Nova Daily - 8 July 2025: Cassandra

Hi!

When I woke up today and scrolled through those beautiful recommendations that YouTube tends to send you, I stumbled upon a YouTube video by one of my all-time heroes, Stephen Fry. Described by Zeinab Badawi as an "all-rounder," he presented the first 13 seasons of the comedy quiz QI, wrote several books retelling the Greek mythology, and he has done a lot of voice-acting. Most importantly for me, he narrated the British version of the seven Harry Potter audiobook versions.

Stephen Fry (I'll call him by his full name, because just "Fry" sounds too distant and "Stephen" sounds a misplaced shade of intimate) did a remarkable job on his delivery and conduct of the English language. In my case it makes for many hours of dreaming away. Except maybe for one bit that's easy to pronounce but with which he notoriously seemed to have great difficulties:

Just listening to the short excerpt above makes me want to listen to all seven books again.

Alright, back to this morning. I was listening to Stephen Fry being invited on a talkshow. In it, he said something that had relevance for the topic of online beef that I had discussed yesterday:

Social media is just a lavatory wall. People just put things up there, and if you believe that it's a reflection of society, I think that's a big mistake. Because there's an enormous gap between what people are prepared to say in the privacy of their own home...that's not really how they are. (...) More than anything else, they are pathetic. They are pathetic people who want a voice.

- Stephen Fry in this interview (15:44-16:29)

The greatest point in this is that everyone, you, me, or anyone else, wants a voice. People want to be heard. We want to get the feedback that we matter.

Cassandra

Cassandra was a daughter of the Trojan king Priam and his wife Hecuba. A stunning beauty, she was desired even by the god Apollo. He was so infatuated with her that he granted her the gift of perfect foresight in order to be able to take her into his arms.

But as the god quickly found out, you can't simply buy your way into a woman's heart. Cassandra kept Apollo at arm's length and reminded him that she never asked for the gift, that she had never promised him anything, and that she would give herself to no-one, mortal or divine.

Not being able to take back the gift, Apollo decided to ruin the gift for her. Cassandra would be able to tell the future with the level of accuracy that would send Kramnik on a Twitter rampage, but no-one would pay her any attention. As Stephen Fry phrased it concisely and painfully, "[i]t was her fate to be ignored." (Troy, "Paris comes home")

The character of Cassandra is very relevant in today's landscape of online social media, although perhaps not necessarily for the many people who portray themselves as seers and/or visionaries. The ignored voice is a dreadfully sad tragedy. People want a voice. People want to be listened to. To be understood. To be recognised for the human beings that they are.

The one thing that sets off the audience's applause is when Stephen Fry points out that people ought to listen more to one another, rather than remain within the confines of the echo chambers of their own self-reaffirming beliefs.

Rather than listening to respond, listen to understand.

To complete the circle: the name Cassandra appears twice in Harry Potter. The first character is the author of the divination manual Unfogging the Future. The second is the name of the great-great-grandmother of the Divination teacher Sybill Trelawney. The name "Trelawney" has a meaning that fits with her gift of seeing the future. And Sybill, just like Cassandra of Troy, always predicts everything with perfect accuracy but is hardly if ever listened to.

On the Reversed Sicilian

As the review of yesterday's game pointed out, it was a done deal right after the opening, and as such, I indicated in yesterday's post that I'd be making a small comparison between lines from the Sicilian Accelerated Dragon and the analogous English lines.

Let's start with the Sicilian Accelerated Dragon.

There are several nuances when you compare these Sicilian lines to the analogous variations of the Reversed Sicilian:

There are several small nuances in the treatment of each of the two openings. The key idea is that Black shouldn't mix the two up and go for the most aggressive lines because the value of that one extra tempo increases greatly in these systems.