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.

skip all tangents

## 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.

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## 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...

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.

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.

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.)

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## 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.

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## 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.

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