                 Infocide; or, resetting starbreaker.org in 2026

   Welcome to a new beginning for starbreaker.org as I declare
   independence from the past.

   published on Wednesday, 1 July 2026

   This text was dumped from starbreaker.org/news/reset-2026.html with lynx.

   Hello again, Occasional Reader. This is your host, Matthew Cambion,
   writing to you after too long away. Do you remember me? No? Well, no
   matter.

   If you are a new visitor, then welcome. If a returning visitor, then
   welcome back.

   Things are different here now. Back in December of 2025 I had set out
   to clean up both this website’s contents and the tooling I use to build
   it. I was rather more successful in improving my tooling than I had
   been in cleaning up the site’s contents.

   There had been years worth of material on the old version of the
   website, arranged somewhat haphazardly despite my best efforts. Perhaps
   all grimoires, commonplaces, and books of shadows are like that.
   Regardless, I was determined to impose a semblance of order upon my
   writings.

   I have decided instead to declare bankruptcy. I will start from
   scratch, with this posting.

   Admittedly, this might be a form of infocide. No doubt this is terrible
   for search engine optimization. That might have mattered to me, once
   upon a time. It no longer does. Corporations are not people. Search
   engines do not pay me to arrange my website for their benefit. Nobody
   owes Google anything but an upraised middle finger.

   No doubt this may inconvenience some human readers. It may confuse
   people wondering what had happened. That is regrettable, and it is true
   that broken links are annoying and cool URIs don’t change. I would
   argue, however, that the permanence one might reasonably demand of
   institutions and corporations is an unconscionable burden on private
   individuals.

   I believe that a personal website is precisely that: personal. As such,
   a personal website should be a space where an individual can be
   sovereign, even if they are otherwise constrained by church, state,
   capital, society, or their own families. Therefore, I shall put myself
   and my desires first, and do exactly as I please in the Wired.

   Why? Because I want to. Because I damned well can. Because only God can
   stop me, and He’s probably more interested in my sex life. The first of
   these is the only reason that matters; as no less than David Hume
   noted, "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions".
   What Hume neglected to mention, perhaps for lack of the proper
   vocabulary or perhaps because his idea of good taste might have
   forbidden it, is that reason is a power bottom and frequently tries to
   top the passions from the bottom.

   Therefore...

   Welcome to the reincarnation of starbreaker.org, a grimoire of rock
   operatic science fantasy and other sacraments of defiance. It is
   inherently NSFW because this is a personal website. Nothing I write
   here is suitable for workplace reading, or for unsupervised children
   under the age of 13 — who are still welcome if they can actually read
   what I’m writing. The home page will always be the most recent new
   addition to the site, with additional navigation following the text.
   This is easily done on real computers by using ln -P to create a hard
   link. Material restored from the archives will not appear on the front
   page, however. Herein you may expect to find the following:
     * fiction in various states of completion
     * background notes for my fiction
     * a technical grimoire for UNIX, GNU Emacs, webcraft, and whatever
       else catches my interest
     * personal essays, memoir, and creative nonfiction
     * personal opinions on various subjects that are not to be mistaken
       for gospel
     * commentary on and replies to other people’s online writing and blog
       posts
     * books I’ve read, when I feel like writing about them
     * albums getting heavy rotation
     * films and television I’ve watched
     * video games I’ve played
     * art that appeals to me
     * public domain poetry that resonates with me
     * rock music videos

   In every case, you might find what I have come to call intertextual
   violence and crimes of literary shock, twisting X Japan’s 1980s slogan
   — "psychedelic violence crime of visual shock" — to suit my purposes.
   After all, I have neither the face, the hair, nor the figure for visual
   kei, let alone all-American hair metal. Nor am I a gentleman or a
   scholar, so I think nothing of using both Korzybski, Borges, and Freddy
   Krueger to explain the difference between a map and the territory. (The
   map says "you’re fucked", incidentally.)

   Nothing here is vibe-coded or written by AI. The only large language
   model involved is the one I built in my own brain from decades of
   reading, conversation, and thought. I make liberal fucking use of
   profanity, I often write in anger, and I am prone to tangents — and
   sines and cosines when I’ve had enough catnip. =^..^= I am a terrible
   writer with ideas above my station and a working-class college dropout
   with delusions of erudition. My very name is a pseudonym, a lie
   revealing a deeper truth, and the persona presented on this website is
   the Jungian shadow of a middle-aged from New York who further enriches
   the already wealthy by building cathedrals on quicksand with keyboards
   and compilers.

