At the beginning of the year, I was focused on Agents. That is all I was hearing since December of 2025. Open Claw took the world by storm, along with the other harnesses that were all of a sudden much better at doing agentic work than they had been. I am one man with finite resources, so I could not run out and buy an Apple Mac Mini. But a lot of people did, and I do what I can do when I cannot afford to partake in something that I wish I could; I watched and assessed.
By this time, my work on 1st Draft was winding down, and I wanted to learn all that I could about agents without committing 10s of thousands of dollars to doing so. I had reached a point with my investors that I could not keep asking for funding for an App company that I no longer believed would be viable in six months, let alone a year. I had no market sway or name recognition, and with AI models becoming so good the need for the kinds of apps I wanted to create in the winter of 2025, the thought of pushing on with creating the other two apps I had in mind seemed daft. I had learned what I needed to learn about creating apps. Something I had wanted to do since even before I took my first Python course back in 2014.
In 2023, after taking a dozen or more courses focused on AI and Generative AI, I realized, along with everyone else, that AI was going to improve at a pace that my learning about it would not be able to keep up with. I still wanted to be on board because I wanted to be able to adapt to a world that I knew was changing more rapidly than ever before.
Yes, I thought about helping others—I still do, but I also thought about making my long-sought-after dreams come true as well. For those who have written a story for the screen that meant the world to you only to have no one take interest in it, even though you believe it could find a fanbase if only someone had given it the chance and helped you make it into the movie or TV show it was intended to be, it is heartbreaking to have to put it aside and have to focus on something else. In 2023, I realized that I never had to experience that again. But I had to wait until the rapidly progressing technology had progressed enough that I could do it all myself. So that I would never have to ask permission and beg for the opportunity to have someone take my story and make it into a movie or TV series. It was a moment of absolute liberation, realizing before the tech was good enough that while I would prefer to have actors and directors, stuntmen and special effects artists all focused on making my story into a reality. I still want that, but I no longer need it.
Now the tech is good enough that I can do it all myself, with the help of AI agents. But at the beginning of this year, the tech was not good enough. We were on the cusp, but not there yet. Seedance 2.0 videos in March made me realize that video was almost there, and then the wave of LLMs over the past few months that are now able to create games was the last step to creating all that I laid out in the story bible for a TV Series in 2024. I knew back in 2024 that we would reach this point. I had hoped someone would take an interest in that story and help me make it with humans behind and in front of the cameras, with AI helping with much of the transmedia content I wanted to accompany the story.
In reality, I could now make the entire TV series and all the transmedia content using agents and AI tools. However, it would take a ton of money to do so. Money I do not have, and money my investors are no longer willing to help fund me with. I used up those resources learning how to create and deploy apps with AI. And at the beginning of this year, these tools were not as good as they are now. Back then, I could not have created the entirety of the TV series using only AI tools; they were not good enough yet. And they may not be good enough yet to make it exactly as I would like. I can't afford to find out for sure in this moment. The funds have dried up, but not to fear, I can still use the pipeline to create in other media.
Back in January, with a last round of funding secured, I decided to focus on learning all I could about agents as well as consulting. I was no longer receiving funds to help me launch STORiCORE, a business that always had two purposes. 1) To help others tell their stories, and 2) To help me present my stories to others in a variety of mediums. With the help of agents, I figured I could do both. Maybe not with apps like I had planned, but with the knowledge I had learned about AI and my 30 years of storytelling experience. I knew I had enough to help others and myself. What I did not have was a lot of money to go all out and start creating movies and TV series. So, I had to be frugal and make decisions that would help me create content now but also allow me to circle back once the models were good enough to focus on the other media I wanted to tell my stories in.
What I had learned how to do back in '23 was to create and implement images when I illustrated Michaelmas. Over a decade ago, after I released Monarch, I had hopes of creating my first graphic novel with an artist friend of mine. It didn't happen. And I realized I was asking him to do more work than it took me to write the story in the first place. He would have had to do most everything on that project. It would have been a collaboration, but the work on the page would have been me directing while he created each and every panel. I loved the idea, and so after I had learned myself up on agents, I began to think of an architecture that might help me create all the different media I have always wanted to tell my stories in. And an agentic pipeline to help me create content.
Seedance 2.0 had just come out in China in February, and here in America we did not get access until April. By that point, I had already made good progress on my first iterations of the creative pipeline. With my lack of funding and my desire to finally be able to create that graphic novel I wanted to make over a decade ago, I decided to focus on images, not video. However, I had wired the pipeline to allow me to focus on every medium I wanted to tell my stories in: Comics, Graphic Novels, Podcasts, Music, Movies, TV series, Video Games, Interactive Media.
In mid-April, my uncle passed away, and I then decided to incorporate trading cards because he was a collector and I wanted to honor him. I focused on the Mars Attacks cards from the 60s; they tell a story in a fun and creative way. I set my mind to comics and cards by the end of April and had begun testing the pipeline, making my decision to focus on images instead of video. The models that preceded the Seedance era were not good enough for me to focus on, so my decision to focus on comics and cards was justified. That said, soon after I decided to focus on images through the pipeline, Seedance 2.0 became available in the States.
