Emerald's Blog

Expect little, recieve even less.

[agirlwithachakram]

sea shanty themes

hearing an old man saying something

Captain’s an asshole

Captain’s awesome (same captain)

first mate sucks

whiskey

the girls out here

the girls back home

ship is terrible

ship is great

Cape Horn

seriously why are we always running around Cape Horn this place sucks ass

want to go home

did NOT want to go home, somehow ended up there anyway

Sally and various sex acts we can do with her

beach party

rolling, heaving, hauling

where we’re bound

sea beasties threatening us and/or assisting us

stormy weather but we’re together

setting out to sea

coming in to harbor/taking shore leave

too much whiskey

punishing naughty crewmen

Let Me Tell You About This Guy

Goodbye!

Hello!

let us bother this fellow

oh man I should marry that one girl if I ever get back home

befriended an animal, call my parents if you don’t believe me!

you ever been to Place?

I have been grievously misled

sailors gotta sail

let’s get this bread, boys

don’t forget your old shipmate

faldee raldee raldee raldee rye-eye-doe

[thefighting74]

How could we have possibly forgotten?

Those MOTHERFUCKERS in the Black Ball Line shangaihed me and beat me to death and stole all my money and

Black Ball Line Propaganda

[wanderingjedihistorian]

I think the reason so many Sean Bean characters had to die was because he used up 47 lives to survive Sharpe. Richard Sharpe should have been dead about 4 times an episode yet he Survived. The scales had to be balanced somehow.

[e-merald-terror]

That is exactly my view. Sharpe used up all of Sean Bean’s on screen lives (as well as at least one of Sean’s own. That horse really did nearly crush his skull)

[gh0stbra1nz]

i feel like everyone but me knows this already so apologies but i had no idea the miniature of nelson was found around hardy's neck. i knew he was buried with his favourite and that's it really, as no book i've read has specified how it was known which the favourite was.

grabbed my head at this. what do you mean 34 years after nelson's death hardy was still wearing a miniature of nelson on his person? over his heart...

[e-merald-terror]

Further to my comment. I don't have a better source at hand, I'm sure someone else does. But this is a section of the biography of Louisa Emily Anna Berkeley, his wife. With the somewhat funny title of Nelson's Hardy and his Wife. Some real this is my husband and this is my husband's boyfriend energy withe the title.

[e-merald-terror]

Happy 261th Birthday to the HMS Victory. The oldest ship still in commission in the world (248 years), Nelson’s Flagship and the last point of pride in the Royal Navy.

May she continue to be the ultimate Ship of Theseus. As well as continuing the clearly parasitic relationships she had with her dry dock (the oldest continually used dry dock in the world)

[theweirdwideweb]

[thekenobee]

@waxedpaperdoor @pathfinderswiftpen @e-merald-terror

[e-merald-terror]

Finally a car mod I can get behind

[thefighting74]

Really surprised there isn't a Drake's Drum -esque legend surrounding Horatio Nelson. It feels like he, of all people, would have something like that attached to him.

[e-merald-terror]

It’s cause they had enough trouble keeping him in his brandy barrel. There’s no need to threaten his resurrection. Probably also cause then the Christ parallels and allusions would cross the line into blasphemy.

Yeah the whole brandy barrel incident was quite ¿funny? They left him on deck with a marine and well the barrel started making strange noises and the top popped off scaring the absolute shit out of the marine (a set of events that make Beatty’s claims about how perfect and uncorrupt the Body was a little more suspicious).

And one resurrection scare was probably enough for everyone.

[e-merald-terror]

A terrible scandal is this very present moment rocking the Royal Navy.

British flagship found in dock with no engine

A heavily armed Royal Navy vessel that has been drydocked in Portsmouth for an extended period is at the centre of a scandal this morning af

[thekenobee]

Sharpe + Incorrect Quotes (Part 16) Source: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia s1e03

[e-merald-terror]

And sometimes they are long days indeed.

[dwarven-beard-spores]

Starting a gofundme for my friend Bunbury who's a terrible invalid,

[ledsastray]

Well, I must say, OP, that I think it is high time that Mr/Ms/Mx Bunbury made up his/her/their mind whether to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be funded in others

[technofinch]

I often complain about my life but one thing I am grateful for is that I've almost never been shot at with a cannon. That happened all the time in the old days and it seems like it sucked a lot

[e-merald-terror]

Unironically spending my boring work days imagining how being blown apart by a French cannon would be more fun.