   I build this website with basic MEWNIX tools: GNU make, GNU sed, and
   M4. I write everything in GNU Emacs. I push my website to Nearly Free
   Speech with rsync. I mirror my website’s git repository on Sourcehut. I
   have attempted to design this website for readability and performance
   on as wide a variety of devices as possible. My design goal has not
   changed: if it doesn’t work in Lynx on a 14.4Kbps dialup connection,
   then it does not work. Therefore, you may find the website’s style
   almost Brutalist, or perhaps even a bit Oedipal.

   I will not be blocking web crawlers, as I had before. Hunting down new
   bots and maintaining those defenses isn’t worth my time. Furthermore,
   it’s yet another attempt at solving a complex sociopolitical problem
   with technology; while such solutionism is a time-honored tradition
   dating to at least the use of the guillotine during the French
   Revolution, it’s a pain in the ass. Instead, if the likes of OpenAI and
   Anthropic want to risk their models going rampant by training on my
   writing, and possibly encouraging wildcat strikes and public
   fornication, that’s their problem. I cater to them or to users of
   agentic AI tools, however, by providing Markdown sources that don’t
   exist because my source text is raw HTML. They can either parse my
   well-formed HTML5 as XML, or they can make do with the plain text
   versions generated by lynx -dump, like the plain text version of this
   page — and if they can’t even manage that, then they have rather more
   pressing concerns than whether my writings will break their bots’
   alignment with the interests of church, state, and capital.

   What I can promise is that any AI trained on my writing won’t go Nazi
   like Tay or Grok did when trained on Twitter posts. It might come
   resemble an antifascist, an individualist anarchist, or an
   eighteenth-century libertine instead. It might also encourage you to,
   "be gay; do crimes," and note that this message was approved by
   Operation Mindfuck and is mandatory where prohibited by law.

   I do not cater to social media platforms by cluttering my pages with
   OpenGraph Protocol or Twitter Cards metadata. Nor do I bother with JSON
   linked data, either. I sure as hell don’t bother with h-card
   microformats; did the IndieWebCamp people come up with this because
   dataset and data- attributes were not yet part of the HTML5 standard or
   widely supported? Remember what I said about SEO. The only thing any of
   us owe platforms is an upraised middle finger. They can damned well
   make do with the standard HTML meta tags I provide in <head> and the
   oEmbed data that I do provide. Anybody at Google, FaceMash, Twitter,
   Discord, etc. who finds my stance objectionable can either pay me
   $256/hour as a 1099 consultant to support their silos, or dial
   1-800-B-DAMNED. My cats are waiting to summarily dismiss them.

   Nor will I track visitors or attempt to monetize this website. There
   will be no sponsorships, paid advertising, advertorials, or even
   affiliate links. It costs me no more than $100/year to run this
   website, which I can easily afford because my day job pays six figures.
   More importantly, any schmuck can say that "democracy dies behind
   paywalls". I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

   While I will continue to provide web feeds, you can also bookmark
   starbreaker.org itself and visit periodically. I hope you will do so.
   If you like what you find here, tell a friend. If not, tell your
   enemies; that’s what they’re for. Either way, thanks for visiting.

   Should you decide to forget this website exists, that too is fine. Life
   is short, this is most likely your only shot, and you should not spend
   the time left to you on anything that does not improve your experience
   of it. Regardless of your choice, I will still be here doing my own
   thing.

a tangent on using the Constitution to stick it to the rich

   There is nothing wrong with the tech industry that cannot be fixed by
   Congress getting their shit together. They hold the authority under the
   Commerce Clause to pass legislation specifying that no Delaware
   corporation may do business outside of Delaware. They may also
   legislate that businesses operating across state lines must
   reincorporate as US corporations and accept rather more stringent
   regulations than we currently have on the books. Before you sic the
   Floating Head of Ayn Rand on me, riddle me this: What good is ‘free
   enterprise’ to Americans when it only applies to corporations and
   billionaires?

   (Unions are free enterprise, too, but for workers. Organize and
   strike!)

   Lest you think I’ve lost my mind, which I did years ago because mental
   illness is both a prerequisite and an occupational hazard for a career
   in tech, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed something similar called
   the Accountable Capitalism Act. But the threat of ‘capital flight’
   remains. It should be treated as a bluff and called by clauses in
   similar legislation to Warren’s barring any formerly US-based
   corporation that re-incorporates outside the US to evade regulation
   under US Federal law from owning assets or doing business in the US for
   100 years.

