About Me (Karel)
I am a creator. I always had a need to create; when I didn’t, I got depressed.
Since I was a little child in communist Czechoslovakia, I have always tried to create something. Building things from Merkur , drawing, doodling in the margins of school notebooks, or trying to build robots — oh, how naive I was — with the basic knowledge of electronics I had at the time.
School duties took up most of my free time (no matter how much I tried to ignore them) and, in some cases, traumatised me, like art classes at our elementary school. The rest of the time was occupied by my ZX Spectrum clone , which I later managed to trade for a 386SX/20 PC. Looking back at that now, I’m surprised I didn’t spend all my time just playing the pirated games I got hold of — it was hard and very expensive to find original games in our country in the nineties. But I was also learning to code and creating some basic computer games.
When I was about twelve, I was introduced to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and a Czech take on Dungeons & Dragons called Dračí doupě , and shortly afterwards to other fantasy books. I was so taken by it that I even tried worldbuilding and DMing a few times — but that required other people willing to play, so I eventually settled for CRPGs instead.
Time went by. I kept satisfying my need to create through programming, gaming, and organising LARPs. But it was never quite enough. Photography had always been part of my life — a hobby inherited from my dad — and at some point I decided to combine it with LARPing. You’ve probably noticed already, given that most of the content here is LARP photography . I don’t regret it, but I no longer feel pulled toward it the way I once did.
So, yes — I have always felt a need to create. No craft was beneath me: 3D modelling and printing , cooking, drawing, furniture making, painting, photography, programming, roleplaying, woodcarving, worldbuilding, writing.
I never claimed to be spectacularly good at any of it to begin with however that never stopped me, and I’m trying to get better by creating. But my main goal is to satisfy that inner need to create and avoid depression.
Do I want to monetise on it? No, not really . I’ve tried in the past, but I don’t have the right entrepreneur mindset for it. It will be my free-time activity until we get a universal basic income or I win the lottery.
CONTACT
- e-mail: karelkremel@karelkremel.com
- matrix: @alembiq:matrix.org
- rss: RSS
