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Phenotype posted:Made a Drowned Baby last night from the Lobscouse and Spotted Dog cookbook! It calls for a cup and a half of raisins, I threw in a cup of dried blueberries and cherries and half a cup of crushed almonds (because that's what I had!), otherwise followed the recipe pretty closely. Came out really tasty, even though it looks like a lump. The little specks are just almond or possibly cinnamon: Very cool. Did you eat it authentically and have it with a couple of shots of rum mixed with water and lime juice? What are you doing next? Please keep posting. 
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Oct 25, 2018 19:05
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yaffle posted:How much coca residue would be left in rat poo poo anyway? They were just ahead of their time. It’s like the civet cat beans.
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Feb 9, 2019 14:40
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Nuclear War posted:So.. did Stephen have the Duke of Habachtal killed? How could a simple botanist and ship’s physician do such a thing?
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Feb 10, 2019 03:20
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Yeah, he would never do something like have someone killed and then dissect their body for shits and gigs. That dude just happened to have died in far off lands after betraying his country.  E: the other was French, so who knows
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Feb 10, 2019 03:41
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Sax Solo posted:I exaggerated a little, but Stephen can be a harsh character. Stephen is blind to some aspects of himself and I think it's interesting to read the books with that in mind. True, but the second one is at least partly the running joke of Stephen getting addicted to everything and always being like "nah, doses of these drugs that would kill a small herd of cattle are good for me and fine and I do not have a problem."
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Mar 15, 2019 07:28
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Sax Solo posted:I don't think Stephen ever quite understands Diana, like a naturalist doesn't exactly understand a wild animal, though he may want to admire it, keep it, and put his name on it. Wasn’t there a local squire that Diana and maybe someone else introduced her to? I could have sworn it’s implied that she figures things out with him. uPen posted:The first secondary relationships I can recall are the guy that wanted to buy a slave to marry and the guy that wanted to be castrated because his wife wouldn't sleep with him. Maybe not too many amazing relationships there either. Sounds like someone is forgetting Babbington and Mrs. Wray and Pullings and Mrs. Pullings.
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Apr 25, 2019 14:17
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freebooter posted:What exactly is the deal with the child in India? I was still coming to grips with O'Brian's prose when I read book 3 and never really grasped this, though I distinctly remember the imagery of Stephen standing at the shore after her funeral pyre. The other fantastic piece of imagery I remember is towards the end when he feels the outline the ring in the letter he received from Diana, and walks allll the way up the volcano slope to sit in a patch of snow and cry. He gives her silver bracelets and she's super happy about it but then gets murdered for them.
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Jan 21, 2020 22:15
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Sax Solo posted:I feel that passage, where Stephen is in awe of Jack's violin playing -- while charitable -- confirms the alienation from Jack. Sax Solo posted:Oh, I read it as.. It's not just any old reveal of a new facet, like, "Oh I didn't know you cared about boxing." It's the very last thing, the last little bit of Jack that Stephen can't understand. And IMHO it's presented like, what is knowable is fully known, and what remains is not for Stephen at all. He has come to the limit of the land, and had gazed at what lies beyond, unreachable, before he turns away. The last little bit of mystery, the last pulse of a love that's become inert. It's like an old marriage where one person has taken the other extremely for granted and realizes it possibly too little too late; not something that can be acted on -- merely bittersweetly appreciated. Ok, or... it’s like that scene in Up where the old dude turns the page and is like “Even though she never played with the philharmonic, she loved playing violin with me all along.” Only she’s not dead. And they’re friends, not married. Looks, it’s not the best analogy ever but I strongly disagree with your takeaway. I will have to re-read it though, with this in mind. Sax Solo posted:a Stephen who very much wants to let us know that his daughter is beautiful and brilliant, not like Jack's fat stupid kids. First, I want to acknowledge that both characters have their flaws. So this isn’t just a “no, but Stephen is good and cool you see” defense here. I just think you’re not giving him enough credit for the difference between Stephen and Jack and how that might affect Stephen’s view of the world. Jack - Uncommon genteel, landed gentry, home in the navy, captain, married the traditionally ideal English country gentlewoman. Has multiple kids that are just regular kids including a son. Stephen - looks like yoda, Irish, bastard, super poor (until he’s not, fuggers), not a laudanum/coca addict, wife is not exactly the Victorian ideal of femininity (horse riding, fucks around, poor, kept woman, from India), not a captain, nothing like the comforting embrace of the navy to go home to. Then he gets married to the woman he loves and has a single daughter and nobody in the series is in a better position to know more that something is wrong with her. So at least here I think you have to cut the guy a little slack for looking at himself in the mirror and looking at his daughter and doing the same with Jack and his multiple children and being just a teeny bit defensive and overprotective.
