The Arcades' Lab / Essays
Ideas worth sitting with.
Essays on writing, accessibility, creativity, AI, and the strange business of being human while all the machinery changes.
The Singularity Log
Essays on AI, creativity, and the collapsing scarcity model.
August 6, 2026
The Stepladder
I experience time more like a stepladder. In the Singularity, it gets weird.
June 2, 2026
The Photograph of a River
Every AI productivity study is a photograph of a river. By the time you develop the film, the water has moved.
May 28, 2026
The Hidden Tax on Senior Engineers
AI didn't reduce the demand on your best engineers. It redirected it. 6.5% more code reviewed. 19% less original work.
May 20, 2026
Refusal Is Not Resistance
Why I use AI when the people coming for me already do. A blind trans woman's case against confusing refusal with resistance.
May 18, 2026
When Labor Gets Weird
Something enormous is happening to work, and it arrives in clerical bites — boring enough to dismiss, big enough to reshape a life. A disabled knowledge worker on AI, four quadrants of adoption, and the fear of being early to the wrong skills.
May 18, 2026
How to Run a Successful Moral Panic
I've been the target of enough moral panics to write the field guide. Here's how to run one successfully — and a warning that you'll be worse off if you do.
May 13, 2026
Claude Design and the Novel T
If you give me agents, a CMS, a publishing pipeline, and one free evening, I will eventually try to write my own word processor. On Novel T, scene-aware drafting, and what an agent-native writing tool actually looks like.
May 13, 2026
The Bad Place
We're not getting an Act-3 rescue. The system wants us hopeless, alone, and dissociated. Here's how to live and love while the long fire burns.
May 12, 2026
The Slow Blade
I'm 92,000 words into a novel nobody's read and three months into leading AI transformation at a 200-person org. Both look bad from the outside, which is how I know they're the same work. On long-arc discipline, the Dune shield, and why patience beats velocity.
May 10, 2026
Death of the Creative Wall
My first 1000-view video on YouTube was a chicken-fried possum lawyer from Toontown Chicago, a thing that would have lived entirely inside my skull five years ago. On cheap iteration, the wall it knocks down, and why slop is just practice with the lights on.
May 7, 2026
The Tollbooth Is Gone: Rebuilding My Publishing Pipeline with AI Agents
The administrative layer between finishing a piece and publishing it was enough to stop the whole machine. Here's how I rebuilt it as an agent-driven pipeline.
April 23, 2026
Who Are You When Nobody Is Approving?
I spent the past three years in blissful maker mode, learning everything I could about AI tools. Not because someone told me to. Not because my job required it. Because I *love* learning new things. I love that feeling of being just competent enough to glimpse the edge of a new world. The firehose still feels like a gift. I got roasted for it. It hurt more than I wanted to admit.
April 21, 2026
The Years of Craft Do Not Get a Vote
For a long time, the story I told myself about work was simple. Get better. Learn more. Become more useful. Refine your taste. Refine your craft. Build skills nobody can take away. I still believe in craft. I still believe in skill. But I do not think that story is enough anymore.
April 19, 2026
After Scarcity
The market model is dying. Not because anyone attacked it. Because the tools changed. What replaces scarcity?
April 12, 2026
Campfire Logic
If preciousness is market logic, what does a non-market logic of art actually look like? Pass it around. Let it change shape.
April 8, 2026
The Ache in your Heart
I like staying in the moment. There's something about the present that feels permanent, untouchable. That if I have food in my belly and music in my life, I can be happy.
April 5, 2026
The Preciousness Problem
Where did our obsession with singular, precious authorship come from? The lone genius myth is an economic invention.
March 29, 2026
Rabies Capitalism
On AI, Labor, and the End of the Moat
Arcade Blog
Essays on AI productivity, engineering culture, and what the data actually says.
July 2, 2026
My Brain Was Built for This
I'm a dissociated system. No continuous narrative, no unified memory — just state passed between alters via handoff notes and context files. Sound familiar? It should. You're building it right now and calling it the future of AI.
June 30, 2026
I've Been Waiting for This My Whole Life
I've watched the hype-cycle pattern four times now — dot-com, cloud, big data, mobile. I'm watching it again. Why I'm not scared of what's coming, and why I've been getting ready for three years.
June 16, 2026
Disposable Art Is Still Art
I make disposable art on purpose. A manifesto on con sketches, e621, Yerf, the print-to-digital flinch, and why fan art has always obeyed campfire logic — not museum logic.
June 4, 2026
The Four Stages Nobody Tells You About
The people getting real value from AI aren't the ones with the best prompts — they're the ones who moved through four predictable stages as fast as possible. A map for getting unstuck from prompt obsession.
June 25, 2026
Beneath These Bones
The Pulse anniversary essay. I came out like a monster truck — loud, imposing, destructive — and ran for four years straight. Then one day it all just stopped. This is the quiet, hard shit no one talks about: picking up the broken glass after transition is done.
June 23, 2026
Wicked Little Town
The cornfield kid finds a furry IRC channel and a rabbit named Kristi. The first time I ever heard the word "trans" used in a sentence — not as a slur, not as a punchline, just a woman casually mentioning she was transgender. Origin story.
June 18, 2026
A Fucking Riot
The Stonewall finale. The numbers I carry in my body — 30%, 46%, two bathroom doors — and a thought experiment about what would happen if we treated tonsils the way we treat trans medical care. There'd be a fucking riot.
June 11, 2026
Letters and the Sun on My Face
Letters to my younger selves at 11, 15, 19, and 22. It's not a fetish. It's not a fetish. It's not a fetish. And the Halloween at Wabash where I finally felt the sun kiss my cheeks — and dove right back under.
June 9, 2026
Early Days
Pride month opens. Year by year from 2009 to now — Olly's in Indianapolis, the parade I got pulled into, the wedding-dress shots for Obergefell. And the night my sister sat me down with an armful of makeup and a mirror that ended boy Austen for good.
On Writing
Essays on the craft of writing.
May 5, 2026
The Mailbox Had a Pulse
His name was Captain Webster. He sent letters. Then the letters stopped. On the email-list mentors who taught a Midwestern kid that writing could be a community, the twenty years of silence after the infrastructure died, and the publishing pipeline I rebuilt to find the hallway again.
March 29, 2026
Pull, Not Push: Why I'm Rebuilding My Online Presence Backwards
I've had more names on the internet than I've had prescription strengths. That era is over
White Cane Chronicles
Essays on accessibility, blindness, and neurodiversity.
March 18, 2026
I Thought I Had a Bad Memory. I Don't.
Sighted people use the world around them to help them remember thing. When you can't do that, your brain builds something different. Something that might actually be better in some cases.