MatthewLylesHornbostel.com

I'm Matthew Lyles Hornbostel.
This site's just placeholder for now, a very
incomplete overview of my life, work.

The 'recursive selfie' seen above is now over a decade old. I am almost 40 now. (Yikes!)

I'm mentally ill and have more issues than most. I also tend to self-sabotage by discussing them all. I'm pretty sure I'm unemployable and on some sort of employment blacklist. Covering the basics, autism, clinical depression, OCD. Plus other undiagnosable oddness.

Went through a ton of early trauma and knew for sure I wasn't like other people and was definitely inferior to them.

Others have delusions of grandeur.
I had delusions of mediocrity.

I tried to lie to myself, pretend to be like the other human people. Tried to be what I was completely incapable of being.

It took a long, long time but I slowly realized that being 'normal' was not a goal I should have ever aspired to. Firstly, it's unattainable for me. Second, normal people often suck. They lie all the time, stab each other in the back. The normal person is greedy and selfish and deceptive.

I preferred finding people who had some aspects of the weirdo countercultural insanity I had and valued that. People who would be truthful even if it killed them to be so, and were raw and emotional and self-sacrificing to the point of ruining their own lives.

I am not generous because I'm a good person. I'm not a good person, I feel I'm deeply defective and shamefully inadequate, but I'm trying to be even knowing that the definition of 'good' I've set for myself is unreachable. Moral goodness is unattainable. Doesn't mean we shouldn't push ourselves to the breaking point and throw everything we have at that goal.

If God forgives me, it has nothing to do with me deserving it. I should be in hell. In fact, I may be there now. But if I'm forgiven, it's because God is loving and merciful, and wants to show me kindness even when I actively tend to push back and refuse it. My prayers are as follows: Please let the pain end someday for me, as my life has often been extremely painful. If I die, God, please let the pain be over after that, regardless of whether what follows is nonexistence or heaven. But the idea of reincarnation or hell terrify me because I am so tired of hurting and don't want to have that go on after this life.

It's that sense that life is torture and I am trapped and cannot avoid feeling terrible a lot of the time... that defines a lot of my views. I know money is stupid. Itdoesn't make people happy. Chemistry does (in the brain) and if a good thing happens for a person ultimately it is a fleeting upside.
Human biology gives each person a happiness set point, as backed by science, a general average happiness over time, and it's fixed. If good or bad things occur they divert it but only briefly, after the moment passes we're back to the emotional levels we normally are at.

What this means to me is that my happiness is not fixable and being 'successful' is not going to change it. Money only helps up to the point where you're no longer sick, starving, dehydrated, etc. Above that minimal 'needs are met' threshold it means little. Relationships with friends and family do raise the baseline too, as does a sense of purpose or fulfillment with what you're doing in your life. All the core Maslow's heirarchy stuff really. But money isn't part of any of it, aside from being a contributor to a general sense of safety/security.

What this tells me is I'll be happier giving a big chunk of my income away. Other people are happier as a result too as core needs are met for people who otherwise would have no way of meeting them. Those people have more potential benefit from my money than I do, so I give it because that's the logical thing to do for all involved.

Sad that nobody will hire me in a sense but I make my life simple, no car - just walking places, no rent payments, few costs aside from $250ish a month in groceries. I am vegetarian because as stated, I don't like inflicting pain. I give as much as I can.
Wish it were more. But I work hard whenever I feel passable and I am not emotionally crashing, in tears, etc.

My biggest fear isn't dying, I actually fantasize about dying. A lot. My fear, and what makes me non-suicidal, is that all the misery I endured amounted to nothing, mattered to no one, and was a net negative in all. There's got to be a purpose, even if transient - otherwise why keep going?

My skill sets, such as they are, are creative - I have found making art is one of the few things I kind of enjoy. So I do that hours on end. Have degree, 3.67 GPA, bachelor's degree at University of Houston. Major in Media Production within communications dept, minor in Studio Art, and about a year of game development, programming courses that sidetracked me from graduating at all quickly. Also didn't help that I dropped out of middle school after months of pneumonia triggered by mold growth in the school. My grades were slipping sure but the dropping out was fundamentally and end result of health problems and the fact that a full third of the people at the school were seriously sick that year. I took my first college level classes at age 13. From then to around age 15-16 a lot of the stuff I did was just trying to get up to speed on high school material while also taking a minimal number of university-tier courses. Around the same time I got my first camera and tapes and began recording home video projects that quickly escalated in ambition.

