|
I think it's important to remember that the rampant obesity we see today would have been unheard of in those days. When 70% or so of people are overweight it skews our perception of what is and isn't fat. By the standards of that period Jack very probably was fat.
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2014 04:21
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 15:34 |
|
|
Decius posted:It's a bit more complicated. It was uncommon for poor people (as they often had hardly enough to eat in the first place to even replace the energy spent working), but it wasn't uncommon for the Upper Middle Class and the Upper Class, especially when getting older. Sports for health reasons were not seen very gentlemanlike (and don't even think about women doing it) while they consumed large amounts of food and alcohol and had others doing any manual labour for them. Getting fat in your middle years was a relatively common sight. Not 400 kg huge, but 20-30 kg overweight wasn't something never seen. still, 20kg overweight sounds about right for Jack. In modern America or Australia 20kg would be unremarkable. It would be 'hey that guy's kinda fat.' I'd probably have to lose 30kg to be 20kg overweight, and I'm not even close to being one of those guys who draws peoples eyes, and can barely walk, and needs to wear a smock.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2014 04:20
|
|
|
I spent basically a whole day on wikipedia and various other sites after I started reading this series just soaking in knowledge. It's kinda like reading Shakespeare.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2014 13:37
|
|
|
You guys should write fan fiction. I'd be amazing.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2014 16:09
|
|
|
Bingeing on an entire series in one hit - preferably by taking a couple of weeks leave from work and parking yourself on a recliner - is one of the most satisfying things you can do. It's a fabulous luxury to come to a series after it has been published in its entirety.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2014 04:47
|
|
|
Nettle Soup posted:Anyone who regularly trawls carboot sales, these are everywhere. I'm quickly amassing a set of physical copies, at about 20p each, Wine Dark Sea was this week's grab. Also my copy of Sea of Words finally arrived, about a month after I ordered it... Yay for having to import books! The film was pretty awesome too, if you haven't seen it. It was a conflation of a couple of the books though, with bits strewn in from other books, and a basic plot skeleton from 'the far side of the world'.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2014 11:44
|
|
|
Colonial Air Force posted:I would definitely read at least one of the books before watching the film, just so you understand that the casting is drat near perfect for every character EXCEPT Maturin. We've discussed it earlier in the thread, and certainly Paul Bettany is a fine actor, but I always pictured Maturin more Catalonian than Irish. I can't say I've ever had a problem with Paul Bettany as Maturin, but I must confess to having seen the movie before ever reading the books. Isn't he described as pale in the books? If he looked more Catalonian he'd have a more olive skinned mediterranean appearance - I don't think he's ever described in such a way. He also spent his childhood and early adulthood in Ireland. The Lord Bude fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Sep 16, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2014 12:54
|
|
|
Raskolnikov2089 posted:Yeah he's too good looking for Maturin. It's forgivable though, because he does an amazing job otherwise. He and Crowe have great chemistry in the movie. Nobody would have had the slightest problem with Billy Boyd if he hadn't been hugely recognizable due to lord of the rings. It's basically a kneejerk reaction to seeing a very recognizable face in a bit part.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2014 16:12
|
|
|
Even anglo-Saxon people can go pretty dark if they spend enough time in the sun. I'm curious to know what the skin cancer rate was in those times. Europe would have a lower rate than say Australia I'd imagine but hasn't the damage done to the ozone layer during the 20th century increased people's UV exposure? Or am I misremembering high school science?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2014 04:11
|
|
|
I bought the awesome hardcover boxed set that condenses all the books into 5 exquisite bound volumes with nice placemarking ribbons.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2014 13:14
|
|
|
khamul posted:I read the Hornblower series as a kid, then later started and put down one of the Aubrey books (HMS Surprise, I think), but I always found the original documents from the era to be better reading than the novels. With the BBC Radio 4 broadcast of one of the series I was interested in picking up one of the Aubrey-Maturin books again. Besides reading/listening to them all in order, is there a good book to start out with in the series? I'm taking a long car trip this January to get to the Battle of New Orleans bicentennial, and a good period adventure would help kill the time. I'd encourage you to read them in order. The first book is one of the better ones in any case, and an excellent starting point.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2014 05:50
|
|
|
