I’ve been on the internet since circa 1995 when I was in the 4th grade. I’m old enough to remember my early days of internet usage such visiting Prodigy chatrooms to chat with other kids about Super Nintendo games and discussing Soundgarden albums. My screen names varied greatly, but by the early 2000s I finally settled with using Baron von Brunk as my primary user name across all platforms. I’m an actual descendant of Prussian nobility, and when I was young my grandfather explained to me that our true family name was “von Brunk” when my great-great grandfather emigrated to the United States from Prussia in the mid-19th century. So to reflect that, I came up with “Baron von Brunk” as a universal online handle when I was a teenager.
Fun fact: I’m not the first nor only person to go by “Baron von Brunk” on the internet – that credit goes to my father, who once had a personal AOL homepage called “Baron von Brunk’s Castle” in circa 2001!
Prior to owning my own domain, I would often create free sites through Geocities and AOL throughout the early 2000s when I was a teenager. My sites were very reflective for the time – i.e. poorly designed and full of animated Gifs. My sites contained a blog for my rants, a gallery of my crude Photoshop attempts, and work-in-progress of my video game mods. I was in the process of designing a custom RPG Maker game as well as a custom mod of Wolfenstein 3D, and my free websites chronicled my progress. I would often share my sites and my game progress on the now-defunct G4TV forums, where I was a prominent member since 2002.
During this time I had a rivalry with a particular moderator of the G4TV forums who was A-Logging me, and for spite he would flag my websites and have them shut down for violating TOS (despite not hosting any offensive content). So to prevent this from constantly happening, I bought a domain and hosting plan to safeguard my sites from his wrath!
Baronvonbrunk.com was first launched in 2005 as a means to showcase my Flash animations as well as my personal blog posts and designs. I was 20 years old at the time (and employed as an assembly line worker), so you can only guess what kind of insane, angry rants I would post. I’ll be the first to admit that I was (and still am) a terrible writer, so the plots of my Flash animations were usually just low-brow self-insert Mary Sue adventures featuring my titular character getting into violent encounters with video game characters, accompanied by copyrighted music.
Eventually I streamlined my website with newer graphics as my digital art skills improved throughout the 2000s, but by the time I migrated to New York City in 2010, I completely removed my Flash animations as I wanted to instead focus on my career as a graphic artist. I also mellowed out and removed my rants. With that said, my creative energy was poured into improving my ability to shoot photos and record videos for my LEGO creations. My website at that time was created by myself with Dreamweaver and Photoshop.
By the mid-2010s, I migrated my content to a WordPress site, which I currently use today. I use this method as means to easily organize my content such as LEGO creations and digital designs in a portfolio gallery. As of today I focus almost exclusively on LEGO-related content, such as creations, photos, animations, and mixed-media art inspired by the toy brand.