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.
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’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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
If you read the previous update post, then you may have gathered that I’m pivoting directions with the project. Away from the archaic and at-the-mercy-of-slow-web-hosts website model, to something more contained and more conducive to telling a good story and stretching my artistic and creative muscles.
That post was insanely long, so I’ll be doing my best to keep this short. In that post, I not only poured my heart out at all of the frustration I’ve been feeling with this project recently but also detailed a lot of parts of the site that I’d deleted.
Here, the list of deleted items continues in more detail since the last update. Alongside some new additions so that the site serves a newer, greater purpose with the new direction. Hopefully, it’ll be a more pleasant experience now that it’s been more slimmed down.
Items Deleted:
The whole entire Suggestion Box and everything that goes along with it! I know, shocking! But honestly, a better way to reach me would be either on social media or through discord. I never check my emails anyway. Didn’t get a screenshot of the page before I did that, but that’s ok, the illustration was old anyway. You can find it in the gallery if you’d like. But I have half a mind to delete the gallery as well, as it’s also not really needed anymore. I’m keeping it for nostalgia purposes. I’m still combing other pages and removing links to it and finding new ones as I write this.
I’m also seriously debating deleting the library with all of the flippy books that I showed off in a previous library update. I can keep it alongside some of the javascript entertainment spectacles like the Babbling Brooke quote generator, the interactive maps, and the runes you can cast to get an online reading. But it all takes up space and I’m all about trimming the fat at the moment. I may regret deleting this in the future, however, so I’ve made private all of these pages for now.
The email sign-up link has been removed as well as the pop-up with the squirrel on it. I don’t actually have an email marketing campaign, nor do I want to run one. As stated before, I barely check my own emails, and would very much prefer to not be the cause of spam anguish in the inboxes of others. This may change in the future, but for right now, I don’t want to spread myself too thin.
The side menu with the bookcases and other little widgets, as well as the side column on the Updates page
They were useful when there were lots of links to click such as “Join the Community”, “Login”, “Your Courses”, “View Your Profile”, etc. I even illustrated each bookshelf to make sense for the links it would hold. For example, the one with the globe was the one that housed the maps. And at one point, they seemed like the most important thing in the world to get right, as this would be the main panel used to navigate for everyone visiting. But now, absolutely useless. I removed all of those unimportant items and moved the visitor widget to the footer. Here are screenshots of them right before deletion.
I’m entirely unsure if I could use them for anything in the future with the new iteration of the project. They’ll likely be flying around in scrap limbo for a while.
Removed a fairly dumb widget about safety and security that was just taking up space for no good reason and replaced it with the visitors’ map in the footer (as mentioned above).
I reworked the entire About Us page (I’ll go into it more below). But in doing so, I removed quite a lot of text. Again, I’m all about trimming the fat right now and I’m absolutely not in the mood for flowery language. Alongside this, I removed the volunteer profile area where I had everyone’s photos and blurbs. For one thing, there are quite a bit more names that must be added now, and adding a photo and description for everyone would take too much time. But most importantly, not everyone wants to have their photos and information shared so nonchalantly. A concern regarding reverse image search has also been brought up and all images have been removed. In my mind, the ultimate success of the project is still up in the air, and I don’t want to lead anyone astray by talking it up like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It’s simply a creative project that I’m slowly working on snowballing and I sincerely appreciate every time anyone wants to help out of the kindness of their heart. The need and requests for privacy are completely understandable to me and I absolutely respect the boundaries set by others. I didn’t touch the “In Loving Memory” portion though. It’s a very important section to me – but if family members of the individuals reach out to take them down, I will.
I removed testimonials from both the Front Page as well as the About Us section and moved them to the currently under construction runeshops.com website I’ve finally started working on. Again, I want to compartmentalize, organize, and trim the fat in as many places as possible, and those testimonials no longer make sense being in those areas.
Edited some of the look-and-feel and text on the homepage to echo the new direction of the site/project.
Fixed some broken elements on the calendar page that changed due to updates and me getting a bit too happy deleting things.
Updated all text on the About Us page to fit with the new project pivot.
Hopefully, many more wonderful developments are to come in a very timely manner. Now is a very exciting time, and I feel a fire under my butt to create. So off to make something else I go. Contributing to that snowball.
