About Us

DThis page is about us, and what we do. Digital Forge, a place where 3 different companies work together for education, technology & entertainment. On the surface, some of the things we do may seem completely unrelated. We publish books. We explore artificial intelligence and emerging technology. We develop and experiment with digital products. We create educational articles about the history of communication and the written word.

We work with websites, digital media, video, and the tools that make modern publishing possible. Look a little closer, though, and there is a common thread running through all of it. Everything we do involves finding better ways to create something, communicate an idea, solve a problem, or put useful information into somebody’s hands.

Digital Forge works alongside three distinct companies: Altered AI Technologies, M. Storm Publishing LLC, and Axion Deep Digital. Each has its own purpose and identity, but there are plenty of places where their work crosses paths. M. Storm Publishing is focused on books, authorship, storytelling, and independent publishing. Altered AI Technologies, or AAIT, explores artificial intelligence, digital technology, product development, and practical ways those technologies can be used by people, businesses, and educators. Axion Deep Digital brings another technical perspective and gives us the opportunity to collaborate on projects where different skills and ideas belong at the same table. Digital Forge sits naturally in the middle, connecting creative work with the technology that increasingly surrounds it.

This is about us, M. Storm Publishing LLC is the publishing side of what we do. Books may look simple when they are sitting on a shelf or displayed on an eReader, but there is an enormous amount of work behind every finished title. Writing the story is only the beginning. A manuscript has to be edited, formatted, designed, converted into the right digital and print formats, distributed, promoted, and ultimately discovered by readers.

Independent publishing has opened that entire process to writers in ways that would have been almost impossible a generation ago. An author no longer has to wait for a large publishing company to decide whether a story deserves to exist. The tools are available to create the book, publish it, and put it directly in front of readers.

That freedom comes with responsibility. Independent publishing means the author or publisher has to handle jobs that were once spread across entire departments. That includes everything from cover design and formatting to websites, newsletters, distribution, advertising, reader communication, and promotion. M. Storm Publishing was created to operate in that world. It provides a home for the books while allowing the creative side of writing to remain connected to the practical realities of publishing them.

This is also about us, Altered AI Technologies approaches things from another direction. Technology is changing at a ridiculous pace, and artificial intelligence has accelerated that change even further. AAIT is interested in what can actually be done with that technology. That includes exploring and developing digital products for personal, business, and educational use, working with applications and other digital tools, and looking for practical ways to turn new technology into something people can actually use. Some ideas work. Some don’t. Some look brilliant until somebody actually tries to use them. Finding out which is which is part of the job.

Artificial intelligence is naturally a big part of that work, but AAIT is not limited to AI. Modern digital products often combine software, automation, websites, databases, media, communication tools, and increasingly some form of artificial intelligence. The interesting part is figuring out how those pieces can work together. There is a big difference between demonstrating that a technology can do something and turning it into a tool that somebody would actually want to use.

This too is about us, that is also where collaboration becomes useful. Axion Deep Digital brings additional technical knowledge and experience into projects where working together makes sense. Rather than pretending every idea has to fit neatly inside one company, we can combine different skills when a project calls for them. A publishing problem might turn into a software idea. A digital product might need design, research, testing, or a completely different technical approach. Sometimes the best solution comes from having people look at the same problem from different directions.

Publishing itself provides a pretty good testing ground because it touches so many different areas. Writing, editing, graphics, websites, email, databases, video, search engines, analytics, automation, and online distribution all play a part. When a new technology can make one of those jobs easier, faster, or more accessible, we want to understand it. When something turns out to be more hype than substance, we want to understand that too.

We do not see artificial intelligence as a replacement for people. A tool can help generate an idea, organize information, identify a problem, analyze information, or speed up a repetitive task. It cannot decide what matters to a person. It cannot replace individual experience, judgment, curiosity, or imagination. The useful question is not whether machines will eventually do everything for us. The useful question is what people can accomplish when they have access to tools that were unimaginable not very long ago. It’s about people, and not always about us.

That same curiosity is behind the educational material found throughout this site. We spend a lot of time talking about the future, but the future makes more sense when you understand how we got here. It’s about how human beings have been trying to preserve and share information for thousands of years. We scratched symbols into stone, wrote on clay tablets, made papyrus, copied manuscripts by hand, built libraries, invented movable type, printed books by the millions, created computers, connected those computers through the internet, and eventually began carrying much of the world’s accumulated knowledge around in our pockets.

