J. R. Mascaro is an ink-soaked hallucination that has manifested to dispense portents and half-whispered facts about various and sundry subjects of great interest and dubious usefulness. He is a sorcerer, an author, a rogue waveform drifting through the cosmos whose signal can sometimes be received around teatime via a Marconi machine. He appears at events on occasion, and he also appears in the background of several French daguerreotypes from the mid-1840s, but only if the viewer is squinting and exceedingly intoxicated.