Mercenary Wars Volume One

Mercenary Wars: The Battle of Piggly Wiggly

✩ Volume 1 of the saga of the 3rd Street Crew vs the greatest villain of all time, The Mercenary ✩

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by the Vigilante Bud Johnson
aka GhostofSocrates
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A Note About A.I.

I don’t monetize my videos. I make music as a hobby, and I make silly videos for the music I make because I think it’s fun. My primary focus has always been on making music. I don’t consider myself a videographer or what one might call “good at making videos.” I started doing animation because I wanted something more than a stationary image on the screen the whole time while the music played. Fast forward a few years and now we have Mercenary Wars.

After I got hit by a car in 2022, I challenged myself to do something new to make sure my brain still worked while recovering from the head trauma. I chose to study music theory, learn how to make music, and learn how to play the guitar.

When I first saw the rise of A.I., I used a free A.I. image maker app to create a few characters for my videos: some of the members of Crustacean Nation and the first batch of Hulk Hogan Clones in particular. Again, this is a hobby and I found a new way to make characters.

I never considered them my original art. I wasn’t Seymour Skinner trying to pass off Krusty Burgers as his own home cooking (Steamed Hams reference). Same way I don’t take credit for making the dancing Thanos animation. I got that off YouTube. Back then I made fun of how obviously A.I. the A.I. was. I can’t make that joke as much these days. A.I. is looking too real now, and that’s scary.

I stopped using the app to create images because, the more I learned about A.I., the more suspicious I got about it. Now I want nothing to do with it. There’s too much to discuss here, but there are good reasons to be concerned about A.I., from environmental and economic concerns, harmful psychological effects and how A.I. can be weaponize by corrupt people in power. I want to be clear that I’m not a fan of A.I., and the images I made were just for my personal use in these videos before I learned about the problems and dangers A.I. can cause.

I believe in the power of human creativity and ingenuity over having a machine do our creating and our thinking for us. A.I. can steal humanity’s intellectual property, but it cannot copy our heart and soul.

— The Vigilante Bud Johnson

aka GhostofSocrates

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Mercenary Wars Episodes

0:00 “Intro”

0:17 “Become The Villain”

2:20 “Hulkster vs Lobster”

4:50 “The Special Technique of Shadowboxing”

9:16 “Dance 4 Me”

11:55 “Eggthulhu Awakens”

13:51 “Attack of the Clones”

16:55 “The End of Crustacean Nation”