Making on Michael Morrison

The Self-Riding Bicycle

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Picture the launch. The lighting is good, the founder is in the nice plain t-shirt, and the thing under the cloth is a bicycle. The GhostRider™, he calls it. We asked a simple question, he says. What if riding a bicycle could be effortless? The bicycle, it turns out, rides itself: sensors, a gyroscope, a motor where the crank used to be. It balances, it steers, it accelerates, it leans through the corners. We removed the seat, he adds. And the pedals. What would you do with them? Not to mention the handlebar. Nobody’s there to hold on! It takes a clean lap around the stage, riderless, to applause.

Becoming Gnarly

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I keep bees, I ride skateboards on ramps, I’ve written a lot of technical books, and I build software and games for a living. On a site that asks you to take all of that in at once, the reasonable question is what any of it has to do with the rest. The honest answer is that they’re the same decision made over and over in different spaces. I tend to pick the harder way to do a thing, and I’ve done it on purpose for long enough that it stopped being a series of choices and turned into a disposition. This is an essay that acknowledges the disposition, because everything else here is downstream of it.