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May 28, 2020 00:26
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Yeah impressment existed for a reason. If a man-o-warsman’s life was actually better than life on shore, I doubt the Impress Service would have been so busy. Don't they talk about this a bit? One of the reasons you have to impress people is that the navy pays less well than other occupations (which also don't involve getting shot as a general rule) so able seamen prefer to be in not-the-navy. I know they impress other folks from time to time but my understanding of the practice generally is that it was primarily for sailors.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:02
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Phenotype posted:I think it paid better than other laborer jobs, it was just that you had to be isolated from the entire world, living in a close packed airless wooden ship with a hundred other filthy sailors, and you had to do hard labor at all hours of the night and your superiors were allowed to beat you and you'd be soaked and wet and miserable, subject to hundred-degree heat and freezing winds and might end up shot or drowned or mutilated from flying splinters. I know they talked about how merchantmen paid better than the Navy, but that was probably not a factor for the average impressed landsman. Sorry if I’m missing something and being dumb here. My point was that it pays worse than other sailor jobs and impressment is really for sailors not landsmen. Despite all the landsmen who get impressed by Jack.
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Aug 21, 2020 04:24
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Lockback posted:Crowe was too well built and generally dashing for Aubrey but in general I thought the energy he brought more than pulled it off. Wrong. The Captain has an uncommon genteel figgar
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Feb 24, 2021 01:02
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CroatianAlzheimers posted:I know we've ruled out Tom Hardy for Jack, but what about for Bonden? He needs to be believable as someone who could cheerfully be champion of the med fleet.
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Feb 28, 2021 17:36
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Anarcho-Commissar posted:This is just the worst! The Rock as Killick. John Cena as Bonden. Dave Bautista as Stephen.
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Mar 2, 2021 14:11
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Notahippie posted:He's a master at "show, don't tell" to the point where key information about characters is often communicated through what they don't say or some casual remark that illustrates their character in just one or two comments. I think it can frustrate some readers but I personally love it. William Gibson does something similar. I love it too and, going back to hornblower chat too, I haven't found anything that scratches quite the same itch. There are other books that are also good and I enjoy (and I read a couple of the hornblowers and they were fine books) but nothing I love in the same way as these.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:13
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Arglebargle III posted:With that sort of habit storage space starts to become an issue, though I suppose the Leopard was roomy. A gallon of laudanum every 4 days? 252 gallons in a tun. Just bring a cask of laudanum onboard, problem solved.
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May 23, 2021 12:39
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Lemony posted:New problem: preventing your sailors from draining the cask dry behind your back. This happened with padeen right? Laudanum addict with super strength who just lifted the top of the presumably super heavy locked chest off the hinges. Phenotype posted:Yep, but of course he wouldn't make any comment because that sort of thing just isn't done between gentlemen, much less between an assistant to his surgeon. I remember on my first read through the series, I had been just sorta taking Stephen's word for it until then -- he was a doctor and he was dosing himself and it might look like addiction to an onlooker but it was actually carefully controlled and hah, they sound like such obvious excuses now, don't they, especially once you learn how massive his doses are compared to what they use for the sailors. Yes but the sailors are given to addiction. Stephen takes it for his health. Huge difference, obviously.
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May 25, 2021 00:09
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ChubbyChecker posted:i'm very much into pirate and ship shows and really wanted to like the black sails, but i had to bow out in the first episode Have I got the movie for you! Similar era to Aubrey and Maturin too. https://youtu.be/05AHp8MgSjk
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Jun 10, 2021 12:55
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Shoulda let catalan be independent and then maturin wouldn't have been working for sir joseph banks and thwarted him at every turn. Aubrey probably would have died too from a heart attack without his good friend advising daily climbs when he got too fat and there goes british dominance of the seas. Pretty big mistake when you think about it.
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Jul 2, 2021 22:09
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Jack is miss piggy.
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Dec 27, 2021 04:25
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Mulaney Power Move posted:That line specifically was what stood out, but there were also some vague comments that I read as derisive toward relationships between men and women, like when Maturin essentially asks him to diagnose his depression. Stephen asks if he can remain capable of love and McAdam says " As between men and women, I use the term lust" and says a burning desire for "some slut" might answer. McAdam wasn’t exactly held up in the books as a paragon of virtue and wisdom though, was he?
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Aug 10, 2022 04:44
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Notahippie posted:Like The Lord Bude said it's always risky to impute the authors' pov from the characters, but personally I definitely feel like O'Brian's take on marriage and for that matter life in general is pretty pessimistic. I don't think there's a happy marriage in the series except for maybe Pullings,' and like you said women are usually presented as a cause of unhappiness. You get a little of that stated directly by Stephen when Sir Blaine is interested in a woman and Maturin tries to talk him out of it. I also always felt like Maturin's musings on humanity felt to me like O'Brian's - in particular the passage, I think actually in book 4, where he thinks something like "many men die before their time - they show a flash of life in their twenties, then die and join the grey things that creep across the land." I dunno, there's something kind of heartfelt in that framing. My mental image of O'Brian has always been that he was depressive and somewhat cynical about the possibility of happiness, but I don't know if that's a fair interpretation or not. Spoilers for folks who haven't read all the books. Don't babbington and mrs. wray end up happily married?
