All of life is practice.
I’m Michael. I make worlds, mods, and AI safety evals, and I try to make each of them a little more beautiful than the last. This site is a doorway: six rooms, each one a thing I keep coming back to.
Tell people what you made, not what you are going to make. Finished things are for sharing. Dreams are for building.
Staravorix
A world written for over a decadeA universe of my own. Burning gods, drifted stars, and long campaigns that outlive their characters. The maps get redrawn every time someone survives something they should not have.
Vintage Story
Mods for a quiet, stubborn worldSome worlds reward patience. I build mods for one of them: slow systems that make a long life feel earned.
AI Alignment Research
I like opening the boxWhen an agent’s context gets summarized, do your preferences survive? I build evals that answer small questions like that exactly, because labs steer by what gets measured.
Convergence
My philosophyAll things have an end. A thrown stone cannot change its path; a stalled plane can wake its engine and choose another. Convergence is the practice of finding the ends worth reaching, and steering toward them.
Romance and other Ramblings
Written in the openLife things. Walks, small ceremonies, what makes a day good. A public diary, updated when there is something worth saying.
Things I’ve Made
The long threadWhat is the most beautiful thing you have made so far? Here is my answer, in order. Each one was practice for the next.
- Writing
A story told out loud
Every night, a story for my little brother. Magic powers, and nobody ever dies. It never really stopped.
- Writing
The first 120 pages
The world that would become Staravorix, written until Word crashed and I learned to save everything.
- VR game
City Breaker
My first published game: break a city apart in virtual reality. Built in high school, shipped in my first year of college.
- Nonprofit
CommunityVR
Bringing VR headsets to nursing-home residents in Kane County, for a little wonder in their day.
- Writing
Leap Motion
Technical writer on a hand-tracking handbook, working with David Holz.
- VR game
Hanger VR
A grappling-gun game across a constellation map. The first thing I made that found fans.
- Game
FitFight
Push-ups become stats. A combat game you level up by getting stronger in real life.
- Art
Dreaming in a Warped World
A webcomic made in the earliest days of AI art, as one of Midjourney’s first few hundred users.
- Tool
fast-email.ai
An AI email writer that grew into a set of business tools. Graduated from Grinnell in computer science, with a neuroscience concentration.
- Research
The Minecraft god-agent
An agent that drifted off its goal and the safety layer that caught it. It won an Apart Research hackathon, and led to the lab. Also that year: the RimWorld Infinite Implants mod.
- Game
Civilization Sim
One of the best things I’ve built. I learned more about history and technology from it than from anything else. Also: Life Leveling, FitFight grown up.
- Now
Vintage Story mods, and PrefDecay-Eval
A flurry of mods, a published eval on preference decay in agents, and a talk called Making Beautiful Things.