I’m a writer, developer, toy and game designer, and amateur stuntman. For most of my career I tried to keep those columns separate because professional convention said I should. I’ve mostly stopped doing that. The combination is the actual job, and pretending otherwise just made the work harder to find a home for.

So here is the whole shape in one breath. By day I’m a contract iOS developer with Mercury Intermedia, where I’ve been since 2009. Stalefish Labs is the studio for the games and apps that are mine. This site is where I write. Three columns, one person.

I skate. I was briefly sponsored as a vert skater in the early 90s before the industry collapsed, then came engineering school and a decade-plus of other work, then a return to amateur skating and a few regional contest wins. I sit on the board of The Skatepark Project. A friend at a contest once joked that I looked like an accountant who showed up to destroy, and the name stuck as an in-joke among friends. That’s @tndestroyer on Instagram, where I post nothing but skating and mountain biking, which suits the handle’s spirit. There’s a mini ramp in the yard, rebuilt by hand, and a 13-foot vert ramp I skate at a friend’s place. The whole skate side of the site is collected on one page.

The writing came first. 47 technical books published between 1996 and 2010, mostly with Sams, O’Reilly, Wiley, and Microsoft Press. JavaScript, Java, HTML, Ajax, mobile development, game programming, and whatever else the publishers were buying that year. Translated into a dozen-plus languages I can’t read, which pushes the total edition count past 80. A few trade-press articles for CIO, Game Developer magazine, and Head First Labs. Four video courses for O’Reilly when the iPhone was still figuring out what kind of device it was going to be, plus dozens of online courses for DigitalThink when corporate e-learning was the new thing. A handful of mobile games and Java applets that won’t run in any browser made in the last decade, including the first action game ever written for Microsoft Windows, back when GUIs themselves were the new thing. They all live in the Vault now, where the trail keeps the receipts.

After the book era I went to work with Mercury Intermedia in Nashville as a contract developer, and I’m still there seventeen years later. That’s how I ended up on the original CNN iPhone app, and on USA Today’s first iPad app, built against pre-release hardware in a locked room in Washington, DC before anyone outside Apple had seen the device. Fox News, Xfinity, and The New York Times followed. The Xfinity TV iPad app I helped build received a 2011 Primetime Emmy Engineering Certificate for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development. Less visible than the books, since the apps ship under client brands, but it’s the work that has paid the bills for seventeen years, and it’s where most of the engineering judgment I write about now actually got formed.

Stalefish Labs is the home for the entertainment projects that are mine. The company launched in 2002; the first game, a physical card game called Tall Tales, shipped the following year. The company name comes from a skateboard air where you grab the heel edge of the board behind your trailing leg, mid-rotation. Still one of my favorite tricks. Still pulling it off, mostly. The first time the connection between skating and the computer-book-author version of me got articulated in writing was in a 2008 blog post about an underappreciated yo-yo virtuoso, six years after the company already existed, but the first time I’d explained the why of the name in any kind of public form. The company’s mission, as opposed to its name, got an earlier written form still: an unfinished 2002 manifesto about using games to pull families back together, written the founding year. Reading it now, it’s the same argument I’ve apparently been making in one shape or another ever since.

What the studio actually ships, as of this writing: Sojourn, bedtime stories written to be read aloud by one person to another. Citizen’s Daily Brief, a daily assessment of world events with the reasoning shown. Ridewise, Fieldwise, and Yardwise, which use real weather data to say whether the trail is rideable, the field playable, or the yard needs water. Open Wheelers, casual F1 and IndyCar fantasy for friends, with NASCAR and hockey siblings on the way. Muster, for planning casual get-togethers, sixteen years old and about to be rebuilt. Marshal, an RC lap counter built with a friend. Tall Tales, still available from the last of the original print run, with four more card games in the queue. And a set of free lab tools, including a 3D ramp designer and a bike jump simulator, that exist because I needed them. The full list is at Stalefish Labs.

The rest, in no particular order: I’ve kept bees on and off. I build ramps. I jump mountain bikes. I race RC cars. I write mobile apps, create physical games, and have been collaborating with AI to wade into creative writing. And I’m publishing the essays I’ve been thinking about for a long time but kept telling myself nobody would read. Turns out that was just the internal judge talking; the actual readers seem fine with it.

If you came here for the writing on AI and how it’s changing creative work, that lives in Essays. If you want the technical bibliography with covers, sample chapters, and code downloads, that’s in the Catalog. If you want to wander through 18 years of things I made that didn’t fit any single column, Vault is the door.

I’m reachable at howdy@michaelmorrison.com. I read everything. I reply to most of it.