About Aric

The Weird Kid
All my life I’ve been creating fantastical, whimsical realms in my head. For years I assumed everyone else did the same thing. Eventually it became painfully clear… they didn’t.
My parents first realised I might be 'different' when I drew what they thought was a boat. “No,” I corrected them. “It’s someone lying in a bath waving a flag.” 

Back in the late 60s and 70s you weren’t neurodivergent. You were just a bit odd. And odd kids had a habit of being quietly pushed to the edges of things by classmates, teachers, and pretty much anyone who didn’t know what to do with a child who saw the world slightly sideways. School was a special kind of misery. Undiagnosed dyslexia made learning feel like trying to read through fog, and bullies were always happy to remind me I didn’t quite fit anywhere. So I did what any sensible outsider would do. I retreated into my imagination. Inside my own head the rules made sense, the landscapes were limitless, and no one could tell me I was doing it wrong. I built entire worlds in there strange, elaborate, sometimes ridiculous worlds. They were my refuge. My playground. Eventually, they became my salvation.

Synths & Spaceships

The late 70s felt like the moment dreamers and misfits finally started getting their moment. The old black-and-white world was slowly bleeding into colour. In 1977 I bought the very first issue of the British comic 2000AD for the grand price of 8p (about 14 US cents). I collected it for nearly sixteen years. Then my dad took me to see Star Wars. That pretty much rewired my brain permanently. Not long after that I saw Gary Numan performing Cars on television. Synths, robotic vocals, and pure sci-fi attitude. Released in 1979, it didn’t just top the charts in the UK it helped turn synthesizers into the sound of the future. The mainstream world didn’t quite realise it yet… but things were changing. And I was absolutely ready for it. By the early 80s I’d saved enough money to buy my first synthesizer. I spent hours recording strange 20-minute soundscapes onto cassette tapes layering beeps, drones and humming electronics into something that felt vaguely like music from another planet. Later in the decade I drifted into painting surreal abstract acrylic art on whiteboards, because frankly there’s no rule saying creativity has to stay in one lane.

The Digital Rabbit Hole

In 1993 I was living in America and had just discovered the internet through AOL. (Younger readers may need to consult their grandparents for historical clarification.) Computers quickly became my newest obsession. My first digital artwork was a spaceship hovering above a pyramid created in the cutting edge software back then Corel Draw. By modern standards the image now looks like something scratched onto a digital cave wall. At the time though, it felt like unlocking a superpower. Photoshop arrived soon after, and Adobe proceeded to empty my wallet for the next 25 years. Then in 1998 I bought my first digital camera… and that opened yet another creative rabbit hole. For nearly two decades I bounced between jobs, hobbies and creative experiments. Music, art, photography, digital design. The problem was never ideas. The problem was too many ideas. My real life often felt overshadowed by half-finished projects and the persistent feeling I was meant to be doing something… else.

The Quiet Years

In 2016 we moved to the Scottish Borders, where I effectively retired from normal life. Over time my life slowed down dramatically. Some people might call that boring. For me it was exactly what my brain needed. For the first time in years the constant noise inside my bipolar mind started to quiet down. Five miles from civilisation in a little cottage that felt like the edge of the world, I finally started to recharge. One day while walking my dog through an empty field, I realised I was acting out a conversation between two new characters: Lady Deadheart and Captain Feathers, who was apparently bragging about his completely ridiculous spaceship. When I got home I scribbled the scene down. Another strange world had quietly appeared.

AI, Pandas, and the Birth of a Podcast

A few years later we moved to north Cumbria to a new home. Suddenly AI image generators, chat bots, text to speech models exploded onto the scene. When I first saw what tools like this could do, something clicked immediately. Finally the half-formed places and characters that had lived inside my head for decades could actually be seen and heard in the real world. So naturally I fell down that rabbit hole as well. Around the same time my wife and I started watching panda videos on social networks, their chaotic clumsiness and complete lack of dignity made me understand something very important. My fictional universe clearly needed a force of enhanced Assault Infantry War Pandas...which seemed perfectly logical 😂. So Remus the War Panda was created and he joined Lady Deadheart in a strange realm of the same name. I’ve always loved audio drama and slightly absurd comedy. So I decided to try making something unusual a weird audio show with an AI version of me, Remus the War Panda and Mc Wordy a garage built robot. By episode four I began to weed out the weird sketches and let the story take center stage.

One Man and a cast of Robot Voices

These days I create a new episode roughly once a month. I map out about 30 minutes of story, wrestle my dyslexic brain into writing the script, and then let AI help tidy up the chaos. After that I basically become a one-person theatre company, directing a cast of AI voices and characters. I Edit everything together in Logic Pro tweaking scenes, adjusting performances, and generally playing the mad scientist until the episode feels right. The songs are AI-generated too, although I still write the lyric, like the script myself.

And So....
That’s roughly how you spend a lifetime in your imagination only to wake up one day in the body of a 60 year older man. married to a grey haired woman, surrounded by 950+ Funko Pops and a grumpy cat called Titus. Sometimes I wonder whether I really lived all those decades…or did I just dream it all UP.........