Hello all! I’m sure all of your lives have been nuts lately. Mine sure has. With a lot of career/family things going on, I had to take a hiatus from doing any updates to this website as well as my social media accounts (which is why, if you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been posting anywhere really). But even though I took that hiatus, it doesn’t mean that I completely stopped thinking about everything I want to work on and everything that is currently in the process of being done.
And that is precisely what I want to touch on in today’s post. This is going to be a long one, so strap on in.
I think every once in a while, it’s crucial to take a step back and take a long, hard look at what you’re working on. Take a break to do some research, work on some other projects, and, in general, let your work sit and digest for a little while. Then, come back with fresh eyes and a newer, more innovative, more informed approach. I do this with everything, be it websites, paintings, drawings, writing, or home improvement projects. And I highly recommend this advice often to anyone who feels stuck in a particular project, as I’ve come to find myself with R.A lately.
With R.A in particular, in the past couple of years, I began to experience a sort of accumulating irritation with the way site progress has been going. This was both on the back and front end, as well as a gnawing notion that there were more robust and substantial ways of accomplishing everything I wanted to achieve without nearly half as much heartache and headache. This also culminated with the fact that it was becoming clearer by the day that this wasn’t the best medium in general for the project (more details below). In my hiatus, I researched the viability of my approach, because all of the work I’d been doing on this site, all the aggravated hours I’d been putting in, all increasingly felt like they were very clearly going to waste – and I wanted to take some time to understand why my gut was telling me this.
In my research, I listened to the advice regarding my progress from people such as yourselves reading this now. Also, from others who had been around the bend professionally more than I have. I actively sought out advice others gave to those in similar situations via online forum archives. I even listened to some YouTube rants by people who seemed to know what they were talking about and pictured them speaking directly to me. It was all very effective at smacking me with reality – like a brick to the face. After all that, I’ve decided to make massive changes to my site and approach to R.A as a whole. Specifically, I was hit with the realization that what I thought was the best path to executing my idea, under closer scrutiny, was a massive time and money sink. And especially if that meant copying what my predecessors were doing wrong, even though I honestly thought that I was bettering their approaches and methods. Also, I needed many moments to collect my intentions and just, in general, realize exactly what I wanted to achieve with R.A. Just because I’ve had this vague idea since I was a kid doesn’t mean I have to stick to it entirely to the last letter if there were better ways of getting things done that made more sense for the present time. Time has passed and people and technology have changed. I myself haven’t stayed the same. So why have I kept my aspirations in their unaltered, childhood forms?
P.S – Before you read, please note that every time I say “as a kid” or “childhood”, I really mean any time from around the age of 6 years old to about 20. I’m serious. The definition is very broad, and upon rereading, I don’t feel like going back and adding specifics.
What’s Now Officially Been Removed Forever And Why
The Entire Learning Interface – This seemed to be one of the few actual things I let on to in the various blocks of text found on this site. It honestly seemed like an incredible idea at the time, especially since I realized the trend of working from home long before the pandemic (primarily because of many of my old work colleagues chattering nonstop about it at the time). I realized that learning from home would follow suit as well. I already joined some “online magical schools” when I was a kid, run by different groups who were looking to capitalize on the Harry Potter trend. Kids were flocking left and right to join schools of witchcraft and wizardry, just like those in the books and movies. Such schools unabashedly said, themselves, in various interviews that that’s exactly what they were capitalizing on.
But many of those schools didn’t seem like the books at all. At least they didn’t convey the same atmosphere to me. They all just had flat, academic lessons to offer. No great story, and, much to my dismay, the classes offered were only remarkable because of the occult and vaguely taboo (for the time) subject matter. They weren’t very interactive or memorable. Most weren’t even anywhere near what I actually wanted to learn about, which was the history and practices of my own ancestors, not just the standard western practices popularized and romanticized in HP. And more than anything, I was chasing the feeling of being wrapped up in an incredible story. Just like in the books. The online schools were just information dumps. No incredible, memorable tale. Just standard digitized encyclopedias written by ordinary folks like you and me.
