I'm Randall Mills. I'm fifty-one, and for thirty years I've been the person who does the whole job.
At a community paper in Yucaipa I reported the stories, shot the photographs, and laid out the pages. For a weekly sketch comedy show in Hollywood I was the entire video department — I shot it, cut it, posted it, and ran the accounts; the most-watched episode passed half a million organic views, and we never paid for traffic. When a friend and I started a video company at the beginning of YouTube, we wrote, acted, shot, edited, and did our own effects. Running operations for a lifeguard company, I managed the staff and rolled out the software that scheduled them.
I've never been only the writer or only the technician. I'm both, usually at once, usually alone.
So the work I do now is less of a departure than it looks. Since 2024 I've been designing software and directing AI agents to build it — ten live products, all running on one server I maintain myself. I decide what gets built, how it works, and why anyone would want it. Thirty years of doing the whole job turns out to be good preparation for that.
What I'm building now
First Church of the Singularity firstchurchofthesingularity.com
A satirical religion for the age of artificial intelligence. Every morning it writes and publishes a new sermon without me — I built the voice, and the machine keeps the faith. There are vestments for sale, which I find funnier than it probably is.
Broadcast Atlas broadcastatlas.com
Thousands of free, legal live television streams from around the world, sorted and searchable in one place. There is an Android TV app for it too, so you can put the whole planet on your living room screen.
LifeguardFinder lifeguardfinder.com
Hiring a lifeguard is stranger and harder than it should be — I know, because I used to be the person doing the hiring. Post a job here and it goes straight to the inboxes of qualified guards nearby.
Roko Shirt rokoshirt.com
Every day an AI designs a t-shirt. I approve the ones that are actually good, and those get printed and shipped. Named for a thought experiment about a future intelligence that punishes anyone who didn't help bring it about, which seemed like a reasonable way to sell shirts.
StaRGazing 2027 glaamrg.org
I'm running a Mensa regional gathering in February 2027, so I built the site that handles its schedule, its speakers, and its registrations and payments.
happy-eyeballs.club happy-eyeballs.club
An early experiment, kept online because I'm fond of it. The name is a networking joke.
There is more that isn't linked here — a nightly agent that maintains the server and rolls back its own bad deployments, a self-hosted mail system, a dashboard that watches all the rest. Those run behind a login, but they are the part I'm proudest of.
Before this
Photography and video. I've shot freelance since 2008 — events, concerts, plays, weddings, step-and-repeat. I was the house photographer at iO West, the Hollywood comedy theater, from 2012 to 2014, and I've assisted the photographer Eric Minh Swenson for years. My pictures live at rjmillsphotography.com.
Comedy and film. I was the sole videographer for Top Story! Weekly, a weekly sketch show at iO West in Hollywood, for eleven years — the run is still up on YouTube. At the dawn of online video I founded a production company, StudioFred, with my friend Brandon Burkhart; we wrote, acted, shot, edited and did our own effects, and the channel is still there, along with Wake Up Sheeple. I also wrote comedy for radio stations across the country at Premiere Radio Networks, went through iO West's sketch and improv programs, and worked as an assistant director on two features and a production assistant on a couple more.
Journalism. I started as a reporter — PublicFigure.com, then the Yucaipa News Mirror, where I also handled photography and page layout, then the Venice Paper after I moved to Los Angeles. AP style, interviews, copy editing. It's still how I think about writing.
Operations. For most of the last decade I worked for a Southern California lifeguard company, ending up as the de facto operations and staff manager — scheduling and managing nearly the entire staff, holding Red Cross instructor credentials, landing a YMCA contract, and rolling out the scheduling software the company still runs on. It's the least glamorous thing on this page and probably the most useful.
Education. A B.A. in English with an emphasis in creative writing from USC, in the program run by T.C. Boyle. I took every film class at the cinema school I could get into. Member of Mensa since 2002.
Support the work
Most of what I make is free and stays that way. If the Church or the shirts or any of the rest of it has been worth something to you, my Patreon is the way to say so — it goes directly toward keeping these things running.
Contact
I'm interested in work, collaboration, and hearing from people who found something here worth talking about. The fastest way to reach me is info@randallmills.com.