them in any way by the way. I just seem to currently find the app incredibly useful and linked it in case anybody else wants to try it.
Plot-Lines Progress - larger gif

I’ve tried to keep this update short just to ensure you all that I’m still working on everything as actively as I can be. It’s important to have all of these roadmaps and to-do lists fully plotted out from the start. It helps give direction on days I’m not sure where to begin and what to work on. And it prevents me from spending too much time on some very unnecessary things by putting into perspective just how much I still have to work on.

On NFT’s

One such unnecessary time-sink for me at the moment is the new trend of NFT’s hitting the market. Now, this is something that got into my creative circle of acquaintances as something you have to do or else you’re not a real artist or creator. A new technology that’s just hit the market and that must be jumped on while the going is still hot to make some easy and fast money. There was even conversation in non-creative circles about investing in them and in crypto in general and making out like a bandit. People started telling me that I could end up funding my entire project on Etherium with the art that I make and still have some left over. I went on websites of my old art-school classmates and saw that they were entering the NTF space as well and planning rather important-sounding opening parties for theirs as if they were hosting gallery openings. It seemed too good to be true, but then there were stories like this one popping up left and right in the news… (click the image for the link to the article)…

So, it still seemed too good to be true, but then my little brother made a bunch out of the blue and it seemed like something I should definitely look into. I started doing research and following all of the steps everyone said to do. If not for going into this space pretty deep, I would never have started the discord that I currently have. It’s empty and full of NTF information, but it’s not currently a priority enough for me to update/fix it. Still, it is one of the best ways to directly reach me. Aside from the discord, I also started making a debut page here on this site for them (modeled after some of the ones I lurked on), a roadmap alongside the others I posted, and I also started work on the NFTs themselves. Here’s an early video of the process that I shared:

@rune.academy Massive projects are a-brewin!! Come join my new discord, let’s chat ?? #nft #nfts #fantasyart #fantasyartwork #nftcollection #nftcollector #nftart ♬ Big Dreams – The Score & FITZ

In doing research, I made a list of pros and a list of cons. On the pros side, I could make them from things I was making anyway for the project – my concept art for the different assets I was going to introduce into the virtual space (or scrap if it didn’t fit… that’s what concept art is for…). I could include metadata into the NFTs that would later be used in-world in very interesting ways. A few other points made the list but they seem so trivial now that I can’t even remember them. I’m sure someone convinced me to put “you’ll be taken more seriously” on to that list at some point and I almost started believing that my project was somehow less real since it didn’t have these little tokens attached to it. But the cons quickly outweighed and outnumbered any pros on that list. I got a lot of push-back and highly negative takes on NTFs that I simply couldn’t ignore if I was to continue. A small bit even made it into the comments on my own videos that I posted on my TikTok while I was still getting my feet wet… such as this one:

@rune.academy #duet with @markliamsmith #nft #nftart #nftcollector #nftartist #whatisannft #whatarenfts #nftsexplained #imakenfts #til ♬ original sound – Mark Liam Smith

The fact that they’re terrible for the environment definitely rattled my nature-loving bones a bit. After all, I’m the crazy artsy lady slowly but actively working towards building her own Earthship dream house. (I give some details on that in the FAQ.) And the massive damage that minting and trading NFTs is causing the environment would far outweigh any negation-of-carbon-footprint that would be caused by me building any eco-friendly buildings. That was one of, if not the main con to working with and creating NFT’s. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t enough of an artist if I didn’t make some. I even started looking into how NFT’s came into being (and why would people want them if they were so terrible?), and it was basically because there was a massive crypto market and a lot of wealth in crypto as an idea and a currency, but a lack of things to actually do with it and use it for. You’re going to kill me for embedding so many videos, but here it is out of someone’s mouth that isn’t my own:

@rune.academy #NFTs were created solely as something you can actually buy with #crypto . Because you can’t really buy too much with it yet. #nftartwork #fantasyart ♬ original sound – Rune.Academy

