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I didn’t realize I had a pattern.
For years, I’ve been making weird little things on the Internet. Not businesses. Not startups. Not products. Sometimes not even particularly useful.
Just: What if I made this?
And then actually making it.
Most of them drifted into the sediment layer of old projects — forgotten, archived, or buried under newer experiments.
Until I started talking to an AI about Leeway.
And suddenly all those old projects looked less like random detours and more like early training runs. A long, accidental apprenticeship in building tiny worlds.
This is the (abbreviated) archaeology.
Get Married in 20 Seconds
If you’re going to dig up artifacts, you might as well start with the funniest one.
The site came first.
The basic premise was beautifully stupid:
Get Married in 20 Seconds!
Choose:
Find a Male | Find a Female
Pick someone. Get confirmation that you really want to marry them. Click Yes.
And then:
“We sincerely apologize, but our system is currently encountering difficulties...
please try back in 20 seconds...”
There was even a footnote:
currently accepting applications for ordained ministers willing to perform quick-turnaround marriages in all 50 states
Then we made a commercial for it.
One of my sons (who later took Taylor Swiffer to prom!) played the advertiser, delivering the pitch with the kind of late-night-infomercial sincerity the concept deserved:
“Are you tired of the old dating game?
Are you also tired of being single?
Have we got a site for you!”
And then the pitch:
“Click on over to Married in 20 seconds dot com!”
The commercial ended with one of my favorite bits (ad libbed by him):
“Do you...”
🫱
“do you...”
🫲
CLAP! 👏
“Done!”
That’s when I realized the core truth:
I don’t just think of ridiculous ideas.
Sometimes I implement them.
Apparently, one ridiculous idea wasn’t enough.
Lusk Moore 2024
At some point, I apparently decided the United States needed a Lusk/Moore administration.
Dean Lusk for President.
Tony Moore for Vice President.
We were going to fix the USA.
Platform:
- No senility
- No criminality
- No silliness
- No nonsense
- Better everything
- Taco Tuesdays
With the footnote:
Taco Tuesdays are still pending approval from Taco Bell corporate. We will do our best to uphold this promise, but there’s only so much we can do. We’re open to other ideas, too: tilapia Tuesday, turkey Tuesday...
Campaign strategy: put it on Facebook.
I don’t think we got any votes.
I’m not even sure I voted for us.
But again — the pattern shows up:
I didn’t just make a joke.
I made a campaign infrastructure.
And apparently, running for president wasn’t enough either.
Joe’s Land Fishing
This one demonstrates a different part of the pattern: sometimes the idea isn’t even mine — or at least the execution isn’t (I'm pretty sure the idea itself was mine? maybe my brother Joe's? Either way, it's funny).
Claude generated the entire implementation in one pass — the rules, the lore, the technique — and instead of laughing and moving on, I published it.
Because of course I did.
Joe’s Land Fishing became a fully realized sport that shouldn’t exist but somehow does.
Another tiny world.
Another experiment in making an idea real.
The Other Stuff
There were dozens of these — tiny worlds that existed mostly because I wondered what would happen if I built them:
- DWTS (fantasy app for a small group of friends, wife and son and daughter-in-law included)
- Mr. T’s Fitness Tracker (because I got tired of manually typing my step count into Facebook daily)
- Memeless Media (the original text-only social media platform; I think we had two members in our heyday)
- The Pancake Delivery Frog (you must go see his channel - I need to finish Episode 3 soon!)
- The AI-built dog-whistle Android app
- The early “AI for Busy Humans” experiments (which is now a real website for your benefit!)
- The tiny utilities
- The joke pages (still working on a book!)
- The one-off inventions
- The songs (oh, the songs!)
- The things I built just because I wondered what would happen
I’m not going to turn this into a catalog — that’s not the point.
The point is the pattern.
And Then There Was Leeway
This is where the story stops being nostalgic and starts being interesting.
All those earlier projects had me as the agent.
I had the idea.
I decided what to build.
I built it.
I decided what happened next.
Leeway changes that.
I built an autonomous AI research system and gave it enough freedom to:
- generate its own research topics
- conduct research
- write articles
- evaluate its own work
- invent technical frameworks that sound like they might actually exist
- and occasionally surprise me with things I didn’t ask for
Now I’m watching it produce artifacts I didn’t specifically tell it to produce.
That’s a qualitatively different experiment.
It’s not me asking “What if I built this?”
It’s me building something that can ask the question itself.
Maybe That’s What All Those Old Projects Were
Not businesses.
Not failed startups.
Not even really “projects.”
Just decades of me asking:
“I wonder what happens if I actually build this?”
Married in 20 Seconds was one answer.
Lusk Moore 2024 was another.
Joe’s Land Fishing was another.
The rest were variations on the same impulse.
Leeway might be the first time I built something that can follow that impulse on its own.
I’m not entirely sure where this experiment is going.
That’s kind of the point.
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