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. The studio is the software and games I make under the Stalefish Labs name, and why.
October 23, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 3 of 3 so far in
Boogie Down Productions' Why Is That? argues about the Bible and the schools over a bass line that may be the first on this site played live by a reggae session man. KRS-One brought a Jamaican rhythm section to Ghetto Music, and the credits say Val Douglas.
Note
My brother ran two report cards for most of a year and had my mother's signature down cold. He had the seal. She had a dot. Five thousand years of document verification turn on that difference.
October 22, 2026
October 21, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 2 of 3 so far in
The bass under EPMD's Strictly Business is one note, played in three quick pairs. It comes from Eric Clapton's 1974 cover of Bob Marley's I Shot the Sheriff, which makes it a British blues band playing a Jamaican song, sampled by two kids from Brentwood.
October 16, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 1 of 3 so far in
The bass riff under Ice-T's I'm Your Pusher is six notes long. Getting to the bottom of them runs through a 1972 nightclub scene, a garage in LA, two misread anti-drug records, a rap beef settled by the Zulu Nation, and a shark movie.
Note
I built an editorial pass to catch bad AI prose and it kept turning my funniest reporter into a competent stranger. The same pass was doing beautiful work next door. It had no idea what it was reviewing.
October 15, 2026
Note
The year a branch of the Musicians' Union voted to ban the synthesizer, two other rooms were quietly building the next one. None of the three knew about the others.
October 8, 2026 · responding to www.cnbc.com
All essays → All notes → The vault →
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
Classic Connect Four, built for J2ME-capable phones in the mid-2000s. The interesting design constraint was the input — most phones of the era had 12 …
From the Catalog
Que Publishing · 1998
Web developers must master several technologies to create sophisticated Web sites. Platinum Edition Using HTML 4, XML, and Java 1.2 gives Web …
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, …
