Follow Your Whims

There used to be a man who parked a pickup truck on US 301 outside Sarasota and carved tiki statues out of palm tree trunks with a chainsaw. Palm "wood" is barely wood — stringy, wet, closer to celery than oak. A chainsaw is a demolition tool, built to remove material fast and roughly, the exact opposite of what a carving knife is for. Neither one of those facts stopped him. He found a way to make the mismatch work, sold what he made off the tailgate, and did it long enough to build a life around it. I liked one enough to buy it. It stood on my patio in St. Pete Beach for twenty years, getting tackier with every season, and I never once regretted having it there.

I think about that man more than the subject should warrant, because generative AI has produced an entire industry of people warning you, correctly and at length, about everything that can go wrong with it. Hallucination. Governance. Alignment. A rotating cast of practitioners who have discovered that "everybody else is doing this wrong" is a durable business model. Data centers get compared to strip mines. Somewhere in all of that, a genuinely simple fact gets buried: the tool is also fun. You can point it at something that means nothing and just see what happens, the way a man with a chainsaw and a truckload of the wrong wood can just see what happens.

What I actually built with mine

Over the past couple of years I have used exactly that permission on myself, and the result is a small pile of vanity websites that mostly exist because I already owned the domain names and wanted an excuse to keep them. Here is what's on the lot.

fibertarian.com is a nutrition site built around a word I made up because "vegan" carries baggage I didn't want. In some circles it functions as a religion rather than a diet, and the label lets a lot of unhealthy material through the door — white sugar and bleached flour are both, technically, vegan. It's also unfair to an entire kingdom of life: a mushroom is no more a plant than I am. Fibertarianism is the diet that actually cares about the fiber, not the taxonomy.

amiacreep.com is a one-page graph implementing the old "half your age plus seven" rule for dating, so you can plot yourself against it directly instead of doing the arithmetic in your head at a party. It shares a trait with fibertarian that I noticed only after building both: it judges you for a lifestyle choice and gently scolds you for drifting outside a social norm. I did not plan that symmetry. It found itself.

cultofthecarrot.com started as an attempt to reverse-engineer the specific, well-documented pathway by which the human capacity to be influenced gets captured by demagogues — a satirical vegetable cult, built to make the mechanism visible by exaggerating it. Then the actual political landscape stopped cooperating with the premise that this was hypothetical, and I retired the joke and folded the site into fibertarian, where it now sits as a cautionary footnote instead of a punchline. It turns out the cult isn't a parody of some fringe edge case. It's closer to the default failure mode functioning democracies fall into with some regularity, and a website built to be funny about it stopped being the right container.

mojobump.com is relationship advice grounded in evolutionary biology rather than vibes, aimed at one specific and very common failure: a couple in a passionless relationship, where the partner with higher libido treats physical intimacy as the whole relationship and the partner with lower libido treats it as a minor scheduling issue. Both are wrong about what it's actually doing for the bond, and the site is my amateur attempt at saying so with a straight face.

bone-again.com is the oldest idea in the pile by decades — a parlor game a few of us invented in college, whose rules I will spare you — and today it does nothing but redirect to mojobump.com, which is a fairly accurate description of where that game's logic always led anyway.

None of that was really the point

None of these sites is going to survive contact with real traffic, and that was never the plan. They are practically placeholders for domain names I'd already been squatting on for years, dressed up enough to justify the registration fee for one more cycle. What they actually did was cheaper and more useful than any of that: they gave me a low-stakes place to get good at directing a model through a real build, front to back, on something where a mistake cost nothing and nobody was waiting on the output.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Every site above sits on the same stack I use for client work and for the properties that actually pay bills — the same patterns, the same conventions, the same muscle memory for handing a model a real spec and getting a real result back. I didn't learn any of that on the project where getting it wrong would have been expensive. I learned it carving a joke dating-age calculator, the same way you'd rather learn to drive in an empty parking lot than in rush-hour traffic.

The chainsaw guy did not set out to become a folk artist. He had a chainsaw, some bad wood, and an afternoon, and he found out what the combination was good for by doing it badly a few times first, in public, for no audience that mattered yet. That's the whole method. Find the tool, find the wrong material, and see what a few pointless afternoons teach you before you need the answer for something real.