sovay | Sovay's Friends

We were at a golf club the other day- one with Royal in its title (not the sort of joint we normally frequent) And halfway up the stairs was a copy of this portrait (though not with gettyimages printed accross it

It's Charles Mountbatten-Windsor in all his glory, but relaxed and at ease with his authority. Look how many medals he's won, and yet how approachable he is. This is exactly how the Mountbatten-Windsor dynasty wants us to see them.

Here's a more informal picture, but one that still conveys the desired message.

GettyImages-477232104-fc938d153df14025844aecaa810b4360.jpeg

GettyImages-477232104-fc938d153df14025844aecaa810b4360.jpeg

Oh, but who's that chap in the identical get-up with whom the monarch is on such good terms?

Could it be this fella?

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Power curates its image very carefully and pictures like the above

Or like this....

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Undo all the good work.....

steepholm

As a young man, Weeden II had been quite outspoken in his dislike for empire and his opposition to slavery, as evidenced in his Zimao, the African (1800) and his poetry collection, Bagatelles (1795), most notably in poems such as "The Slave", "The Indian Warrior, bound to the stake", "The Indian in Despair", etc. Even then, there are definite limits to his radicalism: Zimao the handsome maroon is paired with Wilmot, the "good" plantation owner, for example; the Indians are sympathetically depicted, but the manner of treatment owes a good deal to what we might call the noble savage aesthetic, and presents them as tragic, doomed figures, speaking using jarringly eighteenth-century poetic diction. (But then, no more jarring than when Tacitus makes the British leader Calgacus give an oration that would have been at home on the floor of the Senate - and what other diction did Weeden have access to?) Anyway, this is an aspect of Weeden I've always been fond of, and one thing I'd been wondering is whether his politics changed as he moved out of his twenties, as is so often the case.

Reading his letters from middle-age gives little clue as to that: they are mostly concerned with family and professional matters. But yesterday, I found this fascinating passage in a letter to his son Weeden III, written in his early fifties (on 13th July, 1824) about an event that I feel ashamed to say that I knew nothing about. I've included for interest the immediately preceding sentences about the recent deaths of Thomas Rennell (yes, I had to look him up too) and Byron (whom he evidently had little time for, perhaps because he'd been so mean to his little brother):

The deaths of Rennell & Byron form a contrast awful, improving, important. Yet, how few comparatively lament the one; how pompous & gorgeous are the outward demonstrations of grief for the other! But God seeth not as man seeth.

The death of the Queen of the Sandwich Islands bears a pathos which a poet might feel strongly. A child of nature sacrificed in a few weeks at the shrine of civilization & modern refinement! Change of habits of living, routs of plays & operas, in confined & scented rooms, with a smokey atmosphere, & and at midnight, lead us with ease to divine the powerful disease by which the denizen of pure regions fell. There is in truth the semblance of a mystery visible throughout the treatment of these honest Islanders, that awakens the warmest compassion for the fate of the departed & the liveliest sympathy for the embarrassments & difficulties of the living. “Rex et amicus appellabatur” is the political phrase explanatory of the system now pursued towards these people, to make them subjects to our power & interests & to withdraw them from the paws of the Russian bear.

"There speaks the author of the Bagatelles!" I cried as I read this. Still drenched in the language of noble savagery, admittedly, but still anti-imperialist in his instincts, or at least that's my reading. Never change, great-great-great Grandpapa.

If, like me, you need some of this historical context filling in, there's an account here (including pictures), but briefly, King Kamehameha II (aka Liholiho) and Queen Kamāmalu were visiting from the Sandwich Islands (i.e. Hawaii) when the Queen caught measles, quite possibly in Chelsea, and died a month later, on 5th July. The grief-stricken King also succumbed, dying on the 14th, the day after this letter was written.

