About

I was not doing well. That is the plain version. The longer one is that I had spent years being careful about which parts of myself I let people see, and at some point being careful stopped being worth the energy it cost. So I decided to stop hiding. This page is part of that.

As a child I was pulled in two directions. One half of me was invited to art school as a talent. The other was pointed at the technical world. I went with the technical one, and my soul never quite agreed to the trade. It kept finding its way out. I drew on the margins of the handouts in corporate meetings. I ran secret projects with my team, one of which was a small mobile game making fun of our own company. And some evenings, in a senior management job, I sat and painted my own assets.

When I asked myself which work brought me honest joy, the answer was all those crazy little nonsense side quests. Every one of them fed on the same childhood passions. Writing. Creating and playing games. Painting. Reading. So I made a decision that made no sense and gave them proper time, with no illusion of being any good at some of them. Not yet, hopefully.

Why I love fantasy

Since I mentioned reading. What I have always read most is fantasy.

I do not read it only as an escape. Fantasy books and games also helped me through my harder years. A self-help book carries an idea the way a bored accountant carries a spreadsheet. The idea is usually in there. It is just dry. Not all of them, I know that, but sorting the good ones out of the flood takes energy I do not have, and meanwhile the same insight is sitting untouched where nobody thinks to look.

Nesta's transformation. Frodo coming home and finding out he can never quite outrun his demons. And some of the most layered writing about emotion I have found, surprisingly, in Genshin Impact. Looking at you, Furina.

I did not tell my colleagues that I play a game where I enthusiastically gamble for waifus. I usually did not say out loud the things I feel. Even though I had learned to stand up to anyone when it mattered, I could not be myself: a weird girl with weird humor and a thousand ideas every three seconds. I tried to be normal and invisible for a really long time. It would have been the same in other jobs, and at school before that. I still admire the people who manage to be themselves in places like that.

Another unpopular opinion

Another surprisingly unpopular opinion of mine is that things are always complex, and that I even enjoy the complexity. Most questions are a position on a scale rather than a simple yes or no, and it is perfectly fine to find your own mix, even when it is not smooth and does not match the tidy opinions around you. That is one of the things I call a torn edge.

I found it in the Genshin community too. An unspoken pressure to pick a side on any given topic, decide what is good and what is bad, and then fight about it.

So the first thing I made was about permission. You can feel both at once, and it is fine. Today I love. Today I hate. Two sides of one game. Both are true, and nobody has to win. On the contrary. We can laugh about all of it together, and each of us can keep our own mix of ideas and feelings. We can love the game despite hating it sometimes.

A personal detour that looks unrelated. Bear with me.

The most useful thing my mother ever told me about her marriage, which looked happy to her and looked happy to me, was that sometimes it drove her absolutely mad. Understanding that love and the occasional hate are two sides of the same human experience is what showed me that nothing has to be wrong with me, or with my relationship, when I sometimes feel hate on top of a lot of love. And over the years, I found out that for me it can be a general rule: love and hate are two sides of one deep feeling.

What a fragment is

I feel like a traveler between worlds and between feelings. Some of the thoughts I find stay with me long enough that I want to pass them on, in case they do the same for someone else.

That is what a fragment is here. One piece of a thought, usually small enough to fit on a postcard, that I feel is worth sharing.

Postcards are not an accident. As a child I collected them and had hundreds. As a teenager I found the dusty collection and gave it a new job. On the cards that matched what I was feeling, I wrote messages to myself. Other times I threw a few funny ones into my bag on the way to meet friends, and we passed them around the table writing nonsense to each other. The collection came alive.

When I started thinking about how to get more joy into my life, I found that box again, and it shook me. It was immediately clear that this stage of my life would be about building a new collection, made to measure for me, and about stepping out of the virtual world and back into the physical one for a while. If anyone wants to join me in that, I am humbly grateful.

Everything here is a fragment. The postcards are the numbered ones, because those are the ones I collect. Each of them has its own number printed on it, so I know how many I have made and which world I sent it from. For now there are two. Fragments from Teyvat, and Fragments from the walk, because the walk is usually where those thoughts arrive.

AI and my process

Lately my feeds serve me black and white once again, now about AI.

On one side, people certain that AI already does everything and will shortly do the rest. On the other, people who do not use AI at all, out of conviction.