Every one of those changes affected who could obtain information and how quickly it could spread. A handwritten book that once required months of work could eventually be printed hundreds of times. A library that once required a physical journey can now be reached through a screen. A book that once had to be printed, boxed, shipped, stored, and sold in a physical store can now be downloaded anywhere in the world in seconds. None of those developments made the written word less important. They changed the container carrying it.

That history is one reason we are interested in the relationship between books and technology. People have been predicting the death of books for a very long time. Radio was supposed to compete with reading. Television was supposed to replace it. The internet was supposed to finish the job. Smartphones were supposedly going to destroy everybody’s attention span. Yet people are still reading. They are simply about reading in more places and in more formats than ever before.

A person might read a hardcover book at home, an eBook while waiting for an appointment, an article on a phone during lunch, and listen to an audiobook on the drive home. Those are different technologies, but the basic human activity behind them has not changed very much. Someone has something to say, and someone else wants to hear it. Technology changes how the message travels.

Digital Forge is interested in that entire journey.

We also believe useful information should be understandable. Technology has a bad habit of developing its own language. So does publishing. Spend enough time in either business and eventually everybody starts speaking in abbreviations, technical terms, and industry jargon. Sometimes those terms are necessary. Often they just make relatively simple ideas sound more complicated than they really are. We would rather explain what something does than spend half a page proving we know the technical name for it.

The same applies to the way we work. We experiment. We make mistakes. We change things. If something doesn’t work, we try something else. There is no reason to pretend every idea arrives perfectly formed or every experiment succeeds the first time. Much of the technology people now take for granted exists because somebody tried something that failed, learned from it, and tried again. Writing works much the same way. The first version of a story is rarely the final version. Websites change. Books get revised. Software gets updated. Businesses change direction. Improvement usually looks a lot messier from the inside than it does after everything is finished.

We also try to maintain a little skepticism about the digital world. The internet is full of extraordinary resources, but it is also full of exaggerated promises, bad information, scams, and products designed to separate people from their money. Artificial intelligence has made that problem even more complicated because creating convincing text, photographs, video, and advertising has become easier than ever. Something looking professional does not necessarily make it legitimate.

For that reason, part of working with new technology means questioning it. Who created it? What does it actually do? What information does it collect? What does it cost after the introductory offer disappears? Is the impressive demonstration representative of the real product? Does the thing solve an actual problem, or was the problem invented to sell the solution? Those are not anti-technology questions. They are exactly the questions we should be asking if we want better technology.

Digital Forge is not a giant corporation with a dozen departments and a committee meeting every time somebody wants to change a sentence. That is intentional. Being small makes it possible to experiment quickly, change direction when something isn’t working, and follow an interesting idea without waiting six months for approval. It also means the work remains personal. A book is not simply another product number. An article is not created just to fill a space on a website. A new technology is not automatically embraced because everybody else is talking about it.

Sometimes the most interesting projects begin with a simple question. Can this be done? Is there a better way to do it? Why does this work the way it does? What happens if we combine these two ideas? Those questions have a habit of leading somewhere unexpected.

The word “forge” was chosen for a reason. A traditional forge is a place where raw material is heated, worked, shaped, tested, and turned into something useful. The process takes effort. Sometimes the material has to go back into the fire and be worked again. Ideas are not much different. A rough idea rarely comes out finished. It gets written, tested, changed, broken, rebuilt, polished, and occasionally thrown away so something better can take its place. Digital tools have changed the equipment, but they have not changed that process.

M. Storm Publishing gives stories a place to become books. Altered AI Technologies gives us room to explore, develop, and experiment with modern digital technology. Axion Deep Digital gives us the opportunity to collaborate with another company when a project benefits from additional technical knowledge and a different perspective. Digital Forge connects those worlds while giving us room to explore everything between them. Sometimes that means looking thousands of years into the past to understand how people preserved the written word. Sometimes it means experimenting with technology that barely existed a year ago. Both are part of the same story.

Human beings create things, find better ways to share them, and then start wondering what they can build next. That is what we do here. We write. We publish. We experiment. We learn. We build things, occasionally break things, figure out why they broke, and build them again. We look backward when history has something useful to teach us and forward when new technology gives us somewhere interesting to go. Most importantly, we remain curious. Because whatever comes next, somebody has to figure out what the hell to do with it.