People and Blogs

I was recently asked to contribute to Manuel Moreale’s interview series.

Manuel Moreale has been running a side project called People & Blogs for most of a year now. He’s got a set of questions that he asks various bloggers and website operators: an introduction, about their creative process, how they got started, what sort of tech they use, how they pay to keep their site up, whether they’d like to share anything, etc. It’s a solid format, and the answers are often interesting.

Back in March he had been kind enough to ask me to contribute. Two weeks ago, at the end of May, my interview went up as the fortieth entry. With Manu’s permission, I’ve reproduced it below. Apparently I was the first to think of doing so.

It’s a bit long; I had decided to cut loose instead of holding back. While there is a fair amount of self-promotion, I’ve made a point of promoting others as well.

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I’m Matthew Graybosch of Long Island in New York. I’m a GenX college dropout with delusions of erudition, a long-haired metalhead, and an incorrigible nerd. I’m a man of modest means and plebeian tastes, and if this post seems disjointed, it is because I am large and contain multitudes.

I had majored in computer science but I regret not saying be damned to the naysayers and going for a liberal arts degree. Then again, I probably should have just become an electrician; it’s a union job in a skilled trade and not particularly amenable to outsourcing or automation.

Instead, I build software for a living — a job that pays well but often feels like building cathedrals atop quicksand — and make a hobby of writing science fantasy inspired by heavy metal and prog rock. Nothing I’ve written would be mistaken by a discerning reader for a towering work of literature, but I had a hell of a lot of fun writing it, and I’ve given readings from my work at the World Fantasy Convention. I’m also a terrible musician; I can stay on beat and in tune, and play three instruments poorly: viola, piano, and bass guitar. I have an uncle who does philosophy for a living; I merely dabble in it, since I’m one of those techies who gets curious about areas outside his expertise and sometimes develops opinions about them, too. Worse, I sometimes express them on my website, though you may find I am somewhat more progressive in many of my opinions than the typical Hacker News commenter.

I currently live and work in central Pennsylvania. I’m technically a homeowner, but all that means right now is that my landlord is a bank, my rent isn’t subject to annual increases, and I’m much less likely to hear my neighbors having sex or domestic disputes. It still beats being a renter.

I have a relatively anodyne and corporate-friendly “professional” website at matthewgraybosch.com, but my personal website is at starbreaker.org and that’s where I let my hair down and speak my mind straight from the heart (with liberal use of profanity).

I tend to use the alias “starbreaker” online. I grabbed it out of an old Judas Priest song from their Sin After Sin album, but apparently it’s also the name of a DC super-villain from the 1970s that nobody gives a damn about anymore. It’s also a super-weapon in the Xeelee sequence of sf novels by Stephen Baxter. But I just didn’t want to use “Stormbringer”; there were too many of those online in 1996.

However, when I play Final Fantasy XIV I’m Naomi Bradleigh. You can blame my wife Catherine for that; she loves to play around with character creation in RPGs, she tends to make characters based on characters from my fiction, and Naomi is one of her favorites: a swashbuckling soprano catgirl whose demon sword (which was forged of a stable transuranic heavy metal not yet seated at the periodic table) has figured out how to talk to her over 802.11 wireless networking and thinks that The Dreaming City by Michael Moorcock and Gate of Ivrel by C. J. Cherryh are fun bedtime stories.

Besides, I already pretend to be a man in real life. Why also do it in a massively multiplayer online power fantasy?

I suppose I should mention my day job. For my sins, I work a full-stack developer working at one of the US’ Big Four consulting firms. They’ve got me typecast as a .NET developer, but my technical repertoire is rather broader than they care to realize. When I dropped out of college, it was with both a working knowledge of UNIX and the sting of my ex-girlfriend’s last kiss still lingering on my lips.

Not many geeks can make that boast; they might manage the former but not necessary the latter. I run Slackware and OpenBSD on secondhand computers at home, and build my website with basic UNIX tools. More on that later, since you’re curious about my tech stack. I’ve been on the periphery of various FOSS projects for years; I used to be active on the FreeBSD mailing list between 2002 and 2004 and used to answer a lot of questions about setting up dial-up connections using wvdial. I had also dabbled a bit with Gemini Protocol in 2020 and 2021, to the point of running my own server at tanelorn.city. I’m also part of the reason that Gemini’s companion upload protocol is called “Titan”.

