Note
Nobody at the ramp is keeping score
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
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 .
Latest
Again, Funnier
August 28, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 29 of 29 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, which is also what a marketing director did to my friend Terry, and what I now do at an AI prompt all day. The difference was never the ear. It's what the "again" produces, and when to stop asking.
Note
The lawn franchises
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
We already had this fight once, and won
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
Nobody needed the key
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
The Tax of Mastery
August 21, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 28 of 29 so far in Machined by Hand
Why a competent adult would choose to be bad at things on purpose. Two kinds of starting over — the joyful reset and the dragon you've spent a life avoiding — and a dusty inherited guitar I decided to make mean something.
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
Space Out
2002–2005
A Space Invaders–style fixed-shooter. It began on the cover of Windows 95 Game Developer's Guide in 1996 and came back as a C++ demo in Beginning Game …
From the Catalog
Presenting ActiveX
Sams Publishing · 1996
From the Builds
Wicking Worm Gardens
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, …