#William Roper

[tudorblogger]

Guest Post - Aimee Fleming on Margaret More Roper

Today I welcome Aimee Fleming to the blog. Aimee’s first book, ‘The Female Tudor Scholar and Writer: The Life and Times of Margaret More Roper’ has just been published on 9th July 2024. I’m delighted that my second book, ‘Tudor Executions: From Nobility to the Block’ shares a publication date with Aimee’s first book! Aimee has very kindly written a post about something we possibly didn’t know…

[stastrodome]

Fun Facts. 100% verified.

The singing voice of Laurie Partridge on the Partridge Family was provided by Patti Smith.

In Vermont, a macchiato is just maple syrup and Cool Whip.

William the Conquerer attributed his victory at the Battle of Hastings to his profound dislike of the nickname "William the Succumber".

The most typical question at Harvard admissions interviews is "Tell me about the first time you had a waiter fired".

Virginia Woolf fell into a deep depression when a teenager in a jewelery store called her “Mrs. Dall-a-No-way”. 

(Mural of the Ropers at the Houston Methodist Hospital, 1975)

[underground-hip-hop-affiliated]

YL - LAST ONE STANDING (PROD. ROPER WILLIAMS)

[beatsforbrothels]

Fatboi Sharif & Roper Williams - Po Pimping Do Or Die (ft. Bruiser Wolf)

[djregular]

I walked to the local Farmers Market to get breakfast (see above). While walking, I listened to these joints. Happy Saturday.

[culturedarm]

Nyokabi Kariuki offers a paean to healing, Molly Joyce links hands with the Open Arms Dance Project in Boise, and Christine Correa takes up the clarion calls and defiant tones of Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Oscar Brown Jr. who at the turn of the sixties bore civil rights into the heart of the avant-garde. Plus Kassel Jaeger, James Bangura, Fatboi Sharif & Roper Williams, Sightless Pit, Crosslegged, Richard Dawson, and Cécile McLorin Salvant.

https://culturedarm.com/tracks-of-the-week-28-01-23/

[master-of-47-dudes]

So I showed the early stuff off a bit a few months back, but I've finally completed the first draft of Act 1 of my Lancer adventure path, Kindness of Strangers! The deets can be found on the pilot net discord, but:

LRBT-III, otherwise known as Blanche to the locals. This sun-baked dustbowl of a planet has the high honor of being one of the few habitable terrestrial bodies that anyone has discovered in the Long Rim- and probably the only one that's actually any use to anyone. Luckily- or not so luckily, if you ask some people- it was Union that found it first. Well, about 70 years ago when they stumbled across this star system they got it in their heads that the Long Rim's days were numbered. There’s untold millions living out there scattered along the emptiest shipping lane in the known galaxy who'd need a way out once no one needed to pass them by, and by Christ the Buddha Union was gonna be there for them waiting with open arms.

All of that is background, though. You? You’re a bunch of mercenaries who got their hands on a couple of GMSes, decided to make your manna selling violence for pay. Worlds like Blanche don't take to colonies very well, so even two generations in there's still plenty of frontier out there being settled and railroad tracks being laid. The people out there struggle day by day to survive, and people like you are there to protect them from those who got sick of the hard life. Not everyone out there has the guts to stand up for the little guy- that's why you're called Lancers.

A setting and a campaign all in one, Kindness Of Strangers and its (eventual) follow-up Dancing With the Devil are a series of Wild West-themed 2-mission adventures intended to take players from 0-12 as they find themselves embroiled in the midst of a corporate conspiracy to overthrow the Union-backed government of the isolated colony of Blanche and a ploy to seize control over a nearly completed Blinkstation. All the while, a strange religious movement worshipping an eons-dead alien civilization grows ever more influential in the background...

This campaign tackles themes of colonialism, nationalism, corruption, and conflict between indigenous peoples, settlers, and immigrants, all in a world where well-meaning intentions have gone sour and the ghosts of the past have come back to haunt it. It comes with:

- A setting guide for LRBT-III and its weird-as-hell star system!