Video is extremely important to me, but I just could not focus on it with my attention needed on the creation of images through the pipeline and on my uncle's massive trading card collection needing to be dealt with. I loved my uncle, and his card collection was something I had already taken some responsibility for in helping the family to get our heads around it back in 2021. It is something my uncle would have done had he been in my shoes as the eldest nephew.
When he passed, his collection was located in two states, and the need to find the right way to deal with it became my main focus for several months. I began doing deep research again, keeping an eye on their value and on finding a way to sell them in a timely manner. There was also a concern about how the estate had to deal with them. As I was reminded, no one asked me to do all the work I was doing on the collection, and yet I felt it was my obligation to do so. If I had not, then it might not have gotten done for a year or more, and that burden would have hung over the family in two states like a stack of bricks.
I kept everyone in the loop and shared what I was learning, and we decided after I did exhaustive research on several auction houses to go with the one that made the most sense. Then I had to arrange for pickup with the company in two states. My objective was to try and get all of this done as quickly as possible, but we needed to speak to the attorney first to make sure when we could sign the consignment. So, I arranged for us to have the cards picked up before the meeting, which worked out well because we had to sign a pre-consignment that gave us a look at what their consignment process was like, and we were able to move the cards sooner rather than later. It also gave the auction house time to begin going through the collection while we annoyingly had to wait nearly a month to meet with the attorney.
After the meeting, we were able to sign the consignment within a few days because there was no need to go through probate, which could have dragged things out. I had hoped that with that taken care of and with the auction house in possession of the cards that I might soon be able to hand off point of contact responsibility shortly thereafter. However, I needed to account for what the auction house received versus what I knew that we had provided to them. I was expecting a master list to be provided to me by the auction house, but that is not how they do things. They create lots based upon what they have. That means I have to stay involved likely until next spring. Granted, my involvement at this point is just to check things off my master list, but I had hoped to be able to just sit back and watch while working on other things.
It's just a little bit of work at this point, but there has already been some unwanted stress as I am also having to compare their images with my own from the past five years to make sure the cards they have look the same as they did when I took pictures. Annoying. This is to hold them accountable as well as ourselves. It's a collection that was housed in two states, with some levels of warranted distrust. I can't wait for this to all be done with. Thankfully, it is not taking up much time to review the lots and pictures as they come in. And there will be a lot of relief once those cards are all sold to the highest bidder.
So, focusing on all of that wiped out my work on much of anything else through much of June, all of July, and a large chunk of August. The relief of not having to store and protect those cards after handing them over to the auction house was a huge weight off my shoulders in mid-August. Since then, I have been locked back in on the pipeline and the creation of my first comic.
I am thrilled that it will be House Fly. When I first wrote this story, I had imagined working with my buddy Scott to make it into a graphic novel. This was one of the main reasons I chose it to be the first story through the pipeline. It is one of the reasons I dove into AI back in 2023. To create that which I would otherwise not have been able to. And with video models having advanced so much this year, I will use MCP connectors through the pipeline, and I will be able to create that TV series I wanted to create back in 2024 that helped me to imagine creating this pipeline in the first place.
Speaking of which, this week I have been seeing videos made with code. Yeah, code only. People are claiming it is Fable 5.5, but I am not sure that is the case. It made me think of one part of the TV series transmedia package I had in mind. An interactive game where the user visits a Chocolate Shop in the small town where the entire story takes place. So, I tested it out in Claude. I didn't want to waste all my subscription tokens for the day, so I used Opus 5.5 on high, not extra, max, or ultracode. Which might have allowed it to add sound on the first go.
People were providing either Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5 with simple prompts, so I provided Opus 5.5 high the following: Make me a 10-second animated video of a day in a Chocolate Shop in a quaint little town.
It worked for maybe 15 minutes and provided me a sped-up animation of a shop in a small town. It created it using Python and was not as detailed as some of the others I had seen, but it was animation from code without using an image or video model. Awesome! I slowed it down and made it about 30 seconds, and it was even better. But there was no sound. So, then I asked it to slow down the original and add sound. Within minutes, it did just that.
| Episode | Title | Pages | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Delivery | 1–34 | 34 pages |
| 2 | The First Can | 35–65 | 31 pages |
| 3 | A Spark | 66–91 | 26 pages |
| 4 | The Warning | 92–120 | 29 pages |
| 5 | Time Bombs | 121–150 | 30 pages |
I have created around 120 pages so far and should be through "Time Bombs" within a weeks time. Simultaneously, I have already completed a 2nd pass of "The Delivery", and am also running a second pass on "The First Can" as we speak. I will probably do another 1 or 2 passes on "The Delivery" before I release the first episode. My original idea was to release an episode every month, but because of my work with my uncle's card collection during the summer, I am a little behind on things. So, I may end up releasing an episode every other month. We'll see. I do hope to have the first episode of the House Fly comic out in time for Christmas.