i81icu812 posted:So what is the best way to get the full series of these books? I know the full hardcover print has some unfortunate typos: http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Aubrey-Maturin-Novels-volumes/dp/039306011X I've got to say, I own that edition and I've never noticed any significant errors - I can't confirm it's free of them, but there certainly weren't enough that I'd have noticed. I'm in Australia though so it's possible my version was published separately despite looking the same as the picture. You can also pick them up on kindle, if you're into that sort of thing.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2015 07:21
|
|
|
Does it work if you let it sit in the fridge? Cool places are in short supply where I live.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2016 04:23
|
|
|
I started doing that a couple of years ago. I highly recommend it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 04:52
|
|
|
I'm still fuming that they never made a sequel.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2017 01:57
|
|
|
It probably helps that I'd never heard of the books when I went to see the movie (I was 15 or 16 at the time). I fell in love with it, and that led me to seek out the books. Shortly after seeing the movie I was in a bookstore with my parents, and they had that boxed set with all of the books plus 21 in 5 hardback volumes, so I got my parents to buy it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2017 03:39
|
|
|
It's s testament to what can happen when you put a real director in charge of an action movie, as opposed to a scrub like Zach Snyder or Michael Bay.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2017 04:28
|
|
|
Professor Shark posted:Does 21 just abruptly stop? Yes. It's only a few chapters. O'brien hand wrote all his manuscripts as well, so the last little bit of it is actually just photocopies of his handwritten rough manuscripts complete with little crude drawings and corrections. The writing itself is rough too - it hasn't had the proofreading, and polishing that a finished book would have.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2017 13:08
|
|
|
xiansi posted:You are not alone in that view. Wheel of time was 14 books, each of them as long as a couple of Aubrey-maturin books. It was also definitely not trash; although the final 3 that were written by Brandon Sanderson definitely didn't have the same prose writing quality as the rest. As someone who reads a lot of fantasy it seems hilarious to me when someone calls a book like Post Captain long. Post Captain is approx 154k words; The shortest wheel of time book is approx 227k words, and the longest wheel of time book is 394k words.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2017 05:11
|
|
|
Beverages were chilled by tying the bottles in a net attached to a rope and dropping them deep under water for a while.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2018 12:29
|
|
|
Movie first; then books, then thread.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2018 04:54
|
|
|
I think it's just that he's in a time period where just because you technically have money, doesn't necessarily mean you can access it easily at all times; so he has periods like in the first book where he's caught short.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2020 06:01
|
|
|
Notahippie posted:There's two big shifts in his character between M&C and Post Captain. His relative wealth/inheritance in Spain* and the fact that he's suddenly an intelligence agent for the British Government where in M&C there's no hint of it an in fact he explicitly says that he's completely done with politics of all stripes. My take has always been that these changes are less a reflection of changes in his thinking as a person, and instead they're changes that O'Brien made when he decided to turn a one-off book into a series. I think the two changes give him a lot more plot hooks to develop and O'Brien inserted them for authorial strategy reasons rather than natural character development. It's been years so my recollection might be rusty but I'm pretty sure there are scenes in M&C which in hindsight were subtle hints that Maturin was a spy Wasn't he dropped off on a beach somewhere to 'visit a friend' or some such thing?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2020 17:53
|
|
|
Elaborate dinner parties were easier when the work involved in organising them was 'rattle off some instructions to the servants and then reward yourself for the effort with a gin and tonic'.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2020 03:21
|
|
|
I love that YouTube channel.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2020 07:12
|
|
|
It's especially egregious because the movie came out within a few months of Return of the King. If it had been a movie in which Boyd had a major role it would be different; but because Bonden barely has any lines and just sort of crops up in the background of scenes it ends up being more of a distracting Easter egg sort of thing where you're watching the movie and then randomly 'oh look was that Pippin!'.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2020 17:21
|
|
|
I'm really disappointed they never made sequels to that movie. I think a high budget cable TV show would be pretty brilliant and lend itself perfectly to the style of the novels.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2020 02:18
|
|
|
I liked them both in the film; and I thought it was a great movie; although I watched it long before I knew of the books - it was watching the movie that got me into the books. At first when I was reading I pictured them as Crowe and Bettany but I definitely don’t any more.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2020 05:13
|
|
|