I not only use GNU Emacs for programming at home, but for my writing. Speaking of which, I’m the author of the novels Without Bloodshed and Silent Clarion, as well as stories like “The Milgram Battery” and “Limited Liability”. They’re all part of the same post-apocalyptic metal hurlant science fantasy saga: Starbreaker. It’s basically a pastiche on Michael Moorcock and a bunch of other sf and fantasy authors who aren’t slavish imitators of J. R. R. Tolkien, though I do have a dark lord who wears white and already rules the world; he’s a Silicon Valley Saruman and as cunning a linguist as his namesake. (Remember: what happens in Lothlorien stays in Lothlorien.) If you read my fiction, expect a strong undercurrent of the same sort of Romantic Satanism one finds in Byron, Shelley, and Goethe.

I’m also autistic, but wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my early 40s. Being like that has made my life harder than it might ordinarily be; I can be sociable, friendly, or even charming with effort — but even doing the minimum to seem normal in an office setting can leave me drained at the end of a workday. Despite this, I managed to meet a woman online in 2000 and court her for four years before marrying her in 2004; it’ll have been 20 years for Catherine and me this Halloween.

I haven’t always had the means to make a huge fuss over her for our anniversaries, but we did spend her 40th birthday in Paris, where I did the talking for both of us because I had just enough French to order at shops and restaurants and make basic polite conversation without immediately revealing myself as an Ugly American. It was more than she had, though. Mais non, je ne parle et lire pas Francais bien. But my French is better than my German, which is barely good enough to make sense of Rammstein lyrics.

I’ve got a couple of cats curled up beside me while I’m writing this, and the neighborhood strays know me for a soft touch. I’m a typical middle-aged American man in that I don’t have any friends beside my wife, and I had to get by as a child and a young man without a lot of support, but the life I live is mostly the life I wanted for myself in my youth and I’ve done most of what I had wanted to do. I’ve written and published novels, I’ve traveled a bit, I live in a library, and my wife and I still enjoy each other’s company. I’m doing pretty well for myself.

(Fair warning: if my introduction seemed like too much, it only gets worse from here.)

What’s the story behind your blog?

I can’t remember ever not having some kind of website after I first got internet access through my college’s computer lab back in 1996. I’ve always dabbled in writing about my life online and sharing bits and pieces of my fiction online. The internet was always a place where I could geek out in a way I never felt safe enough to do in “real life”. Even though I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was about 41, my parents had taught me to keep a low profile, not show off what I knew, and not bore other people with my interests.

On my websites I wasn’t obligated to play by those rules, so I didn’t. I didn’t even have to be myself online. Instead, I could call myself “Mabelode the Faceless” in the time-honored tradition of wannabe hackers adopting grandiose pseudonyms. Of course, I’m still doing that, but taking inspiration from a Judas Priest song instead of a Michael Moorcock novel.

For about a decade I ran a website under my real name at matthewgraybosch.com, because posting fiction on Google+ had gotten me a book deal with an independent press and I needed a website to promote myself if I wasn’t to be wholly dependent on parasocial media like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. If I had been a bit smarter at the time, I would have registered starbreaker.org in 2013 instead of 2020 and never used my real name. Though if I had really been smart, I would not have let starbreaker.net go, which I had held from about 2000 to 2006.

I still have a website on matthewgraybosch.com, but it’s mainly a substitute for having a LinkedIn account because LinkedIn has always been the Ashley Madison of job hunting, only more cultish. I mean, have you seen the people posting there? It’s like the Stepford Wives got equally robotic husbands and they all got corporate jobs.

Some would argue that my clinging to a personal website instead of “getting with the program” and doing social media or a podcast or video is pointless. However, the pointlessness is the point. It’s rather like my science fantasy writing: a sacrament of defiance. I feel as though the world only values me (and men in general (and don’t even get me started on the way women are still objectified; Elon Musk in particular reminds me of Immortan Joe from Mad Max: Fury Road)) for my ability to further enrich the already wealthy. My saving the best of my effort and paltry intellect for a website or fiction that benefits nobody but merely amuses me is the sort of gentle rebellion that keeps me alive. Without it I’d have killed myself decades ago, because a life lived solely for the sake of others isn’t a life at all, but a life sentence.

On a lighter note, it’s helped me with dating, too. All of the women I’ve dated, I met online. It wasn’t my face or physique that interested them, but my writing. One of them is my wife of twenty years. The possibility that she might read something I’ve posted online keeps me from being entirely unreasonable.

Nevertheless, I’m just another opinionated guy who happens to be capable of running his own website, so I do. If I had more musical talent and better social skills, I might be playing in a heavy metal band on nights and weekends instead.

