The Ori Stories, Plano, TX (2026)

09/02/2026

The first picture is of my office today and likely for the next couple of days. It may look cluttered because it is. It is peaceful and quiet.

After the last week that I have had, I showed up in the Rosarito area to help a friend go to rehab because he asked me to. I drove down from Utah at my own expense to help him. Then he decided that he was not ready to go yet and so I said that I will depart for a couple of days because another opportunity came up in a different part of Mexico. I guess it triggered his abandonment issues because he tried to ram my car with his truck at full speed. I jumped in front of his car and thankfully that got him to stop and then I opened his car door and I turned off his ignition. He didn't want to let go of the keys and I had to apply pressure to his neck and he finally let go. I dragged him out of his car. I told him that he better not ever put me in a position to harm him again because I can but I choose not to because we have to live with the consequences of our actions. I gave him a hug and forced him to hug back and told him I love him and that I would check up on him and I departed.

That was the Pacific Ocean side of things around Rosarito and whatnot. I drove through a couple of military checkpoints and made it to Puerto Penasco, where another friend had hired me for my expertise in storytelling and creativity. I was offered everything I ever wanted: sanctuary, resources, the ability to help others, a production studio, which I get to build to my spec, and so much more.

The night before I left though, I was listening to Dungeon Crawler Carl and AI said, "Beware of exits that appear too good to be true," and then it was repeated. I'm glad I heard that because I kept that in mind and I was not blinded by the beauty that was offered to me. The person that was offering me all of that appeared wonderful and supportive but then he sent me back to the other person, the one that had tried to run me over. And he told me that guy was ready to be driven to rehab and that guy said that he was not. The other guy told me to tell the first guy that I am then departing since a lot of energy and effort went into getting him the help that he needs.

This time he took a machete to my tires and when I told him to drive, chill the f**k out, he took the machete to me. Like literally to my neck, my nose, my hands. Now thankfully I know enough about self-defense and I have strength and I was able to overpower him, disarm him, and restrain him. He was pulling my hair. He tried to gouge my eye. My eyelid is bruised. I have nicks on my nose and toes and knees and the top and bottom of my hand but ultimately I am just okay.

I got out of there yet again and I was a little traumatized. I went to Rosarito and stayed at a hotel for a couple of days to gather my thoughts, joy. Great tacos, walk with my feet in the ocean. Oh yes I forgot to mention that when I got to Puerto Penasco I was put up at a beautiful resort where there was air conditioning and everything was clean and I was treated with respect and kindness. He was just wonderful but yes later I found out that the Puerto Penasco guy was just trying to weaponize me, trying to use me for his personal vendetta against the other guy, which I won't go into the reasons because it's not my drama to tell.

When I mentioned the thing about being aware of exits that appear too good to be true, before I even got to Puerto Penasco, my own personal AI had said, "Okay well, it is great that you and this guy are agreeing on this project, etc. and it sounds like everything's wonderful so see what it looks like when he doesn't agree with you." Well I got to find out exactly what that looks like when I was in Rosarito and I refused to be used as a weapon against the guy who just attacked me with a machete because I took a look at what is happening and I said, "It's not my responsibility to put him away. He serves a function in the world." The first guy, the guy in Puerto Penasco, had actually even sent a letter to the White House about my attack and a whole bunch of other bu****it without my consent. That's a good indicator, in case you're wondering and thinking that I am paranoid about being weaponized and all that.

Plus I lost my wallet when I was in Rosarito and that had some money, my driver's license, debit cards, and stuff. I had a friend send me a Western Union so I had cash and I was able to use my phone to pay with my virtual debit card. I went back into the United States, where it feels a little safer, to be away from this chaos of these two individuals that both have animosity towards me and I do not want to be part of their drama.

The thing is that where I am staying right now, the first picture, the one of the clutter, which is my office for the day, as I have a 90-page screenplay to write and I have about eight and a half days to write it in. I'm here with the person who was staying in the room above mine in Rosarito. She had approached me out of the blue and started a conversation, which ended up becoming really beautiful. When she saw my reactions to video of people crying and losing their s**t to my art and seeing the celebrities I've worked with, etc., she said she is honored to meet me, etc. I said that we never know who we meet and why we meet and I'm sure we'll be in touch.