Sax Solo posted:Also, I think O'Brian is not trying to romanticize things much himself. Well, he is, but he is also has no illusions, and I think his attitude is like, "Let us look at this one Goldilocks captain who almost never whips his men, but they love him anyway, on a ship neither too big nor too small, far from the disgusting corrupt societies of land, and maybe we can imagine some romantic beauty and wonder of the age, with these two special friends playing music together by the glorious sweep of stern windows." It's a delicate picture and I think POB is aware of it as a pleasing fiction, and he surrounds it with hard facts and skepticism, which makes it stronger. I would not care to wipe my rear end with Mel Gibson.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 19, 2020 08:19
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:He's up to a wine glass of laudinum a day in post captain although it's oddly absent from most of the narrative. He must be taking heroic quantities of laxatives. Bearing in mind that wine glasses were much, much smaller back then.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2021 13:22
|
|
|
Oh I don't doubt he gets high as a kite, I just wanted to point out it isn't quite as much as you might have thought at first glance when reading the term 'wine glass' because a wine glass back then was maybe 1/6 of the size of a modern wine glass.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2021 16:22
|
|
|
freebooter posted:This has long been my pipe dream but I feel like producers fear (probably correctly) that while there would be a loyal market for that kind of period drama, it wouldn't have a broad enough appeal to become something like GOT and significantly recoup its costs. The film made a respectable profit, but sitting down to watch two hours of naval battles on the big screen is a different prospect than investing time into multiple seasons of a TV series on the small screen. I mean, Hornblower was pretty successful right? I don't think you'd stretch out each book into a season but you could probably do 2-4 books per 12 episode season, expand or reduce the episodes per book as the book demands. If you do it well and have a good cast I think it would be a success.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2021 05:50
|
|
|
One of my great regrets is that they never made more Aubrey-Maturin movies. Hopefully one day they give the series the prestige streaming treatment it deserves.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 21, 2022 07:18
|
|
|
freebooter posted:For sure but it's weird the death happened almost but not quite at the end of the Napoleonic wars Yeah I’d absolutely prefer it to be done high budget streaming show style. 12 episodes a season. I reckon you could do the first 2 books in season 1 - very possibly 3 but that might be a stretch because 3 is quite packed from memory.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2022 13:33
|
|
|
Kylaer posted:And that, IIRC, is specifically because it's a captain having relations with a member of his crew, which definitely is something likely to give rise to problems. Interestingly, he paints the crew as generally thinking their captain is a good one despite his inclination, and one of the officers fights a duel with an officer of another ship who insulted the captain. I cannot for the life of me remember what book this all takes place in, somewhere in the middle of the series I think. Book 4.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2022 01:27
|
|
|
freebooter posted:I reckon you could get those 3 books into a 12-episode season of 60 or even 40 minutes each. All the best TV series these days know how to edit well. And if GOT was given the budget to shoot on location in Iceland, I reckon you can get away with passing off most of the Mediterranean as itself and then using Morocco and the Canaries as a stand-in for India and Malaysia respectively, with the help of a lot of Mandalorian-style next-level green screening. Once the series starts getting buzz around season 3 you can DEMAND on-location shooting in the South Pacific, Kiribati will be grateful for the economic boost. It’s authentic though - commodore wasn’t a rank during that time period, strictly speaking, it was a position. When a captain was put in charge of several ships, they were appointed commodore so that they’d be superior to the captains they were ordering around. Then once the assignment was over they went back to being regular captains. This was perfectly normal and explained in the book. It’s also imo one of the best books in the series, would be nice to do it in season 2.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2022 17:18
|
|
|
Would have been weird to start on book 2
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2022 03:59
|
|
|
Genghis Cohen posted:No, sorry, this is from The Commodore, which must be book 17. Captain Duff of the Stately. I feel like something very similar happened in book 4 with the captains under Jack’s command.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2022 16:57
|
|
|
Genghis Cohen posted:You might be thinking of Clonfert's competition with other captains and their inability to work together smoothly? I don't think there were any sodomitical practices though. I was sure there was some subtext there with Clonfert.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2022 18:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 15:34 |
|
|
Also O’Brien is being accurate to the period, it’s a stretch to think the opinions expressed by the characters are necessarily a reflection of his own personal beliefs.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2022 11:14
|
|