Ironically, the captain of the ship that returned their remains to Hawaii was called George Byron - a cousin of the poet.

tamaranth

2026/028: The Kite Runner — Khalid Hosseini

"There is only one sin, and that is theft... When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”

This novel, by an expatriate Afghani author, explores guilt, betrayal and redemption in Afghanistan. The narrator is Amir, son of a wealthy Pashtan father ('Baba'), whose mother died giving birth to him. His closest friend is Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant Ali: his mother ran away when he was little. The Hazara (the ethnic group to which Hassan and Ali belong) are oppressed, discriminated against and mocked. Baba, to young Amir's horror, treats Hassan as well as he treats Amir himself. The boys enjoy the traditional Afghan sport of kite-fighting, and Hassan is Amir's 'kite runner', pursuing the conquered kites with preternatural accuracy.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: sad

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: creative

lauradi7dw

I have been following https://adverts250project.org/ for years (mostly on twitter, sometimes at the website). The object is to go through newspapers 250 years ago to find classified ads relevant to slavery - usually either runaways or for sale ads. The idea of selling people has always been appalling, but it's interesting to see what was in the list of qualifications. In this case, I like seeing that he had had measles and smallpox because it means that the fact that he was immune to these diseases was a selling point. A fair number of them mention having had smallpox, but I hadn't remembered measles in previous ones. I'm really worried about measles now. I'm not so worried about smallpox, but I do think that if there are any live samples still in labs that someone should just pour bleach on them.

labingi

Dreamwidth, I have been cheating on you with Substack. I love you much more, Dreamwidth. My relationship with Substack is purely a matter of convenience. However, the following post is also on my Substack, which may explain its reading as a bit more formal than I usually hold forth here.

Content warning: This is a dark book with lots of abuse, and I discuss some of it.

The discourse over Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights movie has prompted a resurgence of conversation about Emily Brontë’s novel and reminded me just how controversial the book remains almost 180 years after its publication. Wuthering Heights recounts the obsessive attachment of Catherine and Heathcliff, two young people growing up on Yorkshire moors at the end of the 18th century, and the harm done to them and by them. Many love it; many hate it. I am in the “love” camp, and I want to explain why Wuthering Heights is an important book, both to me and in our world to this day.

Spoilers for the novel follow.( Read more... )

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: amused

cyphomandra

I finished Burning Shores! I loved the LA archipelago and the new machines and I like Seyka a lot. I didn’t find Londra, the antagonist in this, as effective or as intriguing as Tilda, and gosh I really miss Sylens (

isis - thanks for the pointer to the in-game shrine to him! It’s lovely). I may at some point go back and do a hard mode play through of HFW, because I do like the gameplay, but I think I’ll give it a break for now.

I went looking for new puzzle games and ended up playing through Is This Seat Taken?, a cheerful indie game in which you have to put anthropomorphic shapes in the exact places that satisfy their increasingly finicky requests (no noise, in direct sunlight, standing on the left but not adjacent to anyone who hasn’t showered, able to steal popcorn from a neighbour etc) in a series of city-based challenges. I like the aesthetic and I like the gameplay. The (thin) storyline, in which Nate the rhombus wants to be a movie star, could have been better, and I would have also liked more female major characters, but it was fun.

Then I started The Room 3 - the latest in a horror puzzle game series with intricate mechanics and foreboding settings, and I’ve previously played the first two. But those were on my iPad and although I’m enjoying it, my phone screen really is too small, so I am now dithering between pressing on regardless or replaying a good 2/3rds of the game on an iPad. Hmm. So instead I started TR-49, where you are searching through a WWII-era machine containing pieces of various writings, in search of an ultimate secret for as yet unspecified reasons; it’s intriguing and I need more time with it.

However. On the PS5 I have returned to FFVII Rebirth, and finally completed chapter 12 on hard mode after being stuck there for months. Fighting Corneo’s assorted brawlers was fine, and Rude & Elena weren’t too bad once I got used to their attacks, but then you go straight into a solo Cloud battle with Rufus, who is ridiculously fast, and also I was only at half health from all the preceding battles and could not face going back and doing them all over. Lots of dodging, lots of very precise timing required to hit back at all, and lots of staring contemplatively at the Game Over screen, but eventually I did it. I went on to chapter 13 but very rapidly this hits a no turn back point, so before that I have been attempting to complete all of FFVII Rebirth’s many, many mini games, in order to get the Johnnie’s Treasure Trove achievement. This requires 88 (!) mini-achievements. I have now won all the chocobo races at the Gold Saucer, done all the Fort Condor and Gears & Gambits hard mode tower defence games, shot targets in Costa Del Sol, sent Yuffie & Aerith out to clean up cactuars in Corel, etc, etc, etc, and currently I have managed to claw my way to 74.

