The Weekender, June 5, 2026: Burgeoning
I'm using that word because it's one of my favorites, but also because it's descriptive. This site is a week old in its current iteration and it's really starting to take off a bit.
Traffic-wise, I mean.
Amber's excited, that's for sure. After the first couple of days, we'd hit 500 unique viewers at OscarandAmber.com, and she recorded a celebratory video...
And a couple of days later, she was at it again. We'd hit 1,000 viewers.
She's probably going to have to record another one. As I'm writing this our total unique site visitor count is knocking on the door of 2,000 - it wouldn't be a surprise if it hit that mark by the time I hit "Publish."
Most of that traffic is coming from Instagram, where our little account is for some reason generating lots of look-sees. That makes sense; we've got a lot of video content in this project with the videos of all of the characters that we're doing (Craig was the last one, and that was a lot of fun to write - he's such a colossal douchebag that I could just let it fly, and I'm kind of proud of that video).
But we're at X, TikTok and YouTube as well. So feel free to follow us at all of those platforms and you won't miss anything.
One of the things I've noticed on some of these platforms is that there's a certain debate about AI and its role in a project like this one. And there are definitely some differing opinions on that subject. I'm going to lay mine down.
I'll say it flat-out - without access to AI programs The Chronicles of Oscar and Amber wouldn't be possible. But I disagree vehemently with the idea that what I'm doing here is "AI-generated" content.
I generate the content. AI is just a tool. I'll explain what I mean.
I'm a writer. I'm using a pen name for this project, because the other stuff I do as a writer is very different than this is and I'm not sure the branding would work out if I did it under my real name. But I do journalistic work for a couple of national publications and I've written a dozen books - some fiction, some non-fiction.
I tell you that because all of the written words in the episodes that you'll read here are mine. They didn't come from AI. Sure, I'll use Claude and Grok for feedback and discussion of what I've written - getting beta readers for a serialized fiction project even when you aren't using a pen name is a pain, whereas those two can provide some instant response and perhaps an idea for improvement.
But they don't write episodes for The Chronicles of Oscar and Amber. I write those.
Are the video illustrations you see here produced with AI apps? Yes. In last week's Weekender I explained how. But the vision behind those video clips is mine and I tightly control what the apps produce.
There's a post up at Kling AI's Instagram which is worth watching. It's from Jon Erwin, who's the showrunner for House of David, the WONDER Project streaming series you can find at Amazon Prime and other places. Erwin is a real filmmaker and he's doing all the filmmaking things, and yet he's using 400 AI-generated images per episode to enhance the scale of his production...
I'll second what he says. On steroids.
I don't have a film crew and I don't have actors. Erwin is doing what he's doing with House of David to scale a million-dollar (several millions of dollars, actually) production up into the visual properties of a hundred-million-dollar production. What I'm doing is creating something that would be impossible without AI, and it's just me doing it.
You can try to be a purist about it and say it's not legitimate if it's generated on a server somewhere, or you can realize that this is content which couldn't exist, at least in this form, without the tools now available to creators. I can bring written characters to life on video, according to the vision in my head, without millions of dollars in production budgets and the inevitable intervention by corporate media suits - and we see again and again what happens to the author's original vision when Hollywood sinks its hooks in - because of AI.
Is that less authentic than using political and cultural preferences to cast characters in a way completely alien to their original writing, or to reboot classic stories with plot points utterly foreign to the source material? I'm going to argue no. What I'll say is that from the perspective of the author of this material (and the other content I'm planning on releasing with the resources and workflow I'm developing here), AI is a tool which facilitates the authenticity of the work.
Amber looks and speaks and acts exactly how I want her to. So do the rest of the characters. I'm not limited to what I can get out of the actors I could afford to cast for this, or the vision of the director I would hire. Or the producers who would stoop to taking this on as a film project.
With AI, I can control all of it. Sure, sometimes I'll compromise because I find that I just can't get the shot I want out of an app I'm working with, but that compromise is still a version of my vision I'm comfortable with.
For example, in the Perspectives: Cara video, my original plan was that Crazy Laura would come in and use a wrench she finds in Keegan's workshop to bludgeon the poor Factory Girl lying on the table into a broken wreck. After several iterations I realized I just couldn't prompt the apps I was working with to give me a credible dramatic shot of her doing that. So I changed the action to get what I could, and the final version has Laura setting the doll on fire, which Cara has to put out with a fire extinguisher.
Which is a better shot anyway. And it was my idea to switch from beating to burning.
The point being that it's a very powerful tool, perhaps the most powerful tool ever invented in the creative space, but it's still just a tool. It doesn't work unless it's prompted, and to prompt it you have to have a creative vision.
Which is human.
It's OK if you don't agree, but I'm pretty confident mine is going to ultimately be the consensus position. As Erwin notes, AI is democratizing the film industry so that we aren't totally dependent on corporate-media gatekeepers. This is happening at a time when book publishing is also throwing off the gatekeepers; some 60 percent of all the books sold on Amazon were from independent self-published authors.
And now this story comes in a medium that we're more or less inventing which sits at the crossroads of those two developments. We'll see where it goes.
So far, it's going pretty well. We're up less than a week as of this writing and by the time you will have read this, we'll have had 2,000 unique visitors here.
And Amber will have to record another one of her celebratory videos soon.