- A 0-12 campaign split up into two books, Kindness of Strangers and Dancing With the Devil, that are made up of three 2-mission adventures each. And then a final mission to tie things up.

- 4 Alt-Frames: the IPS-N Nemo, the SSC Painted Lady, the Horus Roper, and the HA Grant (still working on these)

- New Reserves! (still working on these)

- New Exotic Gear (still working on these)

- New NPCs! (still working on these)

Things to look forward to:

- Rallying a town to fight off a horde of bandits!

- An epic duel at sunset!

- Accidentally walking into a partial metavault and escaping with the only scars being mental ones!

- A weird amount of references to the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, like a probably legally dubious amount!

- Exploding plants!

- Exploding wildlife!

- The **CHRISTHEBUDDHASAURUS**

- Helping striking miners fight off Pinkertons!

- Investigating the bombing of a water filtration plant!

- AND MORE

...so this is really my first time doing this kind of thing so I don't entirely know what all to put here BUT I've put together first drafts of both the Field Guide to LRBT and Kindness of Strangers Act 1: A Streetcar Named Desire. They're not in any state where I can charge for them- I'd call them "playtest and editing ready" rn- but I figure I can share them here so people can give notes. If people think it's cool I could possibly do a kickstarter or something to get the money needed for art and help with editing and lcps and such.

Field Guide to LRBT:

Kindness of Strangers Act 1: A Streetcar Named Desire:

[eldritchboop]

The Lost Book of Spells - Spellbooks and Rituals

The Internet Book of Shadows

History of Magic by Eliphas Levi (1860)

The Greek Magical Papyri (500bce)

Magic, White and Black - by Franz Hartman (1904)

Charms, Charmers and Charming - An International Study by Jonathan Roper (2008)

Art and Science of Personal Magnetism Book by William Walker Atkinson (1912)

The Book of Black Magic by Arthur E. Waite (1898)

Egyptian Book of the Dead by E. A. Wallis Budge (1913)

The Grimoire of Honorius by Honorius

The Ancient Book of Formulas (1940)

Egyptian Magic by E.A Wallis Budge (1890)

The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King by Crowley, Aleister (1904)

Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling by Charles Godfrey Leland

Secret Spells of the Romany Gypsies

Magick Potions

[ltwilliammowett]

Sailor Nicknames

Part 1 is here

Wart - Midshipman

Snotty nurse - Lieutenant

Mistress Roper - Marine

Bullock - Marine

Grabby - Marine

Turkey - Marine

Killick- a leading sailor

Buntings- signalman

Up and at em - Chatham

Pompey- Portsmouth

Guzz- Devonport

Jonathan- an American Sailor

Spithead Nightingale - Bosun

Jossman - Master at Arms

Crushers- Master at Arms mates

Butterboxes- Dutch Sailors

Charly Noble- galley funnel of a ship

Bloody Flag- old action flag

Duster- Red Ensign

Butcher- Admiral

Foul Weather Jack- Admiral Byron

Sea Wolf- Admiral Lord Cochrane

Sailor King- King William IV

Mr. Whip - Admiral Cornwallis

Black Dick- Admiral Lord Howe

Squid- Sailor name from the Marines

Scratcher- Clerk

Jack Shaloloo- braggart

Slops- ready made clothes

Sticks- Drummer

[saiganaru]

Roper Williams artwork

[kwebtv]

The Sign of Four - ITV - November 29, 1987

Mystery

Running Time: 103 minutes

Stars:

Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes

Edward Hardwicke as Dr. John H. Watson

Rosalie Williams as Mrs. Hudson

Robin Hunter as Major Sholto

Ronald Lacey as Thaddeus and Bartholomew Sholto

John Thaw as Jonathan Small

Kiran Shah as Tonga

Jenny Seagrove as Miss Mary Morstan

Terence Skelton as Captain Morstan

Emrys James as Inspector Athelney Jones

Dave Atkins as Mordecai Smith

William Ash as Jack Smith

Lila Kaye as Mrs. Smith

Courtney Roper-Knight as Wiggins

[satoshi-mochida]

Double Dragon Revive ‘TGS 2024 Gameplay Introduction’ trailer, screenshots - Gematsu

Publisher Arc System Works and developer Yuke’s have released a new trailer and screenshots for Double Dragon Revive, which will be playable at Tokyo Game Show 2024 from September 26 to 29 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan.