It is definitely a journey. I prefer the mini games where they’re thematic (sure, the Glide de Chocobo rank III award was a navigational nightmare that nearly gave me tendonitis but you’re riding a chocobo!) or the gameplay ties back to the main game - getting Aerith through Cactuar Crush hard mode required me to upskill dramatically in using her Tempest attack, something I’d previously overlooked. In contrast, I dislike tower defence even when the polygons are cute and shooting targets is not my thing at all, but I am a) stubborn and b) capable of watching a YouTube video and managing to follow at least some of it after multiple attempts.

I have got one more mini game to get through that’s not at the Gold Saucer - it’s the hard mode frog challenge in Junon, in which your party is transformed into frogs (a common occurrence in FF games) and you have to stay on a series of moving platforms for as long as possible - and then I will be back at the Saucer, which has more Queen's Blood challenges, another terrible shooting game I suck at, and the sole remaining side quest, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, which requires me to beat the Shinra Middle Manager and all my own previous high scores on six minigames. Yay. And even if I get through all of those, plus Chadley’s Legendary Challenges, I still have to manage to play piano on the PS5 controller well enough to get an A grade on Two Legs D:

(FFVII Remake is now out on the Switch 2, and Rebirth will be out June. Released with these are patch updates that enable God Mode, which would make it much easier to get any of the fighting trophies - I’m not sure if they will affect the mini games. I don’t have a problem with this mode being available but I would like, if possible, to get the platinum before that).

aurumcalendula

...I somehow missed that Escapade was this last weekend, despite sending vids to it (and apparently I overlooked the email about the Discord invite too)

aurumcalendula

Title: Where Love Goes
Fandom: ClaireBell
Music: Where Love Goes by Kai Mata
Summary: 'this could be the start of something special'
Notes: Premiered at Escapade 36!

( streaming )

AO3 | bsky | tumblr | YouTube

( Additional Notes )

siderea

2026 Jan 20: ApasheOfficial on YT [music video]: Kyiv by Apashe & Alina Pash

Watch on YouTube

konstantya

Title: Not Like I Faint Every Time We Touch
Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Romance (unrequited), crack treated seriously
Characters/pairings: Linda Larson, Reginald Barclay (one-sided Larson/Barclay)
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1,184
Summary: In which Lieutenant Linda Larson develops an embarrassing crush. Takes place during “The Nth Degree.” Inspired by these two Tumblr posts.

If you’d like to leave a comment, please do so on AO3!

( It was his overstepping of authority that really made her stop and look at him—the sheer audacity of it. And the words ''Reg Barclay'' and ''audacity'' went together about as well as Captain Picard and children did. )

larryhammer

(I’ve no idea how much sense this will make if you don’t know the book in question.)

I’ve read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home many times—annually from when I was 16 till my mid-20s, and at least six times (probably more) since then. This time I made an experiment and read it out of order: I skipped Stone Telling’s first two sections until I reached her final section, then with greater social context read it all together, in a single day, before continuing on to the end.

I expected this to not work, but I was curious just how badly it wouldn’t work. The answer is, nowhere nearly as badly as reading chapters of The Dispossessed in internal chronological order, which utterly fails—that story is built around experiencing events in the order given. There is some loss of experience, as between her first and last sections there are pieces expecting you to have read her story beforehand (including a poem by Stone Telling), but it’s not as catastrophic as with The Dispossessed.

And now I know.

One thing that struck me this time: Pandora’s informant about Kesh medical practice is Alder of Chumo and Sinshan—the name Stone Telling’s husband had when she was still Woman Coming Home, who presumably found his third name, Stone Listening, at the same time she did. We don’t know exactly how long Pandora spent on her field studies, but that she has just the one informant suggests it wasn’t years upon years. And yet, the Archivist of the Madrone, when Pandora had only experienced enough of the Kesh to find their concepts of time confusing, knew of Stone Telling’s written narrative. Not a gotcha, but a hmmm.