Well a day and a half later here I am in Arizona, staying at her home. I'm actually helping her to clean and organize and all that kind of stuff. The fact is when I told her about the whole machete thing, she was horrified and I said no. Now I'm grateful for it because if I had not been attacked then I would not have been in Rosarito staying at that hotel. We wouldn't have met and I wouldn't be here right now.

In life when you focus on gratitude instead of trauma or who is out to get you and why or why the world sucks, then all of a sudden you feel much better. Most people would take a decade to get over the trauma of being attacked. Most people, if someone cuts them off in traffic, they talk about how they could have died. Well I had a machete strike to my neck and face and I was forced to get out of there alive and mostly unharmed. I'm already over it because I am focusing on gratitude and also I thought a great deal about what Steven Pressfield says in his book The War of Art. He talks about how the closer we get to our goals the more drama happens and other people will just act differently. Things will happen that will try to derail us from the thing that we were working on, which is this screenplay, which I am now finally getting back to now that I have secured a safe and quiet place and I have cleaned out a little nook in which to work. I have these fans so I am not concerned about the Arizona's and I feel good about the world. Whatever you are going through, no matter how traumatic or stressful, there are always good things that come out of it. Just need to look for them and see them when they do arrive.

08/17/2026

I Finished

I slept.

I said to myself: *oh my gosh, I finally completed something that wasn't at the very last second.*

Although — the competition ran four months, I only worked on it in the last one, and I submitted with five hours to spare. So some people would argue that's still last minute.

But I was at peace. I wasn't stressing.

I'm used to fighting and skipping sleep and going right up until the very last second — usually a couple of seconds past it. Normally that's fine. Normally you pay a little extra fee and the deadline turns out to be softer than advertised.

The William Shatner painting: I was told on a Tuesday that Tuesday was the deadline. Then told on Wednesday that no, they hadn't paid the extra fee, and they really needed it by the next morning or it wasn't happening. I paid triple the late fee, got it printed that day, and delivered the painting to Bill on his 93rd birthday.

Deadlines are more liquid than they appear.

This one wasn't. And I wasn't going to risk it — because this already felt like an opportunity built specifically for me. This is everything I've studied and wanted to do since I was a kid who wanted to make his own far-away world with robots and spaceships and explosions.

This trailer has all of it.

---

What I entered

It's called the **Future Vision XPRIZE**, from Peter Diamandis and the XPRIZE Foundation. They hand out big challenges and back them with money, because money accelerates innovation — and so does recognition.

This one has $3.5 million in prizes. The top five winners get $100,000 each. The grand prize winner gets the $100,000 *and* $2.5 million to actually produce their film.

To enter, you submit a trailer for the film you think should exist. The requirement: it has to be an optimistic future about technology. Meaning AI and robots aren't the enemy for once.

That's the thing Diamandis and his people are worried about. They're watching the culture line up to burn technology at the stake without understanding what it is, what it does, or what it solves. All most people see is what Hollywood feeds them:

- They're going to kill us.
- They're going to become our overlords.
- They're going to enslave us.

There are real risks. I'm not pretending otherwise. But the sum total of good AI and robots we've been given is roughly Wall-E and Big Hero 6.

It's the same reason there's no good news on the evening news. Danger is what makes you pay attention. *If it bleeds, it leads.*

---

The future I wanted to tell

I thought about what I'd actually change.

I'm not a fan of the education system. The current version was built to produce employees — same material, same pace, same teaching style for everyone. No two people are alike, so none of us learned alike. None of us care about the same things.

So: what if you had an infinitely patient teacher who knew everything about you?

One that learns from you as it teaches you. That has your biometrics, so it knows when you're genuinely interested and when you've checked out. That helps with your health by catching problems *before* they're problems instead of after. That reads your contracts so you don't get screwed — because right now none of us have any idea what we've agreed to in any terms of service we've ever scrolled past.

