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 16, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 1 of 1 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
October 7, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
In 1982 a musicians' union voted to ban the synthesizer, and they were right about what it would cost them. The gains arrived forty years later, from a toy.
Note
For four years I wrote the screening tests that decided who got programming jobs, after a GPA filter kept me out of one I could already do. The tests measured recall, which is now the part of the job a machine does for free.
October 2, 2026
September 30, 2026 · by Michael Morrison Dev
The source code to a game I wrote in 1993 was gone, so I rebuilt it from the shipped binary, deriving every rule by inference. Days after I finished, a floppy gave the source back — and graded the reconstruction. On what you learn by having to prove a thing instead of read it.
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
A Frogger-style game where you cross a busy road as a chicken. The name comes from the bad joke — *What's a henway? About four pounds.* A C++ demo …
From the Catalog
Wiley · 2010
The bestselling JavaScript reference, updated for changes in technology and best practices. Co-authored with Danny Goodman, Brendan Eich, and others.
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, …
