#lmaster37 posts

this was a thought primarily fuelled by the fact that since i was a young lad and learned about nuclear waste, i have intermittently gone through brief but intense phases of fascination with the concept of long-term nuclear waste storage—not the technical details, but the importance and the impossibility of ensuring that storage facilities remain undisturbed tens of thousands of years into the future, being particularly fond of the conceptual message proposed by the sandia report ("this place is not a place of honour") and the atomic priesthood proposed by thomas sebeok.

for obvious reasons, the ninth house and its holy duty of protecting an unknown, catastrophic danger which must be kept locked away (but not destroyed) for all eternity invite the comparison.

additionally, the theme of linguistic decay is quite prominent in the books, i would say: not only with the names of the blood of eden rebels (quotes passing into oral tradition without retaining their context) and the survival of meme phrases in house vocabulary, but also, for example, with the names of the house inhabitants which are, yk, sort of recognizable as current-day names but remixed and warped over the millennia.