Adventures of the Persistently Impaired (…and Other Tales) is a creative studio specialising in the research and development of imaginative solutions in media and entertainment.
Founded in late 2024 by former music industry marketing director David James Lennon (Universal Music UK, Sweden, Warner Music UK, EMI Records UK & Ireland, First Access Entertainment), the studio focuses on research and development of future consumer goods and experiences —developing models, architectures, and products that blend everyday practicality with entertainment value, all while showcasing the latest in future tech and IoT… and yet, it all came about almost entirely by accident.
What began as a venture into print, design, and packaging earlier in the year—born from a long-standing love of creating artwork and physical parts for CD and Vinyl Production —quickly turned into something more. The realisation hit: to really stand out, there needed to be a product to print. That led to the creation of Fortunes Told, a local gift brand situated in London specialising in producing personalised gifts and accessories with designs inspired by the iconic Rider-Waite Tarot Deck illustrations by Pamela Colman-Smith.
But going from nearly two decades in digital music to making scented candles for a living—basically overnight—didn’t quite sit right. Then, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in late autumn, driven by a natural curiosity for tech, and a few hours on GitHub… it all just clicked.
Fortunes Told is a unique, experiential online world with a retail-crossover twist. At its core, a homeware and accessories range in 78 distinctive designs—each one representing a card from the Tarot. Every piece is embedded with NFC or BLE technology, hand-produced in London, blind-boxed, and distributed entirely at random. You won’t know what card you’ve been dealt—or quite what it he card has in store—until it’s unboxed.
When paired with the Fortunes Told Companion App (available now on the App Store and Google Play), each item unlocks a personalised Tarot reading that unfolds and evolves over time through a real-time, voice-to-voice interactive experience. No two readings are ever the same.
It needed something a little different—so our research into generative AI and machine learning began. What started as a simple companion app soon evolved into a mixed reality, choose-your-own-adventure experience, where the user played as themselves in a dynamic virtual world.
The tech side was solid: in-game weather that matched the user’s real-world location, and in-game characters that appeared based on the Tarot cards collected in the Fortunes Told Companion App. That’s where our R&D efforts really shifted focus—into building more advanced AI and ML systems to power this evolving experience.
The concept itself was promising. After a few months of development, we had something that felt like a cross between Pokémon Go and Nintendo Amiibo—a playful, connected world that responded to physical products and real-world data. But there was one problem: it didn’t really have a story. It lacked the kind of narrative foundation needed to stand on its own. It was very much one of those ideas where, if you explained it over dinner after a couple of wines, your family would smile enthusiastically… and then side-eye each other when you weren’t looking.
The R&D properly kicked off with training models on specific materials and building workflows that could replicate tasks with incredibly granular requirements. But it was never about making consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT, where you press a button and out comes a block of text to fit a brief. This was about creating tools that genuinely help creatives move their body of work forward.
Storybook was the first tool developed—designed specifically for creative writers dealing with the dreaded writer’s block. At its core, it’s an agentic workflow engine. Writers Block engages users in a natural, chat-based experience, currently powered by LLaMA 4 Scout 17B (previously 3.3 70B), and works with their existing manuscripts, notes, and character sketches to help fill in the blanks, connect ideas, and bring cohesion to their work.
It keeps perfect continuity across characters and plot points—even in texts over 70,000 words long via multiple chunking methods (document storage combined with vectors, a relational graph and a separate “contextual prompt factory” that initiates each individual call to the model with relevant context —and includes research tools that automatically check facts, flag historical inaccuracies, and return verified findings directly within the writing flow. Forget RAG. It’s Deep Research for each round. And verified by passing through an independent adjudicator round before it’s returned. It’s like having a really well-read, slightly obsessive editor who never sleeps.
And currently in development: tools for storyboarding, scriptwriting, character design, and visual development for animation and film. There’s othertales Screenwriter – which converts manuscripts created in Storybook into industry-standard, Hollywood-formatted screenplays with a single click, whilst expanding upon language and dialogue based on character psychology design.
We’ve produced work on Emotional Resonance Engines which paired with Human Reader Simulators—trained using research from film studies—analyse the emotional and contextual weight of each scene, from language in dialogue to scene setting. These engines then come together to graphically sketch and storyboard each scene based on tone and pacing, hand in hand with the user.
A virtual character designer works alongside the author to produce animated and photorealistic character designs, refining visuals through conversation and iterative suggestions. And then there’s othertales producer—a tool capable of working text to full-length, photorealistic, or animated feature film, complete with character-synced audio for dialogue. From book to screenplay to storyboard, to character design and final rendering—it’s all covered.
An Early Screenwriter Workflow Design Pre-User Interaction
But… that’ll never see the light of day. We’ve experimented with some incredible concepts – We’ve even built architectures that replicate entire businesses – agentic flows with models that hold meetings with other models, receptionist agents who answer and field incoming calls, virtual publicists within teams who can email and call press outlets to promote products conjured up by the virtual agentic marketing department, producing the work of entire studios and their internal departments. It’s crazy stuff.
And why? Because the point of R&D isn’t just to build what’s possible—it’s to understand what should be built. To explore both the exciting and the risky sides of new technologies. To know what to promote—and what to leave well alone.
There’s rightly a lot of concern around the rise of generative technologies—what they’ll mean for future jobs, and how they might impact human creativity. And honestly, that worry is justified.
“Back in 2006, I remember sitting in a boardroom at a music company in Kensington, London, being told not to worry about a rival label’s DRM-free deal with a major platform. “It’ll never work,” someone said. “No one’s going to bother downloading a new version of their software.” We’d just come off the back of the Napster and LimeWire boom—an era where the music industry had been so focused on enforcing impossible rules that it completely missed the boat. Consumers surged ahead, embracing new technology while the industry lagged behind, taking nearly a decade to recover from fear of losing control instead of getting involved at the founding moment of change.”
We’re still a little way off from releasing proper consumer business software—but everything produced by PI & Other Tales will come with clear sustainability and ethical clauses built into its EULA. From a commercial standpoint, any software or service developed through our research may not be used to replace a human role within a business. If it is, the licence would be revoked—no refund, no exceptions.
That said, there are some genuinely exciting tools coming out of this work. One of the most promising is our research into attribution tracking—how we can credit original creators whose work is used to build derivative content in consumer-facing tools.
Imagine a system where an artist chooses to licence their work, and every time a model like DALL·E or Stable Diffusion uses it to generate something new, that artist receives a royalty—calculated based on how much of their original creation was involved in the output. It’s not a perfect design. Not yet. But it’s a starting point.
And the name? Adventures of the Persistently Impaired (…and Other Tales)?
Something asked a lot, with raised eyebrows. A light hearted nod towards the founder’s ADHD diagnosis letter, which read ”David is Persistently Impaired in Multiple Domains of Functioning”. A way of taking ownership for a new business moving forwards.
And that’s it. For more information on Research Projects, head over here.
Fortunes Told – The complete virtual experience is on its way. The Companion App is already live, and the base narrative—produced from a few unfinished human manuscripts that definitely got its fair share of side-eyes over the dinner table—is out in hardback, paperback, and Kindle on 19th June, available from all good bookstores.
A substantial portion of retail sales goes straight back into research and development—for a more sustainable and ethical future in Generative AI.