Episode Details

In this episode of The Xeroforhire Podcast, I’m talking about convergence—both inside the Apocalyptiverse and in the way technology, storytelling, and years of creative work are beginning to come together.

I start by going back to The Last Day, an audio drama I originally published in 2014. At the time, I produced five episodes with voice actors recruited from places like Newgrounds, but eventually realized the story I wanted to tell was becoming too visual for the audio-drama format.

Years later, I returned to that same opening story for The Last Day comic. In the original audio drama, Silas enters a mysterious machine and the story simply skips over what happens inside. The comic finally fills in that missing piece, following Steve and Silas through the events inside the machine and their eventual escape from the facility.

What I only recently realized is that this makes the comic much more important than I originally thought.

It has become a convergence point between two versions of the Apocalyptiverse.

After the events of the comic, readers can effectively follow two branches. One leads into the original Last Day audio drama. The other leads toward Shadow of the Night, where Steve, Silas, and their world developed very differently. The characters and starting point are shared, but the timelines diverge.

The comic sits directly at the fork.

That realization has changed the way I look at a project I originally wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about. Something I created years later to fill a hole in a story I wrote more than a decade ago accidentally became foundational to both versions of that world. It also means I need to rethink the visual timeline on Apocalyptiverse.com so readers can actually see how these stories connect.

The second convergence happening is technological.

I’ve been digging much deeper into AI—not simply using it, but trying to understand what all these different technologies actually are. LLMs, diffusion models, LoRAs, agents, automation systems, image generation, video generation: “AI” is really a convenient umbrella for a collection of very different technologies.

And the more I understand them, the more interested I become in learning how to actually wield them.

I’ve started configuring local software and experimenting with AI video. The early results aren’t where I want them yet—right now, some of it looks more like clay blobs fighting than finished animation—but that’s part of learning the tool.

More importantly, running these tools myself changes what becomes economically possible.

One immediate application is Harbinger: Legend of the Seven Brothers. I can take existing character artwork, build character cards for the Seven Brothers, animate them, and integrate those cards into the Apocalyptiverse website without paying for every generation through another service.

That’s where these two sides of the episode finally meet.

Stories I began more than a decade ago are converging with comics and novels I’m producing today. Meanwhile, technologies I’ve spent the last few years experimenting with are becoming tools I can run and learn myself. All of that feeds back into the same larger project: building the Apocalyptiverse into a digital world where people can read the stories, explore the lore, play games, collect character cards, leave comments, and interact with other people interested in this strange mixture of cyberpunk, superheroes, comics, AI, and science fiction.

I’m still learning. The technology isn’t producing exactly what I want yet.

But producing something is only the beginning.

The next step is learning how to wield it.

Timestamps

00:00 — Why this episode is called “Convergence”00:35 — The 2014 Last Day audio drama02:2