Well, guess what. Most recently, I’ve come to find that schools such as this are a dime a dozen and have popped up all over the place. Having been active in more esoteric circles on social media, I know this to be a fact, as most of the business-oriented people I follow or that follow me, have a school or course of some sort that they offer on their website. I guess everyone my age who joined the same communities as I did when they were younger decided they could do it themselves too. Perhaps they saw the same gaps in niches that they thought they could fill to make what they had to offer better than what was already out there. Maybe they thought they could make a more established name for themselves or were just looking to capitalize on advice from some online guru for some easy cash. And guess what, they have almost no traction and have to sell these courses very hard, especially since there are so many for the potential customers to choose from. And even potential customers are in general limited since everything can be found online for free with enough digging anyway. (I tried saying I’d keep everything free to try to get around this but the amount of work, time, blood, sweat, and tears that went into everything I did would end up making that an impossibility eventually.)
And on top of everything else, the subject matter is no longer as closed off and exclusive as it was back in the day. It no longer warrants the joining of an exclusive online “magic school” community. Primarily because it’s no longer as taboo as it once was back in the early days of the internet. Support networks are easy to find on popular social apps so the social media aspect of these schools is not necessary anymore. Personally, for every course I was able to gain paywall access to, I was able to find a dozen more free sources elsewhere that explained the same exact subject matter in a much simpler, faster, and more engaging way. People now consume everything via popular apps and don’t have the attention spans to read a short article (let alone a longer one like this – if you consider this long). Only a select few would sit through an entire course. Younger kids especially seemingly have much better things to do with their lives than sit in silence, read, and take tests to pass classes in their free time (which is one of the main ways learning platforms operate – even with gamification cranked up to the max). Even in regular classrooms, teachers now have to do extreme mental acrobatics to hold their pupils’ attention. Only a rare select few would go to a self-directed class. And part of the main problem here is that the old system of lesson->test, lesson->test (rinse, repeat) no longer works. In fact, tests were one of my most hated parts of traditional schooling.
The Funny Quizzes – One of the first things I tried to do to get around that problem, while still sticking within that old system, was to make the quizzes and tests required to pass the classes shorter, more dispersed, thoroughly reworded to encourage more critical thinking, and crucially, individualized, fun, and funny. (I also made sure the lessons I wrote were also very frequently broken up and written in an engaging and fun style.) Sometimes I’d even make a note to include images, diagrams, or even videos, which all took an incredibly long amount of time to put together.
My mixed-age beta test audience loved them, so I thought I’d figured it out! I’d put in “joke” answers in almost every question and would rephrase them so that you couldn’t just copy and search the keyword in the article in a separate window. That’s actually what I did when I was a student at some of these online schools. I’d literally have a separate window open with “CTRL + F” at the ready, and I turned it into a game to ace as many courses without reading a single thing as possible. It was surprisingly easy. In the end, however, I was collecting certificates but not learning a single thing, and that nearly singlehandedly defeated the entire point of the school. But it was because the system itself was boring and outdated and allowed for such shenanigans. I always told myself I’d eventually go back to reread and actually learn, but really, did I? If you were a kid, would you? Of course, you wouldn’t, because it’s not fun and feels like a chore. Even now, I don’t know most adults who would, especially with their busy life schedules. Everything available in such courses is simply available for free in binge-able short video format that’s a lot easier to digest since it’s spoon-fed information straight into your face. You don’t have to do any legwork by sitting down and concentrating and reading or watching long lectures that someone poured hours of their life into. Even most books that were once so coveted on these subjects are now available for free online with a quick Google search of the title + “.pdf”.
The Interactive Landscape – So for a long time I stubbornly stuck to making the same old, broken thing others did, but slightly “better” and “different”. I dug a little deeper into my memory to try to remember what websites I actively engaged with as a kid for hours in the end. These had to be memorable, highly interactive, bright, and colorful sites that would grab my attention with every single thing that was happening. At this point, we’re talking about earlier childhood e-pet sites that were making a splash of a comeback as waves of all the kids that frequented them were getting older and trying to remember the good old days. I remembered a lot of knock-off sites that sprung out of the craze, even when I was a kid, with people drawing their own pets and creatures, and how I always wanted to make one myself. How wonderful would it be if I could make something similar now that I’m older and have the hobby-time to dedicate to learning PHP, etc. But I didn’t want to make another pet site, I wanted to make a small world for R.A, and the use of the interactive maps specifically was what was most interesting to me.