Instead, I have starbreaker.org, where I let my hair down and speak my mind straight from the heart. My opinions aren’t necessarily palatable; I’m generally irreligious, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian. I provide the usual disclaimers, but it should be obvious that I’m not speaking for my employers there, or their partners and clients. Besides, if somebody doesn’t want to hire me because I play the edgelord on a personal website then they don’t deserve to have my name on their payroll in the first place; they’re not a culture fit for me because they think they have the right to expect me to put aside basic human rights like freedom of expression even when I’m not on the clock.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Wifi off, headphones on. Beyond that, it depends. Sometimes I know what I want to write and have most of it roughed out in my head before my fingertips touch the keyboard because it’s been in the background of my mind like a daemon process. Sometimes I’m feeling my way through, exploring an idea, smacking it around like my cat with a hollow ball that dispenses a little kibble if he can get it to roll the right way.

And sometimes, I’m just angry — usually about real-world bullshit that a sensible person would dismiss as somebody else’s problem because they don’t have the power and authority to take meaningful action. I, however, am not a sensible person. (My wife is looking over my shoulder and saying, “Thank God”, incidentally.)

Hemingway supposedly wrote a lot of his best work while drunk. I’d like to think I’ve managed a few epic rants while somewhere between high dudgeon and Shakespearean wrath. There’s a trope in Japanese role-playing games which suggests that you can solve the world’s problems by finding the right white-haired pretty-boy and beating the crap out of him, but the real-world has a surplus of problems and a marked shortage of atomic blond Adonises on whom the world’s problems can be blamed. Besides, I’ve more experience with a pen than a sword, and I’m a middle-aged adult besides, so I use my words.

Ultimately, my creative process — such as it is — is often just me asking myself how I can go about leaving the world a few scars by which to remember me without hurting innocent people in the process. I am ultimately shouting at the void, daring it to shout back as the abyss might in a Nietzschean staring contest. And sometimes it does, too.

For example, last year I wrote a rant after reading a post by Jake Seliger in which he outlined his regrets, because most of them annoyed me; they sounded like the scoldings of would-be Jordan Petersen who thinks he knows something about the world because he’s made a few mistakes. One of them, which he suggested was not widely applicable, was in my opinion the only one that mattered. He didn’t see a doctor the moment he noticed that something was weird about his tongue. If he had, he might not have lost it to cancer. If he had, he might not be slowly dying.

A couple of months later, I got an email from a woman whom discretion forbids me to name. She went to the doctor after putting it off for months because she had read my rant. Turns out she’s got cancer, too. I never heard from her again. I hope she made it, but I’ll never know. All I know is that if she did make it, but never felt the need to write to me again, I might still have saved somebody’s life.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

If I have an ideal creative environment, I haven’t found it yet. I’ve written at food courts in crowded shopping malls while my wife went shopping. I’ve written in an overpriced apartment with thin walls while my neighbors had a domestic dispute (after calling the police). I’ve written in my bedroom as a young man while my parents screamed at each other over money. I’ve written in the break room at my day job. I’ve written in bed, unable to sleep, and in my home office while listening in on a conference call that should have been an email.

I’m not joking about any of this. I wrote one novel, Without Bloodshed, 1000 words at a time while hiding in a pizza parlor near my office. I’d get a slice, write part of a scene, and go back to work. I finished the first draft in about 100 days of writing in this fashion. I worked on Silent Clarion while working the night shift, babysitting a server farm. Did a lot of blogging that year, too, but I haven’t gotten around to digging those posts out of the archive.

Rather than waiting or searching for the right environment in which to write, I made do with what I had; Virginia Woolf might have needed a room of her own, but there were times when I didn’t even have that. Instead, I counted myself lucky if my parents weren’t at my door giving me grief for being at home writing instead of going out and trying to meet girls. Never mind that what little money I made from my part time job went toward college expenses (or maintenance on my bicycle) so I had no money for dating, let alone the time or inclination.

I’ve found that it isn’t so much the physical space that affects my creativity, but the playlist. The wrong music can make achieving a flow state impossible, but the right music can make me all but unstoppable. A playlist has to have music complex enough to engage my brain and keep me from noticing the world around me, but not so complex that I focus more on the music than the task I’ve set myself. Also, when writing fiction, the music needs to match the character.

For example, I’ve had good sessions with albums by the Blue Öyster Cult, Queensrÿche, Therion, Hiromi Uehara, Thank You Scientist, Braindance, Galneryus, The Sisters of Mercy, Threshold, Savatage, Judas Priest, Ghost, Paradise Lost, and Iron Maiden. I’ve had terrible sessions with albums by Frank Zappa, even though he’s an old favorite. Likewise King Crimson, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Steve Vai, Devin Townshend, Coheed and Cambria, Baroness, and Titans to Tachyons — all of whom have released excellent albums that just don’t make for good writing music because they demand the listener’s active attention.