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Aug 11, 2022 18:55
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hannibal posted:Yes, they do and she's quite bubbly for him. e.g. "Charles" Queenie is also super happy, right? Also, like, alllll of the Sethians. And I thought Dundas but that one is a little shakier in my recollection. (Time for a reread?) Jagiello at least heads to the altar in happiness. On the other hand, there are so very many books written over such a long time that it’s maybe not fair to give secondary characters nearly as much weight as the main ones. And if we were there’d always be Harte as a counterpoint. No spoilers on that one.
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Aug 12, 2022 02:13
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Kei Technical posted:A number of Sethians went back to sea after their relevation that polygamy was cool and their wives’ subsequent revelation that they didn’t have to put up with that kind of poo poo Fair but the ones that didn’t should count double or triple. 
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Aug 12, 2022 03:10
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Mr. Mambold posted:Sometimes it's guys stuck in the water with no remote southern island, no rudder, and no forge! No matter what, it’s about friendship. Sharpe is about sharpe being bad to the bone. Pay your money, make your choice. Lockback posted:This was really cool to read, thanks for sharing Agreed!
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Jan 24, 2023 14:57
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Phy posted:I'm not nautical aside from a summer where I took sailing lessons two decades ago, but I think I understand some of it. If you wear instead of tack you’re a scrub.
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Jan 26, 2023 01:45
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StrixNebulosa posted:It drives me perfectly insane that Jack is more concerned about clean dishes and utensils than Stephen, the doctor is. You sound upset. Try some of this laudanum. Notahippie posted:I've always seen part of Diana's story as being that she's profoundly lonely. Her relationships with almost all of her romantic partners are hideously lopsided, where she has to be working the angles constantly to get what she wants from them, and she has the same dynamic in a different way with Mrs. Williams. Stephen is safe, because he doesn't have anything she needs. She absolutely strings him along, but I cut her some slack because I think she's giving in to the need to interact with somebody who cares about her as her - even if she maybe doesn't love him in the same way he does her. My two cents on this, Diana can be both attracted to dudes with uncommonly genteel bodies like Jack, dudes with absurd wealth and dudes who are smart. And she can be totally screwed over by social circumstance all at the same time. I think folks have pointed out how few options women in this era had but like, SO FEW. Basically all of Jane Austen's books have that same underpinning of "hey, if you don't get married to someone good then you're just hosed forever with no options other than to teach some brats for not very much money and never have anything good sorry." So I cut her some slack for being super frustrated and being young and wanting to bone a bunch of dudes and also not knowing what she wants or, alternatively, knowing what she wants but being unable to have it because she's a woman. She also has to know that her societal value is just beauty and that's going to fade so she has to get while the getting is good. Her world is unfair in a way I've never experienced and much of her behavior is a reaction to that unfairness. Kestral posted:This may be a little heavy for the Aubrey-Maturin thread, but just putting it out there for anyone who needs to hear it: if anyone treats you the way Diana treats these characters, run, don't walk, no matter what you think the reasons for their behavior might be. But also, yeah if someone treats you that way you need to leave. AngusPodgorny posted:Regarding number 3, I don't know where O'Brian got it in particular, but here's a supposedly-true anecdote I've read: “One of them was a small Lion monkey, of great beauty and extreme gentleness, and immediately after I had been feeding him, Jack [another monkey] called him with a coaxing, patronizing air; but as soon as he was within reach, the perfidious creature seized him by the nape of his neck, and, as quick as thought, popped him over the side of the ship. We were going at a brisk rate, and although a rope was thrown out to him, the poor little screaming thing was soon left behind, very much to my distress, for his almost human agony of countenance was painful to behold. For this, Jack was punished by being shut up all day in the empty hen-coop, in which he usually passed the night, and which he so hated, that when bed-time came, he generally avoided the clutches of the steward; he, however, committed so much mischief when unwatched, that it had become necessary to confine him at night, and I was often obliged to perform the office of nursemaid. Jack's principal punishment, however, was to be taken in front of the cage in which a panther belonging to me was placed, in the fore part of the deck. His alarm was intense; the panther set up his back and growled, but Jack instantly closed his eyes, and made himself perfectly rigid." Mrs. R. Lee. Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals. 
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Sep 20, 2023 16:46
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Psion posted:ok I'm curious now, where's this from specifically? Killick.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:32
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skasion posted:Idk about actual regency society but it’s what you’d expect from novels of the period. Like think of Pride & Prejudice where pretty much all the conflict is based on superficial misreadings of other peoples emotions that could be easily cleared up if anyone was straight with each other, which they can’t be because it would be unthinkably offensive . Like nobody dares to be so impolite as to ask Bingley why he’s hosed off leaving the sister in the lurch, or to ask Darcy what his problem is with Wickham. It would be rude to answer truthfully and rude to have to lie. So instead the question never gets asked and Darcy and Lizzie have a shouting match. which serendipitously helps fix everything but whatever. Or later on when Lady Catherine rocks up demanding to know what Lizzie’s intentions are with Darcy and even though she’s Lizzie’s social superior and has good reason to want to know, Lizzie basically says “my life is none of your business, gently caress off”. A conversation is not an interrogation with two parties taking turns asking questions.
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Dec 6, 2023 13:46
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