The screenshots introduce playable characters Billy Lee (voiced by Kazuyuki Okitsu) and Jimmy Lee (voiced by Takehito Koyasu), and enemy characters Roper (voiced by Jun Fukushima), Abobo (voiced by Yuki Onodera), Williams (voiced by Egashira Hiroya), Joji (voiced by Shota Yamamoto), Anh (voiced by Natsumi Fujiwara), and Minh (voiced by Rika Tachibana), as well as the combat mechanics “Basic Attack,” “Grab,” “Special Moves,” “Mid-Air Special Moves,” “Super Special Moves,” and “Critical Assault.”

Double Dragon Revive is due out for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam in 2025. Read more about the game here.

Watch the trailer below. View the screenshots at the gallery.

Tokyo Game Show 2024 Gameplay Introduction Trailer

English

Japanese

[underground-hip-hop-affiliated]

YL - YOKE (PROD. ROPER WILLIAMS)

[beatsforbrothels]

Fatboi Sharif & Roper Williams - Scrabble Board Pieces (ft. ELUCID)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: David Remnick

Date: Feb 6, 2023

Note: this is a very long article, so I won't post it in full, but I wanted to share some excerpts.

[..]

In Tehran, Ayatollah Khomeini was ailing and in crisis. After eight years of war with Iraq and hundreds of thousands of casualties, he had been forced to drink from the “poisoned chalice,” as he put it, and accept a ceasefire with Saddam Hussein. The popularity of the revolutionary regime had declined. Khomeini’s son admitted that his father never read “The Satanic Verses,” but the mullahs around him saw an opportunity to reassert the Ayatollah’s authority at home and to expand it abroad, even beyond the reach of his Shia followers. Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s execution. As Kenan Malik writes in “From Fatwa to Jihad,” the edict “was a sign of weakness rather than of strength,” a matter more of politics than of theology.

A reporter from the BBC called Rushdie at home and said, “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?”

Rushdie thought, I’m a dead man. That’s it. One day. Two days. For the rest of his life, he would no longer be merely a storyteller; he would be a story, a controversy, an affair.

After speaking with a few more reporters, Rushdie went to a memorial service for his close friend Bruce Chatwin. Many of his friends were there. Some expressed concern, others tried consolation via wisecrack. “Next week we’ll be back here for you!” Paul Theroux said. In those early days, Theroux recalled in a letter to Rushdie, he thought the fatwa was “a very bad joke, a bit like Papa Doc Duvalier putting a voodoo curse on Graham Greene for writing ‘The Comedians.’ ” After the service, Martin Amis picked up a newspaper that carried the headline “execute rushdie orders the ayatollah.” Rushdie, Amis thought, had now “vanished into the front page.”

For the next decade, Rushdie lived underground, guarded by officers of the Special Branch, a unit of London’s Metropolitan Police. The headlines and the threats were unceasing. People behaved well. People behaved disgracefully. There were friends of great constancy—Buford, Amis, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Nigella Lawson, Christopher Hitchens, many more—and yet some regarded the fatwa as a problem Rushdie had brought on himself. Prince Charles made his antipathy clear at a dinner party that Amis attended: What should you expect if you insult people’s deepest convictions? John le Carré instructed Rushdie to withdraw his book “until a calmer time has come.” Roald Dahl branded him a “dangerous opportunist” who “knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise.” The singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, who had a hit with “Peace Train” and converted to Islam, said, “The Quran makes it clear—if someone defames the Prophet, then he must die.” Germaine Greer, George Steiner, and Auberon Waugh all expressed their disapproval. So did Jimmy Carter, the British Foreign Secretary, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Among his detractors, an image hardened of a Rushdie who was dismissive of Muslim sensitivities and, above all, ungrateful for the expensive protection the government was providing him. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper remarked, “I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer.”