The importance of having the right album playing doesn’t apply solely to blogging, incidentally. It applies to my fiction writing and to my day job as a developer. All of these roles require that I be able to quickly and reliably access a flow state.

There’s also the matter of tooling. I don’t spend quite so much time in GNU Emacs that I use it to read and compose email, but that’s mainly because setting up Emacs to interface with an IMAP-based provider is a pain in the ass and Fastmail’s web interface is good enough that I’d rather not bother. Emacs has, however, become indispensable to me for writing in a way few other applications have. It is for me what Scrivener is for a lot of novelists, and it integrates with other tools in a way few writing tools can match. Those that can generally trace their descent to Bill Joy’s vi editor.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I doubt your more technical readers would find my stack particularly impressive, but everything’s in my site’s git repository, which is publicly accessible on Sourcehut.

I usually have “Rube Goldberg Variations” by Thank You Scientist on repeat when working on my tooling, incidentally. The title seemed fitting.

My host is Nearly Free Speech, and my website is served by Apache on FreeBSD. It’s all static HTML pages with a little CSS (as a treat) so there’s no database involved and no need for a server-side programming language or framework like PHP or Ruby on Rails, let alone the C# and ASP.NET I use at my day job.

Nor is there any JavaScript, let alone front-end frameworks like Bootstrap. It simply isn’t needed for a personal website in my opinion, especially not with all the functionality that gets built into HTML5 and CSS3. I’m not one of those developers building their blog with Node.js and Astro or Eleventy, for example, let alone React. I don’t even use a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo, though I’ve tried both.

I write for my website in HTML with GNU Emacs on an old, secondhand computer running Slackware, and I compile Emacs myself to have the latest version. I used to use Markdown or Org Mode and convert to HTML with pandoc, but that gets slow once you’ve got a couple hundred posts in your archive (not to mention a few novels). Each page’s metadata is stored in a separate file as shell variables that I source from my build script.

I make use of templates and partials, but implement them using shell scripts and a makefile that I run locally instead of depending on a continuous integration (CI) system. My dependencies are limited to bash, GNU coreutils, sed, awk, m4, exiftool, libjxl, avifenc, cwebp, HTML tidy, and tools from the W3C’s HTML-XML-utils suite. My idea of deploying a website is to type “make install”, which calls rsync and pushes changes to my host over SSH. If I really wanted automatic builds and deployments, I could set up a cron job on my Slackware machine.

Aside from the support for WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL image formats, my stack is something I might have used in 1999 if I knew then what I knew today. It’s just a MEWNIX system. My cats know this.

Smudge (bottom right) and Purrseus (top left) taking turns as sysadmins

(At risk of ruining a joke by explanation: MEWNIX is a weak pun on UNIX, which was in turn a weak pun on MULTICS.)

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

The main reason I have a blog is that everybody and their cat seems to have one. I can’t help but wonder if maybe blogging really did break the World Wide Web, as some posts I’ve read suggest.

I find that blogging requires a different sort of focus, and that I don’t necessarily refer to old blog posts when writing new ones. When blogging, it is easy to ignore the past in favor of the eternal present. This often leads to me repeating myself, or at least paraphrasing myself, because each post is a discrete and timestamped snapshot of what I was thinking in the moment. It seems a format better suited to machines than people.

If I were starting from zero today, or could go back 20 years knowing what I know today, I wouldn’t start a blog. I would rather have the online equivalent of a commonplace book or a grimoire, with a single page per major topic that just keeps growing as I add to it. If I have written about a particular subject, such as commentary on a particular novel or heavy metal album, I would rather expand upon or refine what I have already written than write something entirely new.

I understand that this is also called digital gardening. However, having an internet grimoire appeals more to my inner child, who is still a thirteen-year-old edgelord trying to shock his elders by appearing to dabble in diabolism.

At the very least, I would not want to do as much blogging as I currently do, but instead take an excerpt from my commonplace and either summarize or reformat it as a blog post — or use the blog to highlight changes and additions to my grimoire.

I also think that blogging doesn’t encourage deep reading on the part of visitors. You might read a blog post because somebody shared a link somewhere, but not bother to dig deeper into that site’s archive. Furthermore, blogging in retrospect seems a precursor to social media, especially after RSS feeds and feed aggregators had their 15 minutes. This approach made it easy to think in terms of being a “content creator” and thus commodifying personal expression.

