Prompted by Certain Churnings of the Gyre to place The Stack in suspended animation for the foreseeable, Yr Esteemed Humble, &c found Himself without outlet and therefore without moor, limping across the strait like a rudderless galley. For were ever two bonhommes fitter to purpose than friend Habsul and friend Libhut when pouring affable conference into the porches of your ears? Or man more in Nature than when Goodman Habsul invoked the Muses?

I shall tell you, sirrahs, that fame hath its burdens as well as its privileges, for though the Orient was to Habsul but commorancy, to the Mandarin it is his domain. When their parish lords placed rings upon my hands and bracelets upon my wrists, Beijing grew jealous. When their young men began pledging fealty, they were gripped by martial fear. And when Habsul stopped at the temple to wash his feet, and trains of virgin girls offered up their locks like rags, (not a few who were refused later cast themselves into the boiling Yangtze), lo was their manhood held in discredit. Thus did they so militate against us with repeated imprisonment, and Latency, and other base and unmanly methods that we were left withal but unhappiness in the Cause and good Habsul decided to sell his possessions--including the means of The Stack--and decamp.

And so ends, for now, the Greatest Podcast in the History of Urbit.

Undone by the Peril but never finished! Yr Captain--being in eloquence a Sinon, for policy a very Ulysse, in aspect Adon, and possessing the humility of Philemon--stored up his treasures neither like Ali Pasha, among the Greeks, nor in Heaven, where according to the Good Book they be safe from moths and the Irish, but in himself--in blood and flesh--thereby making his wealth as portable as a cryptographic key. Is not a man a consistory of coffers? And is he not more rich than Darius who fills each spiritual niche with some excellence? Where the layettier fashions his traps of beech, noble men build in their breasts the haggard house, to have a harrier-heart that speeds like a dart to its object; where builds the one his chauff’rettes of glowing embers, the other hangs a mantle high in his inwit to guide him, following no lamp besides. In like fashion did Habsul take his passage and mew it in his bosom, and lifting himself from the beakhead fastened a light from his bowsprit. And now that ship, the ~habsul-rignyr, which seemed destined for wrack, was turned about and given a new heading: the Network State.

O Muses of the internet! descend

from your sculptured alabaster porches,

where a hundred million Mercuries attend.

Prometheus-like cast down your torches,

that they should fall to liven up the stage,

where tread we spirits of the network age.