The horror was that, thanks to Khomeini’s cruel edict, so many people did suffer. In separate incidents, Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, and Ettore Capriolo, its Italian translator, were stabbed, Igarashi fatally; the book’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was fortunate to survive being shot multiple times. Bookshops from London to Berkeley were firebombed. Meanwhile, the Swedish Academy, the organization in Stockholm that awards the annual Nobel Prize in Literature, declined to issue a statement in support of Rushdie. This was a silence that went unbroken for decades.

[..]

Since 1989, Rushdie has had to shut out not only the threats to his person but the constant dissections of his character, in the press and beyond. “There was a moment when there was a ‘me’ floating around that had been invented to show what a bad person I was,” he said. “ ‘Evil.’ ‘Arrogant.’ ‘Terrible writer.’ ‘Nobody would’ve read him if there hadn’t been an attack against his book.’ Et cetera. I’ve had to fight back against that false self. My mother used to say that her way of dealing with unhappiness was to forget it. She said, ‘Some people have a memory. I have a forget-ory.’ ”

Rushdie went on, “I just thought, There are various ways in which this event can destroy me as an artist.” He could refrain from writing altogether. He could write “revenge books” that would make him a creature of circumstances. Or he could write “scared books,” novels that “shy away from things, because you worry about how people will react to them.” But he didn’t want the fatwa to become a determining event in his literary trajectory: “If somebody arrives from another planet who has never heard of anything that happened to me, and just has the books on the shelf and reads them chronologically, I don’t think that alien would think, Something terrible happened to this writer in 1989. The books go on their own journey. And that was really an act of will.”

Some people in Rushdie’s circle and beyond are convinced that, in the intervening decades, self-censorship, a fear of giving offense, has too often become the order of the day. His friend Hanif Kureishi has said, “Nobody would have the balls today to write ‘The Satanic Verses,’ let alone publish it.”

[..]

Rushdie was hospitalized for six weeks. In the months since his release, he has mostly stayed home save for trips to doctors, sometimes two or three a day. He’d lived without security for more than two decades. Now he’s had to rethink that.

Just before Christmas, on a cold and rainy morning, I arrived at the midtown office of Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s literary agent, where we’d arranged to meet. After a while, I heard the door to the agency open. Rushdie, in an accent that bears traces of all his cities—Bombay, London, New York—was greeting agents and assistants, people he had not seen in many months. The sight of him making his way down the hall was startling: He has lost more than forty pounds since the stabbing. The right lens of his eyeglasses is blacked over. The attack left him blind in that eye, and he now usually reads with an iPad so that he can adjust the light and the size of the type. There is scar tissue on the right side of his face. He speaks as fluently as ever, but his lower lip droops on one side. The ulnar nerve in his left hand was badly damaged.

Rushdie took off his coat and settled into a chair across from his agent’s desk. I asked how his spirits were.

“Well, you know, I’ve been better,” he said dryly. “But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad. As you can see, the big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well.”

“Can you type?”

“Not very well, because of the lack of feeling in the fingertips of these fingers.”

What about writing?

“I just write more slowly. But I’m getting there.”

Sleeping has not always been easy. “There have been nightmares—not exactly the incident, but just frightening. Those seem to be diminishing. I’m fine. I’m able to get up and walk around. When I say I’m fine, I mean, there’s bits of my body that need constant checkups. It was a colossal attack.”

More than once, Rushdie looked around the office and smiled. “It’s great to be back,” he said. “It’s someplace which is not a hospital, which is mostly where I’ve been to. And to be in this agency is—I’ve been coming here for decades, and it’s a very familiar space to me. And to be able to come here to talk about literature, talk about books, to talk about this novel, ‘Victory City,’ to be able to talk about the thing that most matters to me . . .”

At this meeting and in subsequent conversations, I sensed conflicting instincts in Rushdie when he replied to questions about his health: there was the instinct to move on—to talk about literary matters, his book, anything but the decades-long fatwa and now the attack—and the instinct to be absolutely frank. “There is such a thing as P.T.S.D., you know,” he said after a while. “I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really.”