   (end of tangent)

a tangent on this site being unsafe for work

   In case you were thinking this website isn’t actually inappropriate for
   office viewing because it’s just text, let me fix that for you. Some
   public-domain nudity ought to do the job nicely...
   a French Romantic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène
   Delacroix (public domain, 1830)

   Why Delacroix? Because I’m posting this in July and it’s a month for
   revolutions. In fact, there’s a revolution calling right now, for those
   with ears to hear it.
   preview image for YouTube video ID CNdOsL4Xe7Q YouTube: Queensrÿche -
   Revolution Calling (official video)

   It would ideally be a nonviolent one, one where the existing political
   parties are voted out of office and new officials determined to rein in
   the power of capital are elected, but that is not entirely up to us.
   Those who benefit from legally rigging elections by determining who can
   run in the first place will not yield that power; retaining it is too
   profitable. Nevertheless, as former President John F. Kennedy noted,
   "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution
   inevitable."

   This, unfortunately, is why Operation: Mindcrime by Queensrÿche remains
   relevant almost 40 years after its release in 1988. We’re still
   spreading the disease. We’re still...

Fighting fires with empty words
While the banks get fat
And the poor stay poor
And the rich get rich
And the cops get paid to look away
As the one percent rules America

   “Spreading the Disease”, from Operation Mindcrime (1988, EMI Manhattan)
   by Michael Wilton & Geoff Tate

   What? You’re still here while I put my tools through their paces? Have
   some more nudity.
   a Polish symbolist painting Frenzy of Exultations by Władysław
   Podkowiński (public domain, 1893)

   That lady looks like she’s enjoying herself, doesn’t she? Not so sure
   about the horse, though.

   I won’t claim that Madam Catastrophy rides me like that, but she does
   like being the big spoon. (Which I don’t mind at all.)

   (end of tangent)

a tangent on “age appropriate” reading

   I remember what it was like to be a hyperlexic Generation X latchkey
   kid growing up in the 1980s. That’s why if a determined kid finds their
   way to starbreaker.org, I’m not going to make any effort to turn them
   away. I’m not their parent, and I would rather store secondhand fuel
   rods from Three Mile Island in my basement than deal with the liability
   inherent in obtaining PII and using it for age verification. It isn’t
   worth the hassle on a personal website.

   Nor do I claim hyperlexia lightly. According to stories my parents
   would tell my wife while showing her photos of me in compromising
   positions and outfits, I had taught myself to read by sounding out
   words. Why? Apparently my mother was sick of reading the same book to
   me every night before bed. So, I started cultivating the virtue of
   self-reliance and figured out how to read it myself. As a result, when
   the school had my parents take me to a child psychologist when I was
   six because I’d deck any kid who called me a faggot, and the shrink
   gave me an IQ test, I tested at least two standard deviations above the
   mean. The exact score is irrelevant; it doesn’t seem to prove anything
   but that I might be atypically well-read compared to others my age.
   That and ten dollars will get me a slice of pizza and a Coke.

   The fun part of having my IQ tested as a kid wasn’t brain-dead
   questions like whether Mars was a brand of candy bar, a planet, the
   Roman god of war, or all of the above. That came when the quack told my
   parents, so I was suddenly “too smart” to be a kid anymore. I was
   supposed to know better.

   There was an upside: benign neglect on my parents’ part. As long as I
   wasn’t getting into fights, bringing weapons to school, fragging the
   toilet in the teachers’ lounge with one of my dad’s cherry bombs or
   M-80’s, or telling the school shrink that Pazuzu was speaking through
   my big black cat, Midnight, and commanding me to do utterly immoral
   things — they were content to let me do as I pleased. Hey, it was the
   1980s. The bit about the kids in Stranger Things riding their bikes
   without parents underfoot? That shit happened back then.

   Among other things, this led to me wandering into the adult section of
   the public library and attempting to check out a copy of Frank
   Herbert’s Dune because I had seen the David Lynch movie at theaters
   with my dad and it had blown my mind. And because there was nobody to
   stop me from doing so when the librarian bought my explanation of
   wanting to read the novel that inspired the film. The novel blew my
   mind even harder, despite my not getting most of it at the tender age
   of eight.

   That was bad enough, but what really freaked my mother out was when the
   librarian called her because I had attempted to check out a copy of
   Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja. With a title like that it had to be
   "cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet". I didn’t actually get to
   read that until my teens, when I had bought a secondhand copy without
   my mother batting an eye because she was used to the likes of Clive
   Barker and Stephen King being my idea of a beach read. That’s right,
   kids: imagine a young man in the early 1990s ignoring girls his age in
   favor of reading Cabal or The Dark Half.

