I'll be the magic you won't ever see

One day, there was a wedding in King Charles VI's court

The bride was marrying for the second time, after the death of her first husband

Whenever a widow remarried, it was custom to organize "charivari", basically a sort of mock parade meant to ridicule/make fun of someone who acted in defiance of social norms (like a widow who refused to stay single)

Musicians were invited to the royal mansion of Saint-Pol, and everyone - including very high ranking members of French nobility - started dancing at the sound of trumpets and flutes (pretty normal so far)

Hugonin de Guisay, a friend of the King, convinced the King and five other companions to bring life to the party by dressing themselves as "savages"

Costumes of linen are directly sewned to their clothes (why)

The costumes are covered in pitch, feathers and pieces of rope, to make them appear "hairy and hirsute from head to toe" (classic savage look)

Masks are placed on their faces, also covered in pitch feathers and rope.

Here's a recreation of what the costume could have looked like ! Sexy 😎

The King forbids anyone from using torches in the room where everybody dances. Good call, considering what they're wearing is like, probably the most inflammable piece of clothing imaginable

The duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI, and the duke of Berry arrive with four knights, bearing six torches, not knowing about the royal order

All of them are already quite drunk, as they spent the first part of the night in a tavern

Suddenly, the six "savages" burst into the room

They start howling like wolves and hurling obscenities at the crowd

The duke of Orléans, intrigued and drunk, goes to inspect the dancing savages with a torch in hand

His torch accidentally lights the linen costumes on fire

The dancers have a lot of trouble avoiding the fire, because evereybody except the King had the amazing idea to all tie themselves with a metal chain (I have zero explanation for the chain)

When everybody realizes the King is among the savages, the Queen understandably faints

Jeanne de Boulogne, duchess of Berry, then 14 years-old, immediately envelops the King in her dress and skirt

The King narrowly escapes death thanks to Jeanne

One of the burning lord, Ogier de Natouillet, manages to break out of the metal chain and throw himself in a water tank used to wash drinking cups (where he belongs)

Yvain de Foix attempts to reach the door, where two servants wait for him with a wet cloth, but burns to death before that

One chronicler, a monk of Sait-Denis, writes that "four men are burned to death, while their genitals fall to the ground, creating a great outpouring of blood" (???)

Only two dancers survive: the King and Ogier de Nantouillet

Hugonin de Guisay, who convinced the King and his companions to dress up, died from his injuries three days later, "cursing and insulting his comrades, both dead ones and living ones, until his last breath"

The consequences of this were absolutely devasting.

The public image of the King's Court was severely impacted. It was seen as a place of extravagant entertainment and moral decline.

The King and his brother had to do penance in front of the people of Paris

The King's mental health significantly worsened. Charles VI was already said to have had an episode a few years before, in which he murdered a few of his companions thinking them to be enemies. The Ball of Burning Men seems to have shocked him deeply.

The episode was used to decry the "Armagnac", a political faction lead by the duke of Orléans and his family.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

Look at me.

Look me directly in the eyes while I say this.

You can just make things.

You can simply create something and put it into the world.

That's allowed.

People have been doing it for centuries.

They sell blank VHS tapes. They sell blank DVDs. Blank CDs. You can buy flash drives by the bucketful if you really want to. If you create a movie, an album, a game, a documentary, or a four-hour video essay about the mating habits of fictional space goblins, you are entirely permitted to put that thing on physical media and sell it.

That is not piracy.

Piracy is taking something that belongs to someone else and reproducing or distributing it without permission.

If I buy a DVD of a movie, I own that copy of the movie. I do not own the movie itself. I didn't acquire the rights to duplicate it, press a thousand copies, and start selling them out of my garage like I've become the regional distributor for Warner Bros.

The copyright, distribution rights, and intellectual property still belong to whoever created it or whoever legally acquired those rights.

If I start burning copies of Iron Lung and selling them myself without Markiplier's permission, that's piracy.

If Markiplier, who made and owns the rights to Iron Lung, burns copies and sells them himself, that's just distribution.

He's the rights holder.

He's distributing his own work.

If you made it, if it came from your own mind, your own work, your own time, your own resources, then congratulations. You own the thing. You don't need a corporation to bless it with legitimacy.

The corporation is not what makes it real.

The fact that it exists is what makes it real.

I think we've accidentally spent so many years living inside a world dominated by mass-produced media that some people have developed the strange assumption that all media emerges from a factory somewhere. As if films naturally occur in shrink-wrapped plastic cases and descend from the heavens aboard a pallet truck.

But independent artists have been burning discs, dubbing tapes, printing books, pressing records, and mailing things directly to people for longer than many of us have been alive.

That's not a bootleg.

That's just a product.

It's not "bootleg."

It's just... leg.

The normal kind.

少年不識愁滋味 愛上層樓 愛上層樓 為赋新詞強說愁

而今識盡愁滋味 欲說還休 欲說還休 卻道天凉好個秋 - Xin Qiji 辛棄疾 (1140-1207)

In youth I knew nothing of the taste of sorrow I liked to climb high towers, I liked to climb high towers To conjure up a bit of sorrow to make new verse.

For the record, as far as I can tell every other rational archaeologist (including me) thinks this is pretty fucked up:

>onions

>my onions

lmao ja dat was dus ook mijn eerste gedachte

mid 2026 pacific rim rewatch: grace would be the third member of the k-sci division and he and newton would have the biggest interpersonal academic beef in the history of xenobiology. they want to strangle each other every day. newton calls him "teach" to piss him off. "heyhey he's the microbiologist, I'm the macrobiologist. you know. size matters?" before the breach newton was the scholar grace called a staggering waste of carbon at the UNESCO conference in denmark.