That's the story. It's about a woman named **Noa Maddin**, born through an artificial womb, raised alongside a teddy bear that never stopped teaching her.

XPRIZE kept citing *Star Trek*, and they're right to. We have flat-screens and tablets and cell phones and voice-controlled AI because people watched *Star Trek* first, thought it was a cool idea, and then asked how to actually build it. I read that as an instruction: invent some things that haven't been invented. Show what life could look like. Give people something to build toward.

Noa learns everything from Bear. One day she finds out what's happening to polar bears — they're getting thin, they're swimming farther and farther to find ice to rest on, a lot of them are going to die. She gets upset. She decides they need to be saved, and the way to save them is to mail them every ice cube in the freezer.

It doesn't work.

But Bear uses it to teach her more engineering, which she loves, and how postage works, because she's going to need that. He never rubs it in when she's wrong.

She grows up and figures out how to rebuild the ice caps.

I won't tell you the rest. Someone wrongs her badly. Rather than let her technology — built to heal things — get turned into a weapon, she destroys her own work. She melts the building down using her own invention and escapes to the Moon. There are plot twists and a lot of technology, some of which I made up myself.

I focused hard on emotion. Hopefully you laugh, and cry, and get angry — and not at me.

It's epic sci-fi, and it's my first one. So maybe it's crap. Maybe it's genuinely good. Either way I got to pour in everything I've ever learned: storytelling, editing, compositing, composition, cinematography, acting, problem-solving, music, psychology.

---

# # The part where I was scared

I found something that challenged me, that I was passionate about, with a message I actually believe.

And then I had to make my first-ever film trailer and put it in front of judges while competing against thousands of people. That's what happens when there are millions of dollars on the table.

It was a mental roller coaster. I'm competing with Hollywood veterans. With large teams. With people who have unlimited resources. When you start counting the entries and thinking about who's judging, it's very easy to shut down and get nothing done.

But after a while of working on it every single day, I got into the groove, and the fear went away.

I think that was flow.

Read Steven Kotler — *The Art of Impossible* especially. He lays out the actual triggers for flow state and how to engineer the conditions that produce it. This project was a sustained state of flow for me. I got lost in it.

One day the soundtrack. The next day sound effects. Then changing how everything looked. Then back into the story, furious about one sentence being more boring than it deserved to be. Then editing and continuity. Is there too much here, or not enough?

It was all I did this month. That, feeding my dog, and sleeping.

And the whole time it was a race: *can I finish a thing I've never done before, at the highest stakes I've ever competed for, in time?*

Obviously the answer is yes — now, after the fact. At the time I didn't know. I just believed. And whenever I slacked, I reminded myself what I was doing and why.

The closer the deadline got, the less I needed the reminder. I got more focused and more relaxed at the same time.

---

I'd already made peace with losing

My AI was worried I was putting too much faith in this — that I'd get crushed if I didn't win.

I told it that's not a problem, because I already won.

I wrote a story. I have a three-minute trailer for it. I'm working on the novel. I can publish it myself if I have to. I got sharper at every skill I already had, and I'm in much better shape to do this again. There are other contests. And it's a golden era for storytellers — I now have the abilities I dreamed about when I was six.

I think that's what made the difference. No pressure on the outcome.

Plenty of pressure on the work, though. As an artist I absolutely put pressure on it — *no, that isn't good enough. No, it isn't ready.*

When I hit walls, when the AI wouldn't generate a scene or couldn't find the angle or just refused to deliver, it kept suggesting alternatives. Settle for this. Try something adjacent.

**This is the first project I've ever refused to settle on.**

Could I make it better? Sure. But by the time I submitted, there was nothing I wanted to change.

That's a real victory.

---

How I celebrated

When I finished I asked myself how I was going to celebrate. And I realized I didn't want to.

I finished something, so there's more to do. I haven't won anything. I haven't *done* anything with this yet.

Then I noticed that asking about celebration was a reflex. An old pattern. Why does doing a thing require a reward? Doing the thing is the reward.

