the popular imagination's comically extreme evolution on the subject of prince w

I've been seeing the backlash over the British royals' visit to Jamaica (I've been seeing Twitter and Tumblr threads, but here's a Guardian article) and this reminds me of some other stuff I saw on Twitter recently: there was some kind of controversy (?) in Britain about something Prince William and some friend said/did recently and then there was some kind of explainer thread referring to 'rumors' and 'secret royal sources' etc to summarize that this other wealthy couple were Kate and William's best friends and neighbors at their rural primary residence but it apparently turned out that William was having an affair with the woman and Kate was demanding complete separation from the couple (understandably) and it was all extremely sordid and soap opera. This current story, which I think could be summarized in progressive Twitter opinion as "Why Did They Think This Was a Good Look?!", isn't even the first recent example of revelations of complete Yikes about Prince William, though, even aside from the whole racism!! thing connected to the schism with Harry and Meghan.

But anyway, my point is that from where I'm sitting, it seems like my generation of the North American Anglophone world has undergone a comically extreme evolution on the subject of Prince William.

The first time I remember being aware of the existence of William and Harry was when I was in middle school, 14-15ish?, and he was a reasonably popular celebrity Hot Guy to the middle class and nerdy American white girls of my acquaintance. There were posters of William (less frequently Harry) and pictures occasionally alongside boyband-type pinups and there were occasional conversations amounting to everyone agreeing on him being hotter than Harry. When I was in high school and later, the modern versions of romance-with-a-prince fiction started to be based on him; there were definitely some YA romances that were just rpf with self-insert ocs with the names changed. And as I moved through my 20s, the Romance With Royal Prince AU became increasingly popular as a type of fanfiction. Of course, because it's slash, these dealt with the idea of a royal coming out as gay as a major plotpoint, but most of the time the stories and plots were still clearly an evolution of the self-insert-with-prince-William idea, with a trope-laden, recognizably Romance Genre Heroine viewpoint character who was usually reasonably transparent.

But NOW this cultural narrative template has transformed into the middle class girl-next-door stuck in a permanent straightjacket of Jackie O-pastels and perfectly coiffed unthreatening feminine hair and makeup with a not-so-dreamy-anymore spineless git who is secretly mean to her and deliberately had an affair with her best friend, and BOTH of them are racist enough to cut off his brother over it?!

The positive PR that the royals (and unfortunately the concept of monarchy) received from the photogenicness of young Harry and William has sure gone places. Since I find celebrity gossip annoying on the whole and am philosophically opposed to monarchies in principle, my observation of these trends was usually tinged with impatience, but I have to admit that in recent years the turn towards anti-monarchism has livened it up. I do enjoy seeing that with mild glee, although not enough to seek out more of it than inevitably crosses my path anyway.

Obviously breakup fic is never going to reach huge status in slash fanfiction because romance drives the fannishness of the relationships, but it is really funny to think about the wavy fanfic mirrors of Prince William also turning out to be a combination of cruel and pathetic, cheating on the fairytale gay princess characters while suddenly looking haplessly terrible in every possible PR framing.

"It's like the grown-ups know what they're talking about" - Wax

As I was looking over my post from yesterday about the costly and exhaustingly time-consuming mistakes we've made so far in renovating our house, I noticed the pattern that in every case, we could have avoided the trouble by doing:

1. On the too-high kitchen floor that doesn't fit at the edges/cabinets: We should've done the first thing Wax's mom and our contractor suggested because it is basic, sturdy, period-appropriate* (well, to the period when the original owners last updated their kitchen: 60s), and affordable: installed sheet vinyl. Would've been a thousand percent better off! Why didn't we completely strip the old floor, then ask the contractor to evaluate our idea before we tried to order any new flooring? Still could've avoided it that way (even though before the old vinyl came off it wasn't apparent that the floor was unsuitable for a floating tile floor).



2. On the cabinet, counter, and toekick problems: Should've done the first thing Wax's mom and our contractor suggested: ordered the cabinets and counter and sink all at once from the kitchen store and had them assembled and installed. This is the most annoying because we thought we could save several hundred bucks by doing what looked Not That Hard ourselves with the Ikea ones, and it ended up costing us more than that because of all that stuff we Didn't Know We Didn't Know.



3. On the hall floor that we for some reason thought we could install: Should've done the first thing the contractor and carpenter assumed: had them install it. (Also we already wouldn't've ordered it in the first place if we'd gone with vinyl per #1 but also they assumed we wanted them to install the linoleum tiles and that was the only sane thing to have wanted.)



4. On the accidentally unusable flooring and the planks we failed to find under the cardboard: Should've done what the book about our sort of house would recommend: peeled back all the layers of the floor, because you're probably gonna find plank floor in a 50s-60s Finnish wooden house. If we'd thoroughly read and followed the expert advice in Hannu Rinne's invaluable book on our house type (houses made after WW2 with our house plan), Perinnemestarin Rintamamiestalo: Kunnostus ja Ylläpito, we would have known. It's incredibly detailed and covers all the common issues and recommendations from decades of fixing and restoring them. We would have known both about the cardboard being a thing and about the extreme probability of the plank floor existing.



5. On the livingroom paint rigamarole: Should've done the first thing the Rintamamiestalo book recommends: re-wallpapered in paper wallpaper domestically made by Pihlgren & Ritola. In the end, this would've been the best thing we could have done.

Something I succeeded at recently: this awesome hat for my dad (whose head is always cold)

My dad lives in the Baton Rouge area now, but trouble regulating your internal temperature is a typical side effect of a spinal cord injury. He is usually cold inside and, per my sister, is still wearing hats indoors now in March.

I sent him some hats at the holidays - a couple whipped up quickly and a couple we had lying around - because my sister had noticed he was wearing several hats I'd made in the past that had holes in them, without throwing them away or having them mended!, and apparently has lost some of the ones she and I have knitted for him in the past.

But I felt a little dissatisfied with the Christmas hats that I sent for one reason and another, and when I saw katsukoknits's amazing striped Musselburgh [Ravelry members only link], I knew I wanted to make one like it for my dad. Fortunately, I found the perfect self-striping sock yarn shortly thereafter, Sheepjes Downtown in After Dark.

It took a long time to finish, because Tristana chewed through the working yarn and I dropped it in discouragement for 2 months, but it turned out great in the end:


cimness' Self-striping Musselbergh on Ravelry [publicly shared link]

My William Morris phone case is visible here too. (Pimpernel.)