about Matthew Cambion

Hello, Occasional Reader. Kindly allow me to introduce myself. I don’t exist outside of the Wired; I am but a shadow.

Nevertheless, I am your host and the author and webmaster of starbreaker.org: Matthew Cambion. If you’re with a Federal agency and you mean to accuse me of sedition, you might instead address me as Matthew Thomas Cambion. You may address me with masculine pronouns or the singular they. Whatever you do, do not call me ‘sir’; as an American I bear no titles of nobility. “Mr. Cambion” will do if you insist on formality.

I am a man of wealth and taste, though admittedly possessed of rather more of the latter than the former. I am no millionaire, but I am still better off than the vast majority of humanity or even the vast majority of my fellow Americans. I am, after all, a few paychecks away from destitution rather than merely one.

I was a Generation X latchkey kid, one of the last. I had grown used to doing my own thing, being left alone, and depending only on myself. I remember doing duck-and-cover drills in kindergarten, and the clock in my heart is stuck at two minutes to midnight.

At my day job I am a software developer, database administrator, and systems administrator. These days the fashionable term is DevOps. I prefer to call myself a “full-stack thaumaturge”. I do, after all, perform miracles on unconscionably short notice and what is computer programming if not practical magick that anybody can learn?

On the job, I am a mercenary. Or, if you prefer, I prostitute my intellect to the highest bidder. I am not loyal to the employer, but to the contract. If the employer abrogates the contract, I’m gone without a glance over my shoulder; what happens to the employer or their clients afterward has ceased to concern me.

Outside of work I am a writer and a webmaster. I have written novels, and one of them even sold well enough to complicate the preparation of my income tax returns for a few years. Another bombed, and then my publisher fell apart and ghosted every writer they had under contract. In 2020 the rights to my work reverted to me, and I have not sought commercial publication since. I still, however, write fiction. You are reading it now, though everything here is based on a true story.

I have also been a musician. I play the piano, bass guitar, and the viola — and you cannot possibly tell a joke about the latter that I have not heard. I also sing tenor, though I cannot quite hit the high notes I used to nail as a much younger man. Then again, neither can Rob Halford. I do not currently record or perform in public, though in my youth I had played the viola in place of an electric guitar in a couple of garage bands that got no further than the recording of a demo tape. Long Island was not the place for such experimentation in rock; I should have emigrated to Europe.

I have had the honor and pleasure of being Madam Catastrophy’s husband for over twenty years. Though she calls me her knight, it is not with chivalry that I serve even if she has ensorcelled me as only a sorceress might. I am her shelter, her shield, and when she requires it: her knife in the dark.

Personality-wise, I am a Fireclown in the tradition of Alan Powys and Til Eulenspiegel. I am a cynical idealist and an incorrigible Romantic, a devil quoting scripture to suit his own purposes. I am a terrible writer with ideas above my station and a working-class college dropout with delusions of erudition. I am autistic because God drinks on the job, but managed to escape diagnosis until I was in my early forties by being a real-life Persona user. I might even be Rosemary’s Baby, and I am here to show you that not only is the emperor naked, but that the man is dickless to boot.

You will never meet me on the street. You will never see my face. You will know nothing of me save what I choose to tell you. If you lack the imagination to conjure an image of me, perhaps this self-portrait will serve.

a manga-style image of a stern and stylish man with long brown hair and a lit cigarette — a self-portrait of Matthew Cambion generated with Picrew’s “*ストイックな男メーカー*“

character sheet

name: Matthew Cambion
race: homo sapiens sapiens
class: full-stack thaumaturge
alignment: benevolent egoist
persona: Prometheus
anima: Circe
strength: 10
dexterity: 15
constitution: 13
intelligence: 18
wisdom: 13
charisma: 15
weapon proficiency: pen; eigengrau sword; ThinkPad T60
languages: English (native); Bad English (native); French (basic); Spanish (rudimentary); German (rudimentary)

resistances

physical: armor-dependent
fire: armor-dependent
ice: half damage
lightning: armor-dependent
wind: half damage
nuclear: armor-dependent
psychic: half damage
curse: nullified
disease: half damage
holy: reflected
darkness: absorbed

on the true names of shadows

As he himself admits, Matthew Cambion only exists in the Wired. He is to real-world software developer and out-of-print author Matthew Graybosch what Mark Twain was to Samuel Clemens, what Richard Stark was to Donald E. Westlake, what Saki had been to H. H. Munro, what Hannah Montana is to Miley Cyrus, what Alice Cooper is to Vincent Furnier, and what Richard Bachman is to Stephen King. Just as this website is a work of textual performance art, so is the literary persona presented herein. The name and persona are literary drag and Jungian performance art.

This is at best an open secret, and the author refuses to live in fear of exposure as if he were a criminal or a sorcerer whose enchantments could all be unraveled in an instant were somebody to speak his “true name”. After all, neither Nearly Free Speech nor ICANN will do business with a man who does not exist. Follow the money, and you will find the man. Rather than be hunted down, he chooses to make his stand here.

Nevertheless, he now prefers to write online and publish as Matthew Cambion or Matthew Thomas Cambion to maintain a semblance of separation between his day job and his chosen work online. He will not legally change his name because he believes that an individual should not have to beg permission of the state to redefine themselves, but that a person’s identity in life is their’s alone to create. Remember: we are not things, and there is no compelling state interest that can justify violating your self-ownership.

It bears mentioning, however, that the author’s hair has been that long in real life and that the portrait above is how he sees his shadow self. He does not smoke in reality, but a man’s shadow self need not fear emphysema or lung cancer — let alone the censure of his equals.

regarding Madam Catastrophy

You will see her mentioned at times throughout the portions of starbreaker.org that are not outright fiction. She is in fact the author’s wife of over twenty years, and his first wife. She is a writer and artist from Victoria, Australia who emigrated to the US in 2004; she and Matthew Cambion met on a Yahoo! writers’ forum in 2000 and met in person in 2002.

She likes drag comedy, Regency romance, steampunk, and optimistic sf. She grew up on oldies and pop, but out of her husband’s collection she likes Savatage, Ayreon, Edguy, Scarlet Dorn, Messa, Blue Öyster Cult, GUNSHIP, and Bruce Dickinson’s solo albums. She generally watches her husband with tolerant amusement, even when his writing strays beyond deep purple and into the ultraviolet. He does, after all, support them both on his salary alone while also doing the dishes and most of the indoor housework.

Though the author reveals his own “true name”; he has refrained from thus exposing his partner. Her pseudonym is one of her own choosing, based on the handle she once used on forums and a nickname her friends had given her. In lieu of a photograph, she offers the following portrait in keeping with that of her husband, whom she sometimes calls “Mr. Kitty”:

Wait! There’s more.