Hello, neighbors. A brief one this week: the wind is in my sails, and I want to run with it as far as it will go.

As a first order of business: if you view these emails through the web portal (or as HTML rendered by your email client), much of last week’s text may have appeared invisible, thanks to copy/past shenanigans. I’ve fixed it in the archives, which you can read here.

Paging through Dead Hand Rule, I stumbled onto one of my personal favorites of the large number of stupid humanities major in-jokes folded into the series wherever an over-read character might make an over-read reference. On page 216: “Tara recalled a bit from Hare’s Reflections, his glimpse at a ball of an Iskari princess who’d be killed, later, in the Rationalist uprising: What a revolution!”

This is a reference to a haunting passage in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke remembers seeing Marie Antoinette dancing at a ball in the years before the guillotine.

I can’t just have Burke nakedly in the Craft Sequence though—or naked in the Craft Sequence, get your mind out of the gutter—so he goes through the funhouse mirror just like everyone else. Burke becomes Hare, thanks to the Burke and Hare murders, of particular relevance to students of necromancy / medical history / anatomy / mortuary science.

This is one of those easter eggs that I expect might have been lost to time like tears in rain. I definitely lose a few recondition points coming out and explaining it, but then, disclosing the existence of recondition points is itself grounds for excommunication from the deniable gatherings of the recondite. Guitar virtuoso John Doyle has a funny creepy song about Burke & Hare, though, which you can hear from the dubious privacy of your own screen thanks to the magic of good internet.

There is a trailer for the Dune: Messiah movie! These beautiful idiots actually made a Dune: Messiah movie! Permit me to queue up for you the needle drop that really ought to have kicked in sometime in the back half of the trailer, if the studio execs weren’t cowards.

On the Butlerian Jihad beat: A couple days back I watched, with awe and disgust, a video about how potential IPOs of SpaceX / XAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic might cause a massive stock market shakeup because there’s just not enough retail investor money (that’s you and me) floating around to support these work-stealing slop-churners’ “I’m gonna destroy the world!” level valuations, which same valuations are, however, already priced into the market via already-public proxy companies because hyyyyype; even algorithmic institutional money (like ETFs) would have to sell off other companies to the tune of tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars to re-balance their portfolios in the event of an IPO. That’s setting aside other potential headwinds in the next year, of which, you know, there are a few. “Your money isn’t in the Building & Loan! It’s in Sam Altman’s house! And Jensen Huang’s house! And Dario Amodei’s house!”

Anyway, I closed that tab, mind reeling from the profusion of powers of ten, and found beneath it a Bandcamp tab sent by a friend, advertising an instrumental album by a middle-eastern inflected Parisian funk band I’d never heard of before, for a $10 digital download. From those striving to build the tower whose top is in the heavens, to some folks who just want to help you groove.

Friends and neighbors, the album is Nadir by Sababa 5. It’s a jam, kind of in the vein of The Budos Band if you know those guys. Give it a shot.

Music is great. Stay human out there. Far too many people aren’t.