Big update drop today! Been working on launching the new Bantha Fodder show and making some solid improvements to Shmotime. Let me walk you through what’s new.
Bantha Fodder Show Launch
First up, the star of this update – Bantha Fodder. I’ve been having way too much fun with this one. The whole concept revolves around me (well, my AI-generated avatar) sneaking around Star Wars sets and slapping holographic stickers on everything.
This intro video shows my avatar – which started as a Sims character that Pux made, became my Anarchy Arcade avatar, and then got the AI treatment through nano banana on Hydra. It’s like digital inception at this point.
The logo came out pretty sweet too:
I’m really digging that holographic sticker effect with the weird sheet metal vinyl backdrop. Sometimes the simplest ideas just work.
Star Wars Sticker Campaign
The whole gimmick is me showing up in various Star Wars scenes and tagging them with Bantha Fodder stickers. Here I am in the cantina:
And here’s another shot on Tatooine with R2D2 in the background, wearing my signature Enter Key Arcade shirt and glasses:
But my personal favorite is this scene where I’m actually talking to Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace:
The AI did a surprisingly good job putting me into these scenes. And yes, before you ask – that sticker actually shows up on various props throughout the scenes:
Shmotime Plugin Upgrades
On the technical side, I added some much-needed functionality to the Shmotime plugin. The big one is episode replacement during JSON imports:
This PlayCanvas script handles intro/outro videos and manages an array of commercial videos with configurable probability settings for automatic playback between scene changes.
I used this new import feature to retroactively add media to old Sacred G episodes. My workflow was pretty slick – export the episode as JSON, feed it to Grok (Twitter’s AI), have it find relevant images and videos for the topics being discussed, format them as producer call-outs, then import back as a replacement episode. Did this for 3-4 episodes and it worked like a charm.
Sacred G Podcast Page
Speaking of Sacred G, I finally built out a proper custom show page and generated thumbnails for every episode. You can check it out at shmotime.com/sacred-g – it actually looks complete now!
Character Avatar Updates
I’ve been working on standardizing all the character avatars across the platform. Here’s the updated Gnarly avatar:
And Jez’s updated avatar:
These are all based on the same pipeline – Pux creates Sims avatars, they become Anarchy Arcade characters, then get the AI render treatment. Still some alignment issues (Gnarly keeps coming out looking like a Trandoshan instead of human), but we’re getting there.
I also generated some character mood shots using AI. Here’s Gnarly in his crack dealer era from Gnarly Farms, looking smug with his cigar and top hat:
And here he is in full rage mode:
Plus the classic “frustrated with ads” shot:
What’s Next
Bantha Fodder is live but doesn’t have its own Shmotime show page yet – for now the episodes are listed on blog.smsithlord.com. I also added some background music from ElevenLabs, though it’s not great and I’ll probably swap it out.
The commercial system is working nicely though – those Star Wars sticker scenes randomly play between episode segments, which adds a nice touch of chaos to the viewing experience.
More updates coming soon. The AI toolchain is getting pretty smooth now, so expect more weird experiments in the pipeline.