Short bio
I’ve been making things on the internet for a long time. Some of that started with yo-yos. I got into yo-yoing in 2003 after meeting someone at an Idaho summer camp who opened the door to a whole world I didn’t know existed: clubs, contests, trick videos, forums, custom yo-yos, and people treating this little toy like a real sport and craft.
I got pulled in hard. I learned from local club meetings, old forum videos, and whatever scraps of instruction I could find before YouTube made everything easy. Later I started teaching other people. Over the years I made tutorials, wrote Learn to Throw: a Beginner’s Course in Yo-Yoing, built online courses, organized Idaho yo-yo contests, designed and manufactured the BassBoost yo-yo, joined the MonkeyfingeR Design team, won the 2012 Idaho State Yo-Yo Championship in 1A, and spent a chunk of my life known mostly as “MikeMonty” in the yo-yo world.
That history still matters to me, but my work is broader than yo-yos.
A lot of my life has followed the same pattern: get obsessed with something, learn it the hard way, build around it, then try to teach or systematize what I figured out. Yo-yos led me into video, writing, ecommerce, web design, SEO, online courses, and small business. Later that same practical internet work turned into client websites, marketing plans, analytics, reselling, inventory systems, and a lot of experiments that only make sense if you like turning scattered interests into workflows.
These days my work tends to circle a few recurring subjects: writing, evidence, AI tools, personal archives, reselling, collectibles, family life, and the weird practical systems that help a person actually finish things. I sell on eBay, build workflows around Pokémon cards and other inventory, experiment with AI agents, and keep working on MikeMonty Atlas, a local-first archive of my journals, projects, notes, and life context.
I’m interested in how a person makes sense of their own life without turning it into a performance. Old projects, journals, photos, abandoned ideas, skills, obsessions, mistakes, useful tools, family stories, half-finished plans — all of it becomes more valuable when it’s connected instead of scattered everywhere. That’s a lot of what I’m trying to build now.
Not a feed. Not another algorithmic slot machine. Essays, projects, tools, research notes, experiments, old stories, and finished pieces belong somewhere durable.