I write essays and books. I build software and games. I keep bees and skate ramps. These things are more connected than they look. The essays make a case for taking the harder path — in craft, in work, in the things worth not handing off. The current arc is taste, judgment, and craft in the AI era, but the subject is older than AI and will outlast it. The catalog holds forty-seven technical books across two decades plus a bunch of translations. The vault is where the older material lives, including the origin document for everything I’m working on now. For more on the software and games I build, check out Stalefish Labs.
September 2, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 14 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
I've built mountain bike trails with hand tools and ridden the kind a machine cuts in a day. The difference was never care. It's a four-foot blade that can't ask above-or-below-this-rock.
Note
A GPA works like a golf score: every failure baked into the cumulative, forever. A teacher's essay on cheating and AI sent me back to the skate session, which reads skill a better way.
August 30, 2026
August 28, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 27 of 30 so far in Machined by Hand
I've made Rick Rubin the hero of three essays without once stress-testing him. Strip the reverence off his method and it's a guy in a room saying "again" until it lands. So was the marketing director who did it to my friend Terry. So am I, at an AI prompt, all day.
Note
A 71-year-old reader survived his own rent collapse in Queensland and bolded four words about the next one: at the same time. Gradual displacement leaves exits. Simultaneous displacement jams them, and luck stops being the tiebreaker.
August 26, 2026
Note
Every school is fighting about AI, and almost nobody fighting it has noticed we settled this in math class in the 1980s. The calculator rule still works. Where it stops working is the part worth worrying about.
August 26, 2026
Note
Three weeks after Claude started marking its own output, someone shipped the solvent. The clever objection to the watermark assumed the checker was the lever. It wasn't, and the law that required the mark says what it was actually for.
August 25, 2026 · responding to declaude.org
Becoming Gnarly
Essays on AI, work, and choosing the harder path when it's worth it. New ones by email as they're published.
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From the Vault
2002–2005
Mobile port of the desktop Henway Frogger clone, optimized for the small screens and limited memory of J2ME-era handsets. Demo for the J2ME mobile …
From the Catalog
CIO.com · 2008
The key to understanding when (and when not) to deploy JavaScript has as much to do with the intent of the target application as it does JavaScript …
From the Builds
Complete (rebuilt) · 2023
A backyard skateboard mini ramp finished with Ramp Armor, tile, and pool coping — and the year-later teardown and rebuild.