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 .
July 22, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 19 of 19 so far in The Automation Line
The art world, supposedly the temple of the artist's hand, abandoned the hand four centuries ago and called it genius. The feared-AI model — many hands, one name — is the oldest move in fine art, and the scrutiny runs backwards: the more the buyer pays, the less the hand seems to matter.
Note
Michael J. Whalen and I landed on the same claim about art and lived experience this month, from opposite ends of it. He has a distinction I wish I'd had, and we disagree about the only part neither of us can prove.
July 22, 2026 · responding to michaeljwhalen.medium.com
July 17, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 18 of 19 so far in The Automation Line
For four years I wrote the technical screening tests companies used to decide who got programming jobs — after a GPA filter once kept me out of a job I could already do. The hiring-gate companion to The Gate Was the Product, told from inside, and the thing no test ever caught: you can't really know a person until you work beside them.
July 15, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 17 of 19 so far in The Automation Line
Some creative reputations were earned and some were just gatekeeping, and cheap AI is quietly exposing which is which. A field guide to the galleries, labels, and imprints that were protecting the work — and the ones only charging rent to get in. Written from the ungated side, where I've always stood.
Note
The most undervalued use of AI is thinking, not making — and the one discipline that separates leveling up from being expertly flattered: don't ask whether your idea is good, ask how it fails.
July 14, 2026
July 10, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 16 of 19 so far in The Automation Line
The paid-creator era was a rent on a scarcity, like the monastic scribes and the single-earner household before it: a window that felt permanent and wasn't. Every livelihood is a rent on a scarcity, and the consolation isn't comfort. It's an explanation.
From the Vault
Head First Labs · 2008
A 2008 Head First Labs piece on how chapters of Head First books got storyboarded before any prose was written. The design-first content workflow …
From the Catalog
Sams Publishing · 1997
Visual InterDev Unleashed provides an all-in-one advanced-level guide to designing, creating, and publishing for the Web using the most sophisticated …
From the Builds
Complete (rain catchers later removed) · 2012
A pair of self-watering raised garden beds built from galvanized stock tanks — sub-irrigated from a gravel reservoir below, fed three different ways, …