About

I’m Matthew Lyon, and this is my website.

As a kid, I wanted to be an architect, and make beautiful spaces for people to live and work in.

But I had undiagnosed ADHD, a predilection towards depression, and tend to learn things in a manner that schools don’t accommodate. I couldn’t learn Calculus the way they wanted to teach it to me, and an internship at an architectural studio made me realize my dream wasn’t what I thought it was. So I studied art instead, and learned to talk about abstract things.

I did some meandering. I started Invoke Arts with my parents, learned how to program computers so I could better manage the inventory, then gave the business to them, moved from California to the Pacific Northwest, and started working in technology, where over the course of 20 years I’ve worked at a variety of companies big and small. These days I’m consulting and making music.

There I had the first real crack in the negative self-esteem that had built up from non-diagnosis, bullying, and more. I met my partner, and started a family. I taught myself how to make music, played with generative art, and have focused my technology work on human/computer interaction design, which I view as making beautiful software spaces for people to work in.

This website is a work in progress, like all websites are, but I’m not going to put an under construction gif here. I’m working on moving it towards more of a digital garden format.

Typography, Iconography; Photography & other images

Typefaces used on this website include Valkyrie and Concourse by Matthew Butterick. The icons are primarily from Phosphor, with a few from Remix.

Unless otherwise noted, all images on this site are created by myself. I have been making photographs since age 8, have otherwise considered myself an artist since my teenage years, creating photographs, paintings, prints both physical and digital, and parametric art. I consider image support as much a part of my voice as my writing.

Technologies

This website is created from flat files using custom code to render html pages from files in Obsidian. I intend to eventually extract that code and share it. Search functionality is provided by Pagefind, and I’ll typically pursue other interactivity via Web Components or SolidJS.

The source code is not available right now as there have been assets checked into the source repository I cannot redistribute — I intend to publish the source code after scrubbing those assets.

I’ve been making websites since 1995, first creating a personal site in Notepad.exe. I’ve played with a lot of technology for doing so over the years, and for my desires this technology stack hits the right balance. I’ve worked in print design, loved the lush layouts of the magazines of yore, and believe the web potential to represent ideas in ways other than text.

Generative AI Statement

I do not use the output of LLM, GPT, or diffusion-based “AI” tools in any capacity for the production of this website or any personally-released creative work. If you have an issue with that, you are a useful idiot.

Why not?

• The process of creating (writing, composing, drawing, et cetera) help me think, which itself is the point, not the output.

• I’ve been on the web in various capacities since 1995 in part to connect with other people by sharing ideas. My ideas, not the averaged response to a prompt.

• These technologies are averaging systems, which are fundamentally at odds with my voice as a creator. I strive to live and create intentionally, and one cannot do that if they’re offloading creative work to someone or something else.

• As averaging systems, these technologies promote bias, especially of things I oppose: sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and most LLMs are trained by people collaborating with a lawless authoritarian takeover of the United States.

• These technologies are increasingly trained on stolen content.

• These technologies are increasingly environmentally unsustainable.

• These technologies take a huge toll on the people who do the training work

• LLMs are by nature sycophonic and I cannot stand sycophants. If I’m collaborating with another party, I want their push back.

Perhaps more fundamentally, these technologies are about power dynamics. If you are using them, your values will eventually become what the tools vendors value. Your ability to reason will be confined by the tools, language and medium those vendors control. If they care, you will care. Sure, you’re not some automaton… yet. You’ll eventually be quietly typing away on your laptop, asking GPT how you should feel about this very paragraph. Don’t worry, it’ll tell you you’re still in charge and your objections to my viewpoints are really excellent.