I mean, envision this; how incredible would it be if you could take a boring, old school framework like the one I just described, and place it onto a Neopets-inspired interactive map. It’s what small-child me wanted the Harry Potter website to be when I logged in for the first time ever. Instead, I was greeted with disappointment. So I carried around the idea for making just that wonderful combination of experiences in my mind for almost 20 years. And in my 20’s, I finally decided that just such a Frankenstein might actually be a cool hobby to pursue.
Early on, trying to figure out how to make everything sing well together, I frequented many forums to see if there were any plugins or scripts that would do most of the base framework legwork. I wanted to make it all myself, but I’m not an idiot. I know the scope of the project was incredibly large, and there’s no way I’m making everything myself from scratch. There were some frameworks available, but nothing recently updated and comprehensive. So I realized I’d have to slap something together myself eventually. I found a few different tools to help me make the maps (some of which I posted on Instagram) and the assignments that would take the student on adventures across the maps on the site. They’d learn from various encounters and people they’d meet there. Some of the courses I made would require students to complete these little adventures instead of pass tests. At the end of the little experience, there would be a code that they’d then have to copy and paste into the course password to pass onto the next stage. I had assignments that would make students post onto specific forum threads to encourage student interaction and more natural forum use. After posting the comment, they’d, again, get a code with the “successfully posted your comment” text to move into the next stage. I’d sit there and daydream about finding all of those codes on a cheat-codes website one day. I’d chuckle to myself. Then I’d curse up a storm again because immediately after, something on the site would break again. I even had a whole progress tree of stages that students could advance to, and an entire pre-requisite courses tree set up with titles they could earn with each stage they graduated to. All trashed because it’s just not viable.
Student Interaction – As lightly touched on before, one of the other ways I’d have assignments be more interactive was to have some lead students to the forums area. They would answer specific questions about lessons in pre-set-up threads (similar to having a written assignment vs. just everything being multiple choice). The idea was that this would provoke interaction among students and help them be less shy in discovering the common discussion areas. This was the most infuriating part of the entire build, however. Everything having to do with the forum specifically, for some reason, loved to break. And the breaks weren’t contained to that area. They broke almost everything else alongside them. Only the basic pages that didn’t have anything really linked on them remained untouched.
Part of the reason I’m going into detail with this now is in case anyone else wants to replicate it and take on this version of the project. I personally am dropping it because I don’t see much of a future in it as a website. But everything I’ve written and worked on so far, I’m in the process of migrating to another platform… especially the 200+ pages of fully written out dry, non-personable lessons. They can no longer be in the same format or written in the same way, but at least all of the research has already been done. I’ll go more into that in further updates. But basically, as it stands, everything and its mother has to be rewritten again.
Another feature I included to facilitate student interaction and add to the liveliness of the entire site was to add a chat feature. That, along with the forums, and Suggestion Box, which you can find me mentioning having problems within previous posts, was when I started having significant doubts about using this specific platform and method to make R.A a reality. The chat broke down surprisingly less frequently than the forum. Granted, it only ever held about 2 accounts testing it at a time, which is stupid low for a test and shouldn’t be counted at all. But since the Suggestion box was actually open to the public, it was much more frequently written about. The major limitation was the website server speed itself as well as getting the SMTP to work correctly. After moving hosting services multiple times over, countless aggravated phone calls, and chats with support, we all finally agreed that we needed to set up our own server to make everything work quickly and consistently. This is problematic since I’m not willing to sink more money and time for purchasing, upkeep, and storage. And this is basically when I started to take a step back and rethink if this was really the best way to go about everything.
I was fine with writing for hours on end and doing research from books and sinking the precious waking moments of my life into this project as a major investment. I made the 2+ hour-long train rides to and from work much more bearable at the time. But once the serious issue of purchasing, upkeeping, and storing a server for a site I was making just for fun as a passion project, without knowing exactly how many concurrent users will be accessing it at any given time came up, I absolutely drew the line then and there. At a certain point, I’m no longer willing. Especially since student interaction was never really as important to me as all of the other interactive frameworks I described. Those frameworks were able to scratch my creative, artistic, storyteller itch, whereas students could simply use Instagram or TikTok to satisfy their interaction needs. At a certain point, I deleted both the forum and the chat, but it somehow didn’t help with the site speed. Very aggravating indeed.