The first couple of videos were 'Send in the Clones' and 'House Trek' both done as solo performances simply because nobody else wanted to help as cast members. SITC specifically was me acting in scenes with myself, sometimes 2 or 3 copies of me in a given shot. No super special stuff, just basic masking, but between that and the edit of the first two House Trek videos complete with a few 3d animated sequences done in Bryce 3d or an outdated used copy of Strata 3d, people in my immediate circle took note. Soon after a friend named Bradley costarred in a Clones sequel, then in the third one he was part of a trio of guys fighting the clones. By House Trek ep. 4 I'd upgraded to Lightwave 7.5 for 3d and Adobe After Effects and Premiere 5.5. as compositing and editing tools. Yes, this was before either the CC or previous CS series of Adobe programs existed. And yes, I paid for a lot of the software but parents assisted witht he biggest purchases and they did so knowing there was some real ambition there.

I've made little silly indie videos off and on ever since and almost none of them are online. If they end up online it'll be in an upcoming redesign of HornbostelVideos.com, with a few exceptions. Some videos with the scout troop I was involved in may end up on a Troop 4 website, as that was a group I did a string of projects with back in the 2000s and I ended up with Eagle rank there. Family members, usually extended family during Christmases, are also recurring as cast in my video projects, along with various friends from the Church of the Redeemer where I grew up in Houston, TX. Other scattered projects might end up here and there elsewhere - I might make a Myst short fanfilm eventually and it'd end up on my Myst fan page. I regard Cyan's Myst series fairly highly in part because it was that moment for me where I realized you could make entire worlds with 3d graphics and make that captivating. Sort of like the cinematic brekthroughs with the likes of Jurassic Park and Toy Story motivated me to pursue digital VFX in videos, Myst/Riven were key inspiration moments in my pursuit of someday making video games players could get lost in.

After graduating there was some fiddling with a few ideas. 2007's iPhone release led to mobile gaming as a category and my dad Scott and I founded GalileeGames at that time and made the Android title Prodigal. It drove me crazy as we had some creative differences and I felt he was co-opting my skills as the game's designer and pursuing a design path that was fundamentally doomed from the start. My big issue was not the art style which I had actual input in, but the fact that it was impossible to market. The target audience, per my dad, was 'people who don't play video games' which is an untargetable market. The game was rejected by Apple and Google, and remained on GalileeGames.com as freeware with almost nobody noticing. After this, my dad sent me to work as a crew member at nonPareil in Plano, TX, where I showed up with a strong demo reel and then the leaders of the group somehow forgot I had a wide range of skills going in, and put me through a year of basic classes before realizing I was unhappy, asking what was wrong, and me meekly saying 'I already know what you're trying to teach me' - the result was them pivoting to move me into actual productions and trying to make me teach a course covering material and software that nobody else, leaders of the org included, knew how to do. Not that that was new. I had been told by my teachers in university the exact same here and there, over and over: "I don't know how you did ______ so I cannot teach it to anyone else, and the other students in the class now are asking about how to do it, and I can't say anything other than I don't know, ask Matthew."

I eventually left nP as the reality was they had no intention of ever paying me anything (or) listening to any of my input that much, so it was demoralizing and after more than two years there and a presentation presented to my parents, they agreed it was a waste of time. I made 16 iterations of a trailer for nP game Lightwire and not only can I not legally show any of that work but they never released any of it either. That was typical - the sheer number of variations of each and every asset they had the team make was staggering. When they finally settled on the best option after 25 prior versions were dismissed as inadequate they moved on to the next one. After what my best guess was 40,000 hours of unpaid work from that team altogether, about 2500 of those hours went into things that ended up in the game. Then the game was released and nobody played it. It has a handful of reviews on Apple's app store and consensus around its quality is mixed, something like 3/5 last I checked. I wish they had not iterated so much. I wish they had a clear vision and just pursued it efficiently, instead of telling us all to submit concepts for each and every model and then slowly iterating on the best five or so until eventually choosing something. They also shoul d have promoted what they made because not even trying to was a major disservice to everyone who wasted their time on a game which, in the end, made around a penny per hour of work put into it at best.

The presentation post nP to my parents was as follows: I just made $500+ the last year in spare time on eBay and doing freelance gigs on other sites. I could make more if I were not committing most of my time unpaid to nP. Also, my sister Katie just had twins. As long as I'm in Plano, I cannot help with the newborns and I want to. If I double down on eBay + freelancing I can make more money and be able to help with family, the work online can be done from anywhere in the country.

So we moved not long after to PA and helped with the kids - twins Nick/Ben and Evelyn, born two years after the twins.

