Whew! I am tired. I’ve been intensively web building for nearly 5 days straight but I think it was worth it. It’s funny, just when I think I like my current theme, I end up changing it to something massively different. These changes were necessary though for the upcoming things I intend to implement this year, and having everything divided by subdomain is a fancy touch. It’s not really just a website anymore, it’s kind of a mash between a website and a visual novel at this point. I had a few inspirations for this theming: particularly Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Runefactory, and Marigold Town. I loved the way Marigold.Town is set up and I just started on moving The Book Ring over there, which is actually going to be Marigold.Town’s Library once I’m finished! I’m going to add elements of roleplay here on my own website as well where The Book Ring sort of connects the two towns, so it’s going to be like our two web worlds are connected in that way. Anyways, ever since I started working on this, I feel like my entire website has come alive. It’s no longer just a website, it’s a new universe. Maybe I’ll even develop a story based around this world and make the characters interactive.
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Also, I’m just going to get it out of the way now because I know it’s going to eventually come up, and I know it’s quite frowned upon and understandably so, but a lot of generated AI art was used in this overhaul to envision this web world. I’m not an illustrator, I’m a designer, so I could not illustrate it myself. This a personal website and I’ve only been using free-use imagery anyways unless it was something I whipped up real quick in Canva myself. So given I was never taking away any artists jobs for this website in the first place, well, it doesn’t seem to be doing any damage in my perspective at least. I get why artists are upset though. AI is coming for their jobs, but honestly they’re taking over designer jobs too. They’re coming for everybody’s jobs and it’s at a point where it’s everywhere now that I’m not sure there’s any stopping it unless people want to get a little uncomfortable en masse and really pressure their government to put heavy regulations on it. If I’m totally honest though, I don’t have faith in the government to do any good anymore and AI is part of their future plans so… we either gotta figure out how to utilize it to our own advantage, or we gotta get really loud about it en masse so it doesn’t take all of our jobs away, and so far the getting loud about it part isn’t happening other than online. No real action is being taken and venting your feelings about it online isn’t going to fix it. It’s an ugly truth, but it’s the truth.
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To ease my conscience though, down the road once I get the Café set up, and depending on if it even gets populated, I am planning on hosting contests to slowly replace a lot of the AI images on my website with human illustrated ones. All artwork made for this website will be featured in a new “building” known as the Art Gallery in town. I’ll link credit back to the original artists, bringing them more traffic and hopefully it will result in them getting commissions. Rewards for winners will be in Café perks and exclusive badges (spoiler alert, the Cafe will be gamified like a real video game to sort of flow with the inspiration of the rest of the website). Overall though, it would add a really special touch to this website and make it come more alive if there were many members of the small web visualizing this world with me. Anyways, that’s a plan further down the road. For now, this is a good start and a solid foundation for what’s to come. 🙂