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 9, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
The new mark on this site is traced from a wooden bass bridge Les Paul carved in his home workshop. It reached me through two gifts and one refusal. Nobody charged anybody for any of it.
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
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
2003
Part trivia, part storytelling contest, built around three legends — Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Roswell alien. The first game Stalefish …
From the Catalog
Wiley Publishing · 2007
Make your Web pages stand out above the noise with JavaScript and the expert instruction in this much-anticipated update to the bestselling 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.