And I kept eBay sales going for a while selling handmade art to people, made to order shipped personalized stuff in mailing tubes or boxes and it absolutely blew up to the point where it was impossible to keep up with. Canvas art was expensive to ship too and scammers kept threatening to give bad reviews on art if they weren't allowed to have it for free. The shady 10% of buyers who exploited the shop and threatened me basically erased most profits and the outcome was I was working on a backlog of artwork commissions with no profit margin, falling farther and farther behind and in the end the only real move possible was closing the shop because I couldn't keep up. Most customers, we'll note, were delighted and the reviews were 100% positive [hundreds of positive reviews]

I pivoted to Etsy as a higher-tier option and offered various services from print services [posters, bookmakrs] to predesigned paintings I made not to order but just made something pretty and if anyone wanted it they could buy it. Exploitation was less common than on eBay and you wound up avoiding the occasional buyer with a vague request who told me the painting I shipped wasn't quite what they imagined. And I'm like, okay, sorry, I'll give you a refund if you ask for it but I do think you understand how your short text descfription of the idea could have been interpreted visually in various ways? So selling clearly defined preexisting art could have worked, sometimes did, taking photos and shipping prints of them or even customizing designs a bit, enlarging, colorizing, filtering, adding text... all of that went well. Until it too became overwhelming after four years or so and shut down in 2024 because I couldn't keep up with the sheer volume of orders anymore.

Some of the handmade art from that era ended up on my page on Pinterest.

Already had another backup plan moving by then and that was itch.io and asset creation - PBR seamless textures, 3d model packs, etc, and since late 2024 that all has begun accelerating and since those are digital products the prospects for big volume without it all crashing down are better I think.

I also have that same stuff accessible through Ko-Fi and will take comissions for specific 3d assets people need made.

Each pack's around $1, and there are about 15 out so far, released plus a few listings (asset packs upcoming, or indie games) not done yet and not launched. So... all those get bundled up in one sale archive for under $2 during holidays. Great deal. Years of work for a dollar and change. And now 50% of that is being directed to charitable donations, so... yeah.

At the moment a record 2.2% of page visitors there are buying and the ad campaigns backing this are extremely carefully optimized, such that only 1% of visitors need to buy anything for the campaign to break even. (As in, 0.008 cpc for any marketers out there.) That is lean enough that I can give half of the cash raised away and still make a small profit on every dollar put into ads.

And if the response rate hits 3 or 4%
that all explodes. Which I think will be likely by end of spring 2026.

VITAL STATISTICS:
Ad spend related to matthornb.itch.io now exceeds $450 to date.
-140,000+ page views
-26,000+ individual visitors
-500+ purchases made to date.
-18 positive reviews/ratings posted by customers. Under 3% of buyers post reviews. Many newer itch users don't even know reviews can be posted.

$29 ad spend = avg of $65 in sales and one review, maybe two, posted lately.

I'm ramping ad spend up to $75/month so might be making $160+ back, of which $80 is donated, $80 sent back into ads the subsequent month. As the likelihood of purchases seems to increase heavily as ratings accumulate, the presence of 24-25 ratings on the site by mid summer, not 18, could cause major acceleration in response and purchasing decisions over time, in turn boosting every part of the cycle.

In other words it's taking off so solidly that I can envision it leading to THOUSANDS of dollars donated by spring 2027. Which is kind of my hope, my dream - I know the most efficient charities out there like the Against Malaria Foundation do, on average, save a human life for average cost of $200. So $1k donated means we saved five lives. Does not matter ultimately if I donate that or you. Indeed it's more effective if you do it directly and I advise you to choose some great groups browsing GiveWell.org, Charity Navigator, etc. Doante! But if you want to send a dollar my way know this:

Best to do it during a holiday bundle sale.
That way you get all my stuff and more in the coming months too.

-Your encouraging positive feedback on a listing is extremely impactful on the rate of future sales. Every enthusiastic review publicly made visible has a clear impact on the perceived value and quality and authenticity of the profile. Especially since some people post utter misleading garbage on itch. And I don't - I generally put far more into these packs than is ever seen on the listing pages for them. Leading to responses that the collections were way undervalued, way bigger than expected, etc. And the two best selling individual packs are both texture packs, but they are also [notably] the two listings I have with the most public reviews. Clearly those reviews are affecting later sales.

-You also are helping my shop's momentum and building progress on new releases. You're a part of the first really big success I've had after two decades of dead ends. And I appreciate that a ton. But also it helps build that to the point where it becomes a full time thing and some chunks of it that have been stalled move forward fast. Some game releases are by now almost done, nearly ready to go, but getting each title launched involves $200 minimum in fees so I can post on Steam, Epic, and Itch.io all at once. So the games have the best shot at being widely seen. Some flexible new shaders might help too with future simulated VFX elements but that's a smaller cost. And yes, I want to make all my old archived indie videos accessible to the world too but I need to set up agreements with a dozen plus still uncommitted cast members in them and the digital signatures, terms may take some cash too. I'd like this to all move forward as fast as possible. Especially since AI could be at the point of making a lot of it irrelevant and less competitive before long maybe.
If it doesn't work out in 2026 it may never work so I am asking for help simply for the reason of timing.