Michael Morrison

Everyone's a Ringer to Somebody

I played beer-league hockey for fifteen straight years, the kind with a checking ban and a roster that runs from former juniors to guys who learned to skate at thirty (me!), and I’ve noticed a tic in how everyone in it thinks, myself included. Whoever is better than you is a ringer. Not “better.” A ringer. A guy who doesn’t belong down here with us honest players, who’s slumming, who ought to be playing up a division and is padding his stats against us gentlemen of the game. The actual skill of the league has nothing to do with the judgment. You run the same math in the top tier and the bottom: draw the line at your own ability and call everyone above it a cheat. I suspect you probably don’t escape this issue until you truly graduate to the professional ranks, where incentives flip and you actually want to move up leagues.

Can I Interest You in a Self-Riding Skateboard?

Friends — how much of your skate session do you waste actually skateboarding?

The Self-Riding Bicycle

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

I keep bees, I ride skateboards on ramps, I ride bikes up hills without gears, 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.