Gamification – To add more pizzazz to the progression system and add more rewards, I even came up with a badges and contests system. The badges were similar to basically any old gamification system you’d find on any website or MMO. Some were awarded for daily visitation, some were awarded for finding a random, obscure page on the site, some for reaching a certain level of learning. Most of these systems I can fully end up reusing in the new format I’m migrating everything to, so there’s not too much to groan about here.
For some of the contests, I even made real-life medal-of-honor-like badges I’d be able to ship out to the most eager of students. I’d envision them having fun wearing them to Renn fairs and LARP events, or simply displaying them in a trophy cabinet along with their dance/martial arts/track-and-field/*insert childhood school activity here* trophies. I still have these. They will never be for sale. I still plan on holding contests to give them all out and that’ll be the only way to get one’s hands on them. I guess I’ll go into more details on that in future updates as well.
Real-World Meetups – Speaking of Renn-Fair-like LARP events, I had a short mental fling with hosting one myself at one point. Alongside the half-finished calendar that I uploaded and forgot about, were grand plans for real-world meetup events. Then, the pandemic happened and I lost all sincere interest in pursuing those as well. But in all seriousness, how could I possibly manage to spread myself so thin with maintaining the website, constantly updating it alongside social media, and on top of everything planning and managing real-life events? Pandemic + being overworked + family emergency drama have done a thorough job in turning me off from any such pursuits for the immediately foreseeable future. Not much more to write here. But it was an idea, the remnants of which can still be found across the site and in my cabinets.
P.S. For those that asked – the ritual celebration mentioned in a previous post actually went very well! It was an amazing get-together with some wonderful, thoroughly-missed friends who drove in from all over to come together and see each other for tghe first time in many years. I think that for a very long time now, the only types of real-world gatherings I’ll be able to stomach will be for people who are near and dear to my heart. I do believe I’ve become, in general, more selective with who I spend my time with and who I give my energy to. And I highly suggest this for you too.
I’m now officially incredibly out of steam and will have to end the post here. I definitely have more to say and more to update about. But I thought this post should stand alone and be put out first on account of its uniqueness. Usually, update posts are made about features added and growth of some sort. This one has entirely been about what’s been taken away (I just hope I didn’t forget anything). But that too, is growth in its own way. You sometimes have to drop a lot of old, broken baggade to be able to soar to new heights. This has certainly been a trip, and a massive learning experience. Though I wish I’d dropped some of these old ideas sooner, I’m happy everything happened exactly how it happened. I was able to learn, grow, purse an interest, and amass an icredible body of research that I can convert to future use.
This website now officially serves only one purpose: to post updates on the main project and be an information hub for progress, to-do lists, and roadmaps. I’ll post some fun interactive things here and there that are essentially remnants of old code if I ever get the time. But don’t expect too much. Hopefully, with everything gone, the site itself will load just a tad faster now too.
So as promised, the following is a comprehensive list (in no particular order) of the updates and fixes made to the site while it was down in maintenance mode. No dates are attributed to any of the following updates because everything was done very sporadically throughout all of downtime (and also vaguely simultaneously).
I corrected the way the updates page looked and behaved so that half of it was no longer magically missing. This was the main deterrent from making the website live!
The total site layout was once again fixed. Alongside some minor updates to the website illustrations. But a full illustration overhaul will be coming later, so that shouldn’t be a major point at this stage. All current illustrations are basically stand-in rough drafts of what they should ultimately become. Updates will be live-streamed on Twitch and other social media as they happen.
A slew of various necessary declarations were signed by me on behalf of this site. This was done primarily to make my stance known on certain controversial (to some, obvious to others) topics, and hopefully also to deter certain toxic personality types from bothering me on any of my platforms. All links are prominently displayed on the About Page as well as in the footer widgets of all pages. They’ll also be updated periodically as R.A makes a stand in more places on more topics.
Piggybacking off of the previous point, the About Page was further fleshed out, both in the main body as well as the individual bio’s you can find there. More content was overall added, and volunteer reviews were moved from the front page to there to help differentiate them and keep everything organized.
This might be a bit strange to put on this list, especially since I’ve already made an entire post on it previously, but it happened during maintenance mode downtime so it belongs. I finally was able to set up the Events Calendar I’ve been looking forward to for a while! It’s not complete by any means and still needs to be fully fleshed out but it’s a promising start!