It reminds me of Steven Pressfield's *The War of Art*, one of my favorite books. He writes about the years of pain and rejection before any of it landed — he didn't taste success until his fifties. I turn 50 in four months, so that lands differently than it used to.

He tells the story of finding an RV park, sitting down at an old typewriter, and finishing his first book. He told his neighbor, a successful author. The neighbor said: *Good for you. Now start the next one.*

So I'm on to the screenplay.

If you make the top group, they ask for a full screenplay by September 10th. I plan on being in that group, so I might as well write it either way. And if it turns out I'm not — then I'll have learned to write a screenplay.

---

The actual lesson

With AI, you can learn almost anything, quickly, in the way you personally learn best.

*"I've never done it before"* doesn't mean what it used to.

If you don't know what to work on, show your work to an AI and ask what's missing. Then ask how to fix it.

**The problem decides the curriculum.**

Do what you know. Figure out what you need to learn to take the next step. Repeat until it's done.

The version of me that started this project could not have finished it. The version writing this could build the whole thing again, faster and better.

---

What's next

I might go on an adventure for a week or two — friends in Arizona and Mexico. Call it balance.

I've been focused and isolated for months, and I got something real out of it. But if you've been following: I've been homeless for the last year and a half because I burned out. I made art every single day for 4,000 days and never took a break, and eventually my body and brain locked me out.

So I'm not going to be that single-minded again. I'm going to go see people who matter to me, have some fun, and let the balance come back before it gets taken from me.

I feel good. I have purpose again. There was a stretch where I was certain I'd be homeless forever — and while I'm still homeless-adjacent and most people would say I don't have much, it feels like things are together again.

I have freedom, my health, my dog, and a laptop.

With those, I can do anything.

---

*The final version of the film is in the first comment. It's already submitted, so this version is locked — no changes. If you watch it, let me know what you think.*

08/16/2026

Woo Hoo! I completed the trailer, I did the written portion. I submitted with 5 hours left to go. That's 5 hours faster than I'd usually need :)

08/14/2026

This is still not final.... There's definitely some glitches that one can see - but... There are no more animatic frames--- no more stills... Everything has come to life.

I'm still working to fix a few things, but... this is it. 3 minutes sharp. And, my vision brought to life....

I have seen this so many times, and each time I like it more, not less.

I can't speak for you, but I would want to go to see this in theatres (don't worry, the polar bear will be more lively).

08/13/2026

I believe in Hollywood they call them dailies and this allows you to see the progress that's been made since the previous day. I have to say I still have a way to go but I only have two days to get there. I'm not freaking out! It's close enough to where I can enjoy this. I can watch this and I can feel what it's like. When it's completed I will do what I have to to get this done in time.

08/13/2026

Editing... Compositing... Composing... Foley.... There's always another skill to master in this process.

08/12/2026

Today is the 12th. I've got three days to finish everything. I still have to do an entire film treatment for this, for the actual film not for the trailer, so a lot more detail.

I am just trying to balance being focused and not freaking out. My brain just wants to give up so many times but deadlines help focus me.

08/12/2026

If you have been following along then you can see a massive difference between everything I've posted so far and this new paragraph. There are all new visuals, there's a lot more consistency, and the most obvious change is that a great many shots are no longer still images

I have three days left to bring everything alive, compose a proper soundtrack, and unify everything and my brain is messing with me. There's been so many attempts at giving up, etc. I understand the science of how the brain works and why it tries to stop us. It's been a roller coaster but I'm pushing through.

08/11/2026

Moving from "shots" to "Scenes" - Can you tell that it's a flashback? I've got 4 days left to finish my trailer for

08/08/2026

This has come a long way.

I don't know if you've actually checked out the previous animatics but this is starting to come alive. I think this tells the story in a much more lively manner. The timing, the voices, the shots have rejiggered everything. I'm getting close.... but it's not perfect. Some of the things are still place holders.

The 15th is the hard deadline for everything to be completed.

The Ori Stories

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