I want to know more about Giver Ire’s daughter and Ire herself. They reappear more than anyone. Along with Thorn of Sinshan, they may be enough to constitute a reasonable Yuletide request.

(I still wonder how homosexual marriages, which are mentioned in passing only twice, work in practice in a tightly matrilocal culture.) (Pro tip to readers: the soundtrack of music and songs of the Kesh, which was included with the original publication on a cassette tape, is still available on Bandcamp.)

---L.

Subject quote from Freedom! ’90, George Michael.

osprey_archer

A busy weekend! I went to two shows, The Revolutionists and Galinthias.

The Revolutionists is a four-woman show set during the French Revolution. Playwright Olympe de Gouges is trying to write a play when her friend the Haitian rebel Marianne Angelie shows up asking for Olympe to write some pamphlets. Soon after, Charlotte Corday bursts in, asking Olympe to write some bitchin’ last words for her to speak on the scaffold after assassinating Marat. Last but not least, Marie Antoinette steals the show, a hilariously vapid and vain and yet pathos-filled figure.

Overall a lot of fun, although I must say I rolled my eyes whenever we veered into “this is a story about the Power of Stories (™)” territory. As a writer this theme surely ought to speak to me, and yet so often I feel that it’s asserted rather than demonstrated: the characters rattle on about the power of stories but the story if anything shows the opposite, given that three of the four heroines end up guillotined.

You might think the level of guillotining might make the play quite dark, but overall it’s funny and surprisingly upbeat. (For instance, when Olympe de Gouges dies, we get her last words and then a few different interpretations of her last words, starting with the urgent cry of “Please do my plays!”, which raised a laugh, because it arises so well out of her characterization up to that point.) Maybe a bit too upbeat? I’m not sure that “People are still telling your story centuries after you were guillotined, and isn’t that what matters?” actually is what matters. I for one would prefer not to be guillotined.

Galinthias is a recent play about a minor figure from Greek mythology: the midwife who delivered Hercules after Hera cursed his mother Alcmene with perpetual labor. In punishment for breaking the curse, Galinthias was in turn cursed to become a weasel.

However, in this retelling, Hecate has taken Galinthias under her protection, and one day a month, Galinthias gets to be human again. She uses her time as a human to act as a midwife and abortion provider, until young Xandra shows up all “I was raped by Poseidon! Can you get rid of the pregnancy?”

Galinthias is understandably reluctant to put herself in a position to be cursed by the gods yet again, but of course she ends up agreeing. They recruit Alcmene (not only Galinthias’s former queen, but also possibly her former girlfriend) and the three of them go on a quest that takes them across the Greek world. They visit Pythia, who sends them to Colchis where they meet terrifying but helpful Valley Girl Medea (“Daddy keeps killing people! It’s so boring!”), who sends them to the garden of the Hesperides where they have a slo-mo fight with a nymph who nearly strangles Galinthias with her own braid… Oh, and also Hecate has sent the Furies after them, because she’s so annoyed that her pet weasel ran away (still in human form) rather than come back as she is supposed to do.

Also lots of fun! Very funny, which is not necessarily what I expected when reading the synopsis which prominently content-warned the Themes of Sexual Violence. A solid adaptation. Perhaps reaching a bit too hard for contemporary relevance at times, but nonetheless deeply interested in Greek mythology and knowledgeable enough to explore it from new angles.

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a novella with a whole range of aliens with different language features, wildly different environments, etc. Several of my friends just stopped reading this review to go pre-order or request that their library do so. You are correct, if that is the sort of thing you like, this sure is that thing.

What it does less successfully, I think, is the twist ending. I feel like this is a book that is for people who like science fiction about aliens, but for me, as soon as I knew the premise, I knew the ending, and I was correct. So if you're reading for the aliens, come on in; if you're reading for a clever twist you did not see coming, this is not that novella, that is not where Huang spent time and energy.

conuly

And I'm getting paid for every last one of them, including the 6 hours when the house slept and so did I. Normally, we're not actually supposed to sleep on an overnight shift - but almost everybody really does, so it's more like "don't get caught" - but c'mon.

