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Our simple first game had settlements, factions, multiple languages, trading, quests, realistic inventory, hunting, tracking, random encounters, bandits, The Changed, real survival lessons, a field guide, a fog-of-war map, changing weather, seasons, daylight, moon phases, food spoilage, injuries, an apocalypse mystery we had deliberately decided not to explain and maybe a poop meter. There was also supposed to be a larger story for people who wanted one and a pure survival sa

There is a sentence being thrown around a lot right now when someone admits they used artificial intelligence to create something. “You didn’t make that. The AI did.” Sometimes it gets shortened to, “That isn’t art.” I understand where some of that comes from.

Book marketing ate my life, but an AI writing debate pulled me back. Too many people are throwing every use of AI into one bucket, from brainstorming to generated passages, then branding authors with the same warning label. That is not transparency. That is a scarlet letter.

“Pen and ink” sounded like one style until I started searching museum collections. It turned out to include everything from loose sketches and clean contour drawings to dense cross-hatching, cartoons, and technical diagrams. If I mixed all of that into one dataset, I might teach the model nothing more useful than “old-looking and black-and-white.”

I never thought I would be a filmmaker. I cut hair for a living. That is still the job. I love it. That is the thing that pays the bills and puts me behind the chair talking to people all day. But somewhere along the way, thanks mostly to my ride-or-die partner Michele and her dangerous habit of saying, “Can you learn this?” I ended up making movies too. Actually, the more dangerous phrase is, “I have an idea.” That’s usually how it starts. The real beginning was virtual prod

Before I could train a rights-cleared pen-and-ink LoRA, Ace made me build a digital filing cabinet. Four folders became eleven, with separate places for originals, rights records, captions, training settings, test results, and everything else I might otherwise lose.

My first fantasy novel, The First True Song, "An Ayam Handsoom Story" is finally done done. There are still plans for an illustrated hardcover edition and an audiobook version voiced by Michele and me. For now, the paperback and Kindle copies are ready. This book started after an exciting night of tabletop role-playing with some friends. I talked Michele’s ear off about it, and rather than getting irritated, she encouraged me to start writing it down. I already had a solid ba

My friend Ace and I sat down over coffee to discuss a perfectly reasonable question: Can an ordinary creative train an AI image model using only images they have the right to use? Enjoying my coffee and thinking about my book's illustrations. How can I use AI? By “ordinary creative,” I meant me. I am a barber. I know how to cut hair, run a small business, write fantasy stories, help make low-budget movies, and act mad as a hatter at, well, the drop of a hat. I am not a comput

The internet is full of old illustrations, but that does not mean they are free to use. Before adding anything to my LoRA dataset, I needed a rule I could actually defend: every image had to come from a traceable source with a clear rights statement. That turned image hunting into detective work.