The Suggestion Box was actually broken ? (in the dumbest way possible) so don’t use that for now hahahaha. You can contact me instead via my social media handles that can be found pasted all over the site. It’s not too much of a priority since I’m easy to get in touch with on Instagram, Tik Tok, etc.
Some of you may realize now that TikTok is a new platform I’ve never mentioned before. This will be further elaborated on in a later update as well, but Rune. Academy now has a few more presences online than it previously had, all of which can be found on our LinkTree which can be accessed here. It also includes a commissions section!
Alongside that, new Donation avenues were set up. Some still need further updating but, for the most part, all groundwork should be there. They can, again, be found on R.A’s LinkTree.
Etsy has also been set up and linked to all the shop links on the page. Items are slowly being added.
Possibly the largest change to have happened was the start of a new (unfortunately on the down-low for now) project that allowed for such a pivot in what I was doing behind the scenes that I was able to delete a MASSIVE amount of half-started projects and data. I’d originally had this idea where I was going to combine a plethora of interactive mediums that were difficult to integrate and banked on this website being the main hub for them all. Worrying on the integration caused me to stagnate on actually working on the content itself. It’s a good thing I didn’t sink too much time into it! Because I found a solution that I feel I can definitely handle all on my own and am finally working on something much better! And it’s finally all in one place!
There’s a strong possibility that I’m forgetting something, because for some reason, I didn’t start this post as I was working on everything, but after. So there’s a chance that something actually didn’t make it on here. Apologies if readability is a bit iffy on this post. It’s very late and I’ve been putting off publishing this for long enough now. I need to complete it and move on to the next thing.
Productivity is key!
I wish you all the absolute best and hope to see you all again in the near future~!~~
Hello beautiful people! Maybe you’ve noticed that the site is finally up? Well, there will be a new post made detailing all of the updates in due time.
This here will just be a short update inviting you all to go check out and support our good friend Lana of Noble Root Herbs if you’re in the AZ area!
Plans for a small event have been made! In efforts to maintain a safe environment with Coronavirus on the loose, we’re keeping this a closed event, with only the participants holding the location address. But hopefully, by the time the planned date crops up, the entire pandemic situation will be a lot calmer. (If only we had a nickel for every time someone’s said that one!)
Svarog is an Ancient Slavic Deity of Blacksmithing, Primordial Fire, and Creation. He is said to have crafted the world in a massive storm with his hammer and anvil. In other mythology, it is said he is perpetually asleep and dreams the universe into being in real time.
His son, Svarozich, who carries a similar name, is the personification of flame and fire itself. Svarog is the one who molds the world out of, and with the help of, his son, fire.
Regardless, Svarog is the only Slavic deity who was confirmed to have existed in nearly all regions of Eastern Europe.
The chosen weekend also happens to be around the time the Ancient Roman festival of Vulcanalia, which is usually celebrated around August 23rd. The Roman Vulcan, or the Greek Haphaestus, was also a deity of beneficial fire and the forge, but also of volcanoes. Vulkan can in many ways be seen as a parallel to Svarog, but he isn’t as associated with creation and creativity as much as Svarog.
Those who follow and honor Svarog, generally understand him to be very “put your head down and work” type of god, who loves to make beautiful and, very importantly, useful things, and has no time for nonsense, as he is also known for having a fiery temper. After all, his name is the originator of the old Slavic word “Svarka”, which in some languages means “blacksmithing”, but also “argument”, even though etymologically, Svarog’s name did originate from the words meaning “heavens” and “skies” of Proto-Indo-European languages.
We hope to document the experience enough for everyone to share later on for all of your viewing pleasures.
There will also be an option to separately honor Hecate, as the chosen date also falls on one of her festivals, but the main itinerary has been planned around honoring Svarog.
As the title very says, this is the Events and Celebrations Calendar Update!
I’m personally very, very excited for this update as it’s one of those ideas that’s been floating around my mind since the very first version of the site. On the front page of the first ever iteration of this site, we made this little announcement on our first holiday season officially together as “Rune.Academy”:
Magical Fae Yule Update Goals~
As the wondrous holiday season approaches, we here at Rune.Academy are doing our best to turn the dream of everything this website can become a reality. For the holiday season, we’re planning on releasing a reworking of the website mainframe and stability. New beta testing of the behind the scenes features will also begin. In the new year, one of the first new features will be a comprehensive, accessible, and fully functional calendar of magical holidays celebrated all around the globe.