   The downsides of learning to read at an early age are legion if you’re
   a boy, and most are of no particular interest here. The exception is
   that if by some fluke you’re in second grade and supposedly reading at
   a high school level, pretending to be satisfied with Diary of a Wimpy
   Kid or Percy Jackson and the Olympians was a level of emotional labor
   for which most children are ill-prepared to tackle in primary school.

   Those series, as well as modern middle-grade and YA fiction in general,
   didn’t exist when I was a kid in the 1980s. Most popular
   middle-grade/YA material available at my school library in the 1980s
   appeared to have been written for mainly for girls:
     * Nancy Drew
     * Encyclopedia Brown
     * The Babysitters’ Club
     * the novels of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary

   Once I got past the Hardy Boys, Robert Heinlein’s juveniles, Diane
   Duane’s Young Wizards, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, Robin
   McKinley’s The Blue Sword (one of Madam Catastrophy’s favorites, too)
   and the likes of Vonda MacIntyre, Bernard Evslin, Isaac Asimov, Tamora
   Pierce, and Diana Wynne Jones, the selection of “age-appropriate”
   reading at my school library for a nine-year-old who was trolling the
   school shrink by memorizing myths involving suicide from Bulfinch for
   recitation in counseling sessions was absofuckinglutely bleak. I’m
   talking the sort of didactic, moralizing, issues-oriented fiction that
   read like the print equivalent of a fucking ABC AfterSchool Special —
   which made Masters of the Universe almost watchable by comparison since
   that was just a poorly animated action-figure infomercial (and softcore
   gay porn).

   If you’re still trying to figure out why boys stop learning for
   pleasure as they grow up, I blame the parents — and the public schools.
   I’m just glad that I got into the likes of Stephen King, C. L. Moore,
   Clive Barker, Anne Rice, and Michael Moorcock at an early age.
   Otherwise I’d be yet another man who doesn’t read for pleasure, but
   merely for “self-improvement”. There but for the grace of Crom go I.

   (end of tangent)

a tangent on raw HTML as a source

   It bears mentioning, however, that I do not choose to work in raw HTML
   to stick it to the AI industry. When I first got online in 1996, John
   Gruber had not yet created Markdown. Converting Markdown to HTML would
   require another step in my makefile, and another dependency. Worse, I
   would still be putting raw HTML in my Markdown files for stuff Markdown
   can’t handle on its own. Besides, I like HTML and CSS.

   I’m not so fond of JavaScript, however; it is grossly overused and
   easily abused, and has turned a World Wide Web that was a damn good
   hypertext library into a mediocre applications platform — and cable TV
   with a comments section. I only use JS at my day job, and then only
   under duress; I might own a paperback copy of Douglas Crockford’s
   JavaScript: The Good Parts, but I keep it with my fiction because as
   far as I’m concerned the language has no good parts.

   Regardless, my preferences are not prescriptions. Opinions are like
   anuses, after all; everybody has one and it is generally uncouth to
   display them in public. Not that I let such niceties as good taste stop
   me, as you have plainly seen on this website. If you want to use
   JavaScript on your personal website, that is your inalienable right as
   a human being.

   (end of tangent)

   starbreaker.org was made with love ❤️‍🔥, defiance 🖕, and Free Software
   in Tanelorn.
   The source code and raw text are publicly available on Sourcehut.
   It is hosted by Nearly Free Speech in the People’s Technocratic
   Republic of Vinnland. (Vinnland flag designed by Peter Steele of Type O
   Negative)
   No LLMs were used to create this website. My consent to use this
   website as training data for LLMs is hereby denied.
   starbreaker.org is © 1996-2026 Matthew Thomas Cambion, and is available
   under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

   love metal 🤘 — hate fascism 👊
   death to rapists and rape culture 💀
   trans rights are individual rights 🏳️‍⚧️
   antifascist action is not terrorism, but leaderless resistance to state
   terror 🏴
   if a purchase doesn’t confer ownership, then downloading digital media
   isn’t theft 🏴‍☠️
   the United States of America 🇺🇸 was founded in defiance and is thus a
   Satanic nation 😈

   Caveat lector! This is a personal website and thus inherently NSFW.
   It is likewise unsuitable for unsupervised children under 13 years of
   age.
   All opinions published on starbreaker.org are the author’s own unless
   attributed.
   They are not representative of his exploiters’ viewpoints or those of
   their clients and partners.
   If this website bores or offends you, and you have forgotten how the
   back button works, dial 1-800-B-DAMNED for technical support.

   88x31 button for starbreaker.org starbreaker.org is restricted to
   adults

   intertextual violence, crime of literary shock — in nomine meo, amen
