How to Craft the Perfect Story:

Make a guy

Make him gay

Give him problems

Put him on a boat

another thing I love about aubrey-maturin is how convinced they both are (but especially Jack) that together they cover the whole sum of human knowledge. he’s always thinking, “well, I don’t know that, so Stephen will.” conversely the things he does know, Stephen doesn’t. Like the meme:

and they were tie-mates (oh my god they were tie-mates)

Whumptober 2023 - Day 25 | Storm

Master and Commander - The Far Side of the World (2003)

'Were you ever in Elsinore, Mr Jagiello?' asked Jack.    'Oh, many a time, sir,' said Jagiello. 'I know it well. I believe I could show you Hamlet's grave from here.'    'I was really wondering whether they were ten- or thirteen-inch mortars on the upper terrace,' said Jack, 'but I should be very happy to see Hamlet's grave as well.'    'Both ten and thirteen, sir. And if you go a little to the right from the farthest turret, there are some trees: and among those trees there is the grave. You can just make out the rocks.'    'So there he lies,' said Jack, his telescope levelled. 'Well, well: we must all come to it. But it was a capital piece, capital. I never laughed so much in my life.'    'A capital piece indeed,' said Stephen, 'and I doubt I could have done much better myself. But, do you know, I have never in my own mind classed it among the comedies. Pray did you read it recently?'    'I never read it at all,' said Jack. 'That is to say, not right through. No: I did something better than that—I acted in it. There, the upper terrace fires. I was a midshipman at the time.'    'What part did you play?'    Jack did not answer at once: he was watching for the fall, counting the seconds. At the twenty-eighth it came, well pitched up but wide to starboard. 'Port your helm, there,' he called, and then went on, 'I was one of the sexton's mates. There were seventeen of us, and we had real earth to dig, brought from shore; it played Old Harry with the deck, but by God it was worth it. Lord, how we laughed! The carpenter was the sexton, and instead of going on in that tedious way about whose grave it was he made remarks about the ship's company. I was Ophelia too: that is to say, one of the Ophelias.'

Reading the Aubrey-Maturin Series:

WELCOME ONE AND ALL TO TINY! TOM! PULLINGS! TFRIDAY!

😭

I get it now. I might well read 20 books about these two.

spent too long thinking about The Rational Garment at knitting club tonight and gave myself a hysterical fit

How it started-

-and how it's going-

I don't know about you but "Try a piece of this, old cock" had me eating walls 🦥🥃

What does Aubreyad mean?

"Aubreyad" is a nickname that Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series got as a play on words with "The Iliad", which is also lengthy and about the human dynamics between people at war. I think it's fun to say :)

I neglected the memes too long, I know... also sorry there's so few but I'm running out of them and need to make some more.

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It's a bit frustrating to look at the Aubrey-Maturin tag and be deluged with gifs from the movie. Now I like the movie, it was my introduction the series as giddily presented to me by my grandmother when it hit theatres (her copies of the series are over on my left), and if half of it hadn't been filmed on now-awful-looking 2K digital film, I'd love it even more: the cinematography is excellent. Russel's Crowe's Jack Aubrey is about as good as we are likely to get from Hollywood: he's nowhere near fat enough, he's nowhere near scarred enough, he's not nearly taut enough with his officers and men (because somebody probably complained it made him sound 'mean' if it even reached the script stage—several times in the film he lets his officers give their opinions, which goes against Jack's character), and he honestly not nearly goofy enough (the famous weevil crack is about the most we get), but all in all it's a good performance for a Hollywood flicker and it acquits itself well. It's the Jack in Heroic mode we essentially get throughout, and I get the motivations behind it even if it lacks the complexity of the character I love. But Paul Bettany's performance as Maturin is frustrating. First, its offensive in and of itself to cast as an Irishman an Englishman who is so English his father is godfather to the wife of Prince Edward. You wouldn't know Bettany's Maturin was Irish (much less half-Spanish) if he didn't expressly say so in the picture. For a character so inextricably Irish to just be an Englishman is very vexing. He looks like Stephen Maturin even less than Russel Crowe looks like Jack should: he's much too handsome, much too well-dressed, and far too pleasant. None of Stephen's peevish waspishness makes it into the movie: at best FilmStephen mopes, and none of his cutting wit, far less his erudition, really makes it to the screen. Part of the problem, of course, is the same issue that inflicts every Jane Austen adaptation too: a distinct refusal by the part of filmmakers to depict an era with such a different understanding of intimacy among the upper classes. Even O'Brian struggled with this, as I once heard an interview where a historian complained that in the early books it was downright promiscuous how often O'Brian's characters shook hands. So of course both characters come off as less-formal on screen than they do in the books. But the movie flattens all of Stephen's wrinkles out, leaving him a caricature of his dynamic, prickly, funny, often dangerously drug-hazed, Butcher of Boston, sometimes stuffy, sometimes radical, always sui generis self. It's not a bad performance, Bettany does what he can with the material he's given, but the character on screen is decidedly not Señor Esteban Maturin y Domanova, MD.