But why were game devs and massive studios pushing crypto and NFTs onto their players left and right suddenly? They were pushing the change for the future that they wanted to see happen. There were so many conversations happening online about how gamers and social network users were angry about large tech giants pushing this change onto them by getting celebrities to join in that my head began to spin. Facebook’s CEO alone spent more money than I’ve ever seen in my life just rebranding to META and forcing these ideas down people’s throats, with the main tactic being FOMO after losing most of his userbase to newer platforms. And so far, almost everyone I’ve asked personally not too far into the art or investment circle has either not cared about this move of his or downright hated it. Anyone who’s a self-proclaimed tech-saavy or “cyber”(etc) artist/investor looking to make a quick buck is, unfortunately, falling for the FOMO. And to an unsettling degree too. The way they speak starts to become very reminiscent of multi-level marketing “salespeople” trying to rope in someone new. But it could all also be because those few are just louder than their uncaring counterparts.

Now also, all these studios and companies are talking about making some massive metaverse and everyday, normal creators are hopping onto the trend by integrating them into their virtual worlds. And if they’re not saying it directly, they’re somehow making people believe it. Because I’ve come across this confusing notion more than just a few times in exploring the space. People are under the impression that all of their NFT tokens and assets will just transfer over from platform to platform without even asking the questions of how they’ll all link up in the end or why companies competing against one another would go out of their way to allow for cross-platform compatibility with their own competitors. These investors are legitimately thinking that they’ll be able to buy a hat from one space and transfer it to a completely different one. Sure, maybe someday. But it’s a definite gamble. And until there’s more concrete evidence that someone’s actually working on one platform that’ll be the end-all-be-all of virtual reality, I’m not convinced on the latter part. I’ll just look at them for what they are, as bids on art and nothing more. (Even that take isn’t exactly accurate as you don’t even own the art in the end.) Then, on top of everything else, videos like this came along and presented logical arguments that I simply couldn’t ignore.

So my main reasons for making NFTs, the fact that “I was making something similar already anyway, so I might as well mint some”, and “there’s a chance that I might be early to the party and make a bunch of money” were falling to the wayside fascinatingly fast. On the latter point, a sour taste definitely entered my mouth when taking into account the thought that NFT’s were mixed up in so many scams so early on, with so much harassment on Discord from spammers that I had to make a whole section on there about how to protect yourself from them.

Like why would I try to sell something to someone if I then had to explain to them how they could be scammed buying something similar and why mine definitely isn’t a scam??? Like, “Here’s some magical white pixie powder that looks like cocaine, but definitely is not cocaine. Here’s how to tell the difference between cocaine and my magical white powder… do you see how hard it is to tell the difference? Yeah? Now just trust me when I tell you that what I’m selling you isn’t cocaine, and, in fact, perfectly legal to buy and you definitely won’t go to jail or go bankrupt.” I’m not willing to have someone take a gamble on me if I’m then in turn not willing to turn around and take a gamble on someone else. And a lot of the people who take the money and run after making tons of empty promises are facing consequences for their actions now. Still, there are many who might never. I was recently blessed with a video like this on my YouTube page that gave me some hope.

Absolutely stupid. I could be spending my time actually developing and creating things that all accumulate and snowball into something larger and leave all of this NFT business for a bit later when 1) the entire market stops freaking out about people running with their money, 2) when people actually start scamming less and are charged more to deter them from doing it in the first place, 3) when I figure out how to implement the metadata I wanted to put into them into the actual project I’m working on without just making empty promises, 4) when it stops killing the planet in order to actually implement, 5) when there’s just overall less sketchiness associated with everything and fewer people willing to fight you for every move you want to make.

It would be interesting to see how the space evolves once the trend and hype die down. It might become more legitimate or it might die out. At this rate, later on down the line, I might as well forego the blockchain altogether and host some sort of art purchasing party that comes not only with metadata code that can be used virtually, but also an art print that someone can hang on their wall and a nice shout-out and a pat on the back or something. I can even bring cookies and tea.

I have much, much more to say about all of this still, but this is definitely enough to chew for now. I’ll be watching the space closely and might post something else about it later on. No promises though. Have a lovely day everyone.