For everybody at home, leaving without a replacement is not simply a fireable offense but an actual, factual crime. Also, I'm not sure how I would've gotten to the bus. I mean, it's right outside the door, and buses were running all night, but man, it was brutal out there. We needed a little shoveling, and neither I nor manager wanted to shovel, so we had to wait for the neighbors to get their sidewalks and then sorta patch us into theirs. (The transportation issue is also why I'm not blaming any coworkers who didn't come in. It was impossible. I genuinely don't think that this was a fixable issue, Staten Island got a lot of snow.)

In retrospect, what probably ought to have been done would have had to have been done in advance:

1. Manager should've taken as much discretionary money as possible, agreed to let staff order Chinese or whatever for two, three meals - something that reheats nicely - and offered to pay all our carfare home in advance, and then used that to straight up bribe at least one extra staff member to stay over the storm. With three of us, we could've had one on each floor and also could've more easily arranged sleeping shifts so somebody was awake at all times.

2. She also should've called up the families of those residents who frequently go home for an overnight and asked if they'd take their relatives from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning. That's suboptimal for a lot of reasons - there's a reason they all live in a residence instead of with their families! - but it would've lightened the burden on us significantly if we'd had even just our two or three easiest residents away visiting their sisters and brothers.

But we all survived! My replacement actually showed up at midnight last night! But she declined to wake me on the grounds that I wasn't going home at midnight, and she was quite right. And then another staff member showed up this morning, and 90 or 100 minutes later my bus finally showed up. (And yes, I do insist on getting paid for that last hour and a half as well. I wasn't just sitting around, I was doing laundry, and supervising on the basement so that everybody else could handle the upper floors, and walking the guys out to their van so nobody slipped on ice.)

I'm home now, I showered, and I have the rest of the week off, off, off. Yay me!

If this happens again, I'm bringing a change of clothing.

tamaranth

2026/027: Nonesuch — Francis Spufford

...here they still were, since they were not the dead ones, under the weary yellow lighting, sharing the unspoken knowledge that, every night the bombers came, ten thousand possible exits from life opened silently, and unpredictably, and without appeal, down which anyone and anything could fall. [loc. 4817]

My initial review: rereading for this 'proper review' was sheer delight, and I am eager to read the second half of this duology.

The story begins in August 1939. Iris Hawkins lives in a Clapham boarding house, works at a City brokerage, and is fascinated by economics. One evening, she flees a disastrous date and ends up at a bohemian dance club, where she encounters the other two protagonists: Geoff Hale, a gawky engineer who works for the BBC, and Lall Cunningham, the icy recipient of Geoff's unrequited love. Iris intends her seduction of Geoff to be a one night stand, but things become more complicated ( Read more... )

Current Mood: jubilant

poliphilo

Our daffodils are coming into their strength. I planted a load in '24 and a load more in '25. They're my favourite flower- at least in part because they start appearing in the wintriest time of the year. I see the first daffodil and think, "And now it's Spring!"

We've had no snow in Eastbourne- we rarely do, but we have had lots of rain. We were driving up Seaside on Sunday and there was water mushrooming out from an overtaxed drain and flooding the road.....

We've floated the idea that Wendy should take over our garden and grow vegetables. It would be a win-win arrangement. We need someone to take the garden in hand and she needs somewhere to grow things. I'm not a gardener. I plant shrubs and bulbs and then more or less let them get on with it. Also I cut the grass- but I'd be happy for there to be less grass to be bothered with. So long as she leaves the daffodils in place she can have a free hand.

There seem to be fewer pigeons about. Maybe they're off sourcing nesting sites. There are however rather more gulls because Roselands with all its chimney stacks is a nesting site. I love pigeons, I love gulls, I only wish we attracted more of the smaller birds than we do.....

aurumcalendula

Amazon seems to have fixed the typos in the summary and sample of Jeannie Lin's Love, Death & Lanterns! Unfortunately they seem to have either have not done so in the ebook itself, or my copy is glitched (redownloading, clearing caches, and even deleting and rebuying it still gives me a copy with one of the main characters' names misspelled).

I have a version of it sans-typos from when it was one of the HEA Collective novellas, but this is annoying me.