It’s bad enough I have to be a commodity, or human capital, at my day job. I don’t want to be a commodity in my recreation as well.

Financial question since the web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I rent my domain for about $15/year. Dot org domains don’t seem trendy, so they’re generally cheap. I rent disk, CPU, and bandwidth from Nearly Free Speech for about $5/month on average, though that’s dependent mainly on traffic. Hosting on Nearly Free Speech is relatively cheap because they charge extra for technical support if you aren’t the sort who can read a FAQ and figure things out yourself.

I pay the expenses of running a website out of my salary from my day job instead of trying to make a side hustle out of it. This is, oddly enough, recreation and self-care for me. My website is my work done my way, and that’s priceless.

Besides, I spend a lot less to run my website than I have on any of the following in a given year:

I’m against monetizing personal websites, but nobody elected me to have an opinion on what other people do with their own websites — and they certainly aren’t paying me to care. If you want to turn your website into a side hustle, or can make a full-time living off of affiliate links and making people pay for the privilege of posting comments, more power to you. I just can’t be bothered to do any of that myself.

Memo to people monetizing their sites with ads: don’t expect me to turn off my ad blocker for you. I don’t do that for anybody, because all adtech is malware and uBlock Origin is the new Norton Antivirus. And if you get really annoying, I’ll disable JavaScript for your domain, too. Why? For the same reason I write: because I can, because I choose to, and because you can’t stop me. If ads on your website can’t support your expenses, too bad: that’s what having a day job is for.

Incidentally, I’m even rethinking my “screw AI” and “screw Google” stance; it had occurred to me that by blocking AI crawlers I am forgoing an opportunity to throw a monkey wrench (or a spanner for the Brits reading this) into OpenAI’s works by injecting my irreligious, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian sentiments into their training data. It would be amusing of ChatGPT encouraged young workers to ask themselves what America has done for them lately because OpenAI slurped down my blog without anything resembling meaningful human oversight.

On the other hand, there’s enough machine-generated slop on the internet without me indirectly contributing to it.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I was tempted to suggest that you take a look at my links page and pick websites to check out, but reorganizing that page (and adding more sites) has been on my to-do list for a while now.

I’ll try to keep this simple: with one exception that I’ll list first, if I mention a website here it’s probably worthwhile to interview its operator as well.

The exception is Simone Silvestroni at Minutes to Midnight, because not only have you already thought of him but he seems to have submitted his reply with greater alacrity than I’ve managed.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Oh, there’s quite a bit I could share, and not all of it mine, but I’ll get to the self-promotion in due course.

Books

Music

I had been listening to some of the following while working on this post (and other things):

My Stuff

I’ve got a fairly sizable archive of posts on my website, but I provide a recommended page as a starting point. It has web manifestos like “Party Like It’s 1989” and “This Is Not My Side Hustle” along with rants like “Literature Ain’t Burger King” and “Storming Heaven”. Basically, something to offend everyone.

There’s also my fiction. After the rights to the fiction I had published with Curiosity Quills Press reverted to me around 2020, I ended up putting it all on my website. Good thing, too, because my first novel Without Bloodshed (2013) is long out of print, and my second novel Silent Clarion never got a print edition in the first place.

(For people interested in web development, I manage to publish both of these novels as a single page while using less data than a typical post on either Twitter, Bluesky, or Mastodon. My secret: no JavaScript, and no frameworks — just raw HTML with a little CSS.)

Both novels, as well as my short stories and other unfinished/abandoned work, are pastiches of Final Fantasy, Michael Moorcock, and lyrics from Blue Öyster Cult and Judas Priest. My fiction page makes no secret of my influences, and you can also read Silent Clarion as a mostly-affectionate parody of urban fantasy and paranormal romances by the likes of Laurell K. Hamilton, Patricia Briggs, and Kim Harrison.

If you’ve ever decided against sharing something like Motherfucking Website at work because of the profanity (or find it too Oedipal), I’ve got you covered. This is an Actual Website.

As I mentioned, I have a somewhat more professional website at matthewgraybosch.com. At least, I’m not using nearly as much profanity there, but I still claim to be a “full-stack thaumaturge” there. I’m also looking for a better job, so if anybody knows somebody looking to hire an experienced generalist techie with a patchwork DIY liberal arts education, please send them my way.

In closing, and to paraphrase what I say in party chat after a dungeon crawl or boss fight in Final Fantasy XIV: thanks for having me!