He added, “I’ve simply never allowed myself to use the phrase ‘writer’s block.’ Everybody has a moment when there’s nothing in your head. And you think, Oh, well, there’s never going to be anything. One of the things about being seventy-five and having written twenty-one books is that you know that, if you keep at it, something will come.”

Had that happened in the past months?

Rushdie frowned. “Not really. I mean, I’ve tried, but not really.” He was only lately “just beginning to feel the return of the juices.”

How to go on living after thinking you had emerged from years of threat, denunciation, and mortal danger? And now how to recover from an attack that came within millimetres of killing you, and try to live, somehow, as if it could never recur?

He seemed grateful for a therapist he had seen since before the attack, a therapist “who has a lot of work to do. He knows me and he’s very helpful, and I just talk things through.”

The talk was plainly in the service of a long-standing resolution. “I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me. . . . Which I do sometimes think.” He laughed. “It hurts. But what I don’t think is: That’s what I want people reading the book to think. I want them to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.”

Many years ago, he recalled, there were people who seemed to grow tired of his persistent existence. “People didn’t like it. Because I should have died. Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.”

As he lay in the hospital, Rushdie received countless texts and e-mails sending love, wishing for his recovery. “I was in utter shock,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist, told me. “I just didn’t believe he was still in any real danger. For two days, I kept vigil, sending texts to friends all over the world, searching the Internet to make sure he was still alive.” There was a reading in his honor on the steps of the New York Public Library.

For some writers, the shock brought certain issues into hard focus. “The attack on Salman clarified a lot of things for me,” Ayad Akhtar told me. “I know I have a much brighter line that I draw for myself between the potential harms of speech and the freedom of the imagination. They are incommensurate and shouldn’t be placed in the same paragraph.”

Rushdie was stirred by the tributes that his near-death inspired. “It’s very nice that everybody was so moved by this, you know?” he said. “I had never thought about how people would react if I was assassinated, or almost assassinated.”

And yet, he said, “I’m lucky. What I really want to say is that my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude.” He was grateful to those who showed their support. He was grateful to the doctors, the E.M.T. workers, and the fireman in Chautauqua who stanched his wounds, and he was grateful to the surgeons in Erie. “At some point, I’d like to go back up there and say thank you.” He was also grateful to his two grown sons, Zafar and Milan, who live in London, and to Griffiths. “She kind of took over at a point when I was helpless.” She dealt with the doctors, the police, and the investigators, and with transport from Pennsylvania to New York. “She just took over everything, as well as having the emotional burden of my almost being killed.”

Did he think it had been a mistake to let his guard down since moving to New York? “Well, I’m asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer to it,” he said. “I did have more than twenty years of life. So, is that a mistake? Also, I wrote a lot of books. ‘The Satanic Verses’ was my fifth published book—my fourth published novel—and this is my twenty-first. So, three-quarters of my life as a writer has happened since the fatwa. In a way, you can’t regret your life.”

Whom does he blame for the attack?

“I blame him,” he said.

[..]

[ Archive: https://archive.is/uiRsY ]

==

I'll state it plainly: Rushdie was betrayed by people who not only should have known better, but did know better.

They took a faux-moralizing position in order to keep themselves out of the firing line. When the bully goes on the rampage, you side with the bully to save your own skin. One of the earliest modern day incarnations of cancel culture, joining the outrage mob so as not to be their target.

That's understandable in a way, but there's a profound cowardice in the people who took such a self-interested defensive posture in the 1980s, who scolded Rushdie and anyone who defended him, and yet still today have not admitted their contributions and collaboration with what happened. I've yet to see any of them admit "I/we got it very wrong."

[therappundit]

Another groundbreaking 9/29.

Rome Streetz, Daniel Son & Wino Willy, Lil Wayne, Defcee & Messiah Musik, Mickey Diamond & Camoflauge Monk, Maxo, Scy Jimm, Roper Williams, Hemlock Ernst, Yo Gotti's label compilation, Cash Kidd, Jay Fizzle, Doley Bernays, Wrld Tour Mafia, of course Armand Hammer (the album is INCREDIBLY good), tons of singles, and more...imagine questioning the future of rap music? Have a great weekend, all. 🙏