-Rune.Academy (Holiday Season, 2017)
Oh, how naive, green, and full of hope were we to think that we’d be done with that entire checklist by the end of that holiday season. We had absolutely no idea what this dear endeavor had in store for us and just how much it would test our resolve to believe in it… Rune.Academy took us on an absolute roller coaster ride.
We were learning on our feet mastering disciplines we never before thought we’d need. (I personally had rebuild the entire site from almost scratch twice now.) It’s been annoying and insane… but completely and absolutely necessary. As if the powers that be wanted us to get real smart real fast! (Or as smart as we could get in the time allotted to us anyway.)
And now that almost all of the priority items on that list are well on being out of the way, this Events and Celebrations Calendar Update is one of the first non-priority updates that I was completely ecstatic to jump on.
I found an interesting calendar base that looked correct enough but was still missing a vast majority of the holidays we personally practice. I knew I could easily double check, correct, and then continue to heavily add to it and flesh it out. I’m currently in the process of still adding holidays, and likely will be for a long time, but it’ll also be a good place to keep track of group activities and events we’re planning on attending. Now I’m happy to be able to provide you all with a calendar that you all can follow along with at home… view it here!!
Welcome to the Massive Maintenance Mode Update!! To explain this update, you first have to understand that most of Rune.Academy’s look and feel info as well as database info was lost in the crash, so we rebuilt whatever we could find and remember. We ended up completely moving providers, which I may have failed to mention in the previous updates, because the backups the previous one made only backed up the bare minimum and weren’t doing their job correctly in archiving everything they were supposed to be archiving (mainly databases… which means we lost basically all of our old updates posts unless they were archived by a third party, which is how we got back whatever we currently have back,). There’s still a few things left to remake, namely java-script interactives, but that’ll have to be done in later updates, as they’re currently a lot less pressing. This update is being posted for bookkeeping purposes and to update everyone on board while the website is still down in maintenance mode.
Everything was worked on at the same time, throughout the duration of a few months (with the site being in maintenance mode for close to a year now), so no dates will be given for any of these. But as of today, this is where everything stands regarding the rebuild:
All old pages have been reinstated, even if some are still blank, all old links are currently live again.
SSL Cert is back up again. New laws make it so those have to be manually redone every year now so that’s annoying. But the new SSL comes with a fancy-shmancy emblem that we placed at the footer of the site.
Work in progress images were added to all side menus that are clearly still works in progress. The bookcase menu still clearly has to be taken a gander at with a second pair of eyeballs to reconfirm that it looks wonky.
All fonts work now! All site colors are all set and work now! There’s an odd berry purple that pops up in some places but it’s kind of pretty so I’m leaving it. It looks like the light purple of the above sweet treats.
New features like the lexicon and calendar have begun work!
The about-us section has been redone and more has been added in. It’ll have to be redone again because I’m actually waiting for some new valuable information to go through. (Currently at a 1/3 on that.) Will also be placed in the footer when that’s done.
Donation buttons are back up and functioning. They’ve also been placed in the footer. And the page is back.
The Art-Gallery is functional now! Yay! I placed all of the old website illustrations there for a nice nostalgia trip later on in years. Here’s a screenshot where you can also see the current footer. The emblems on the bottom are for gallery display. The text will be changed later.
The updates section has been completely fixed aside from the aforementioned sidebar. Might place a header image in there later but that’s not currently a priority.
FAQ was checked again even though there wasn’t really anything broken there.
The Homepage is still broken. updates won’t save. No idea why because the rest of the site is clearly being worked on and updated perfectly fine. I’m wondering if I should just make a completely new homepage and then delete the old one…
A LOT of features have been removed form the back-end to lessen clutter. They’ll be added back once we’re ready for them. There’s really no need for them to be sitting around back there without being used.
User login pages have been dismantled so that they can be made completely from scratch again. Yikes again.
Aside from that, March is the month that everyone is celebrating their birthdays here! So happy birthday to everyone and their mother! And happy birthday to me too soon! See you in the next update!
Today’s update post is incredibly short, but centers around a very exciting new library feature.
This new library feature is a flip-book and helps add immersion and interactivity to the site content.
I’m not going to spend too long talking about it because the below pictured library book should speak for itself. Feel free to mess around with it! The sample below includes some images from one of our Instagram posts.