On both sides there are people and creators I respect and value. That is exactly why it matters to me to tell you as plainly as I can where I stand on the scale between those two positions, and how AI is part of my process.

How I make things

There are things I hand over to AI gladly. Tags, product listings, research, reports, the questions I need to ask my accountant, and some of the video editing, once (if ever) I work out how. I would rather approve that work than be doing it at 2AM.

Then there are things I want to do myself, even after I had a clear picture of how well AI could do them, and even after I had already learned how.

My own voice is the first of those. Full of enthusiasm about the time it would save me and how elegantly it would solve my accent, I built an AI clone of it, spent a long time getting it right, and the result was genuinely decent. And then I decided never to use it, because I want every word I say in a video to have actually been said by me. So I apologize to everyone who ever meets one of my videos. You are condemned to my accent and my pronunciation, because I cannot give them up.

Translation sits somewhere on the scale. I write and speak in my native language, with the occasional English word or sentence, and AI has now proudly replaced my previous master assistant, Google Translate. It can change my grammar and word order. It never changes my meaning and never adds a sentence I did not write.

Painting and photography are a similar case. I photograph and sketch everywhere and always have. On napkins, in my son's coloring books while we play. When a composition finally sits right, I either paint it again properly or trace it onto watercolor paper, using a technique that is still, frankly, new to me.

Then I give the painting to AI and ask for the same picture with a facelift. It is like that use of AI where someone takes an old photograph of an even older bust and lets a living Cleopatra walk around in a video. Sometimes I use my own photos and selfies as the source instead. Once I have the AI version of a painted or photographed image, I usually try to change it with prompts, asking for a variant where the character is looking somewhere else, for example. As soon as I move away from my own source that way, I stop mentioning the source on the product at all, so that a note about a painted or photographed base cannot mislead anyone.

The reason I work this way is that it does not take the joy out of creating, and it does not take away my chance to get better at it. And so far, the result is, in my opinion, noticeably better than it would be without AI. When I compare a photo I have stylized myself in Photoshop with the same photo stylized by AI, AI somehow gets closer to the feeling I am after.

These outputs, where AI reworks something of mine (a painting, a photo, a sentence I wrote), feel completely different to me than an image AI painted on its own, or a text AI wrote on its own. I think that difference might be a way through the flood of average, interchangeable AI slop, at least for me: keep my own ability to think and write and create, keep learning, and still land somewhere better because I hand off part of the process. Where that line sits is different for everyone, whether it is rendering or translation, and so is the price each of us is willing to pay for it. I have decided I am willing to pay mine.

The rest of the process is collage and Photoshop, which is the one thing I never really stopped doing across fifteen years of a corporate career. Graphics for fun, an occasional secret project, a permanent side hustle. The photos of flowers are mine. We pick them on walks with my son and press them in books at home before I photograph them.

I do not touch the flower photos at all. I like keeping something real in the collage: a slightly dirty flower from the side of the road, pressed with a leaf bent the wrong way, next to a polished, stylized version of my own photos and paintings. Rough on one side, glossy and unreal on the other, in the same picture. That mix feels like the balance I am after. My father is a professional graphic designer, and I imagine this makes him want to tear his hair out. Just kidding. He is already bald.

I buy assets from other artists, usually through a stock library, and use them in my collages. I credit the artist if the name is part of the asset, and I call a piece hand painted if its label says so.

Every product describes how it was made: whether I worked from photographs or from painted images, and that the picture is AI generated. It is AI generated whatever I fed the machine to get there, and saying so on every product matters to me as much as putting the logos of the tools I use into every video that shows the current process. Clarity and transparency feel important.

Where I stand

This is the mix that makes sense to me here and now, with AI inside my process. Keep the parts that bring me joy. Use AI to help me learn the ones I am not good at, English grammar being the obvious candidate. Hand over the monotonous work that was killing me, which somehow always turns out to be phrasing questions for accountants.

The process will change, and I will update this text when it does. I write this noodle-long description so that you can decide for yourself whether you want to support me.

If you have read this far, you already have. You supported me with your interest, your time and your attention, which is the most valuable thing anyone has these days. I cannot put into words how much that means to me, whether or not you agree with the opinions behind my words.

Thank you. A fragment of gratitude, sent from the heart of Europe.