[them-witches]

i walke into the cathedral at canterbury

sword: sharpened 

king’s wishes: misunderstood 

thomas becket: deade

[them-witches]

i am forcibly excommunicated from our holy mother church

[reddherring777]

hate when mummy movies use Imhotep as the big bad. He was an architect. Imagine a mummy movie but the mummy is Frank Lloyd Wright. And he was buried at the House On The Rock. Ok nevermind that would be a sick ass movie.

[thekenobee]

Sharpe + Text Post (Part 31)

[e-merald-terror]

Perfection as usual

[indefenseofseagulls-deactivated]

Breaking my silence. Does anyone want to discuss the Chimney Scene in Sharpe's Prey (2000)

[e-merald-terror]

Every boody day of the week, that whole book gnaws on me in its ability to shove Sharpe into a personal hell from start to end.

[indefenseofseagulls-deactivated]

bernard really said We doing character development! dawg experienced ego death and rebirth stuck in a chimney

[e-merald-terror]

I will die by on the hill of this book being the low point in both his career and personal existence. At the end of Trafalgar, he had everything: a promising new regiment; the woman of his dreams; and all that gold. By the opening of Prey his wife is dead (together with a baby son); his new Regiment sidelines him as Quartermaster (probably because of all the day drinking he begins to do); and all of his money has disappeared (probably inherited by the family of Lord William Hale as one final insult).

So like any reasonable man he decides to return to his childhood home, only that 'home' is a child abuse factory, one that hasn't seemed to have changed at all in the twenty odd years. Complete with an overseer who sells children to chimney sweeps (and other things...). One self affirming murder later and you'd think that would be the end of the horrific childhood flashbacks.

But that would be far too easy. Instead, he gets shipped off to Denmark, betrayed and stranded. Captured by the enemy and forced to relive a second set of childhood trauma by climbing his way through a chimney. Something that he in the distant past (at the bold age of like 6) he escaped by plunging himself into the cramped slums of London. Because life as a street urchin was better than that fate. And 20 odd years and after all his wildest dreams came true (even if they were quickly ripped away) he is once again forced to face the hell of a chimney flue.

I'll stop here for the sake of spoilers, but the rest of the book doesn't go much better for him.

[indefenseofseagulls-deactivated]

Something I really think is interesting about Sharpe is that he has Issues Fitting In. Because he was a fictional character written in the 1980s, so of course he does. This is the decade of the Breakfast Club that he's invented in. Conformity in office culture and in the schoolroom is at an all-time high, and society is once again trying to sand down everything to be safe and comfortable. (He's a representation of the dark instincts lurking in the back of every affable secretary and accountant's mind /j) Other characters in the genre want love and community in a way that works with the era their stories were written in–Hornblower isolates himself based on his social role, and when that melts away, he becomes more ordinary. His problem is that he's deeply aware of the power he has over everyone in his life as a man in a patriarchy and a commander in an autocratic leadership structure. It's very 1950s.

Sharpe, however, makes friends anywhere, he just doesn't "fit in." He might as well be a teenager with braces. He feels like he's allowed to want friendship and community, (in a way that Hornblower does not) but friendship and community remain just out of his grasp because he has no idea how to stay in one place for any amount of time without bolting like a scared deer. Which is like, a very common experience for people in the latter half of the 20th century into the 2000s, but much more bizarre for someone in 1938. I think it's really interesting how the idea of a "relatable protagonist" has evolved.

[e-merald-terror]

I think a lot of Shape is ultimately him looking for a ‘family’ as soppy as it sounds. And as you point out he never really gets there (except of course at the very end and largely off page). And usually it involves every parental figure (including the very abstract ones) actively making it worse. And almost everyone he ends up making any connections with ultimately meeting a grizzly end. Sometimes even as a direct result of Shape’s actions.  So I cannot blame him too much for his skittishness when met with actual sense of community. As you rightly point out, he’s consistently a fish out of water (too much of a gentleman for the ranks, not enough of a ‘gentleman’ for the mess etc). Which makes for good reading but is a tragic fate for Shape as a character. Even when things seem to be going his way on paper the reality is often far more disappointing. I don’t want to read into Sharpe too much, but I think a lot of it can be explained by Cornwell’s upbringing in a pretty whacky British Christian Sect/ Cult (The Peculiar People, Capt. Peculiar springs to mind).

[indefenseofseagulls-deactivated]

Breaking my silence. Does anyone want to discuss the Chimney Scene in Sharpe's Prey (2000)

[e-merald-terror]

Every boody day of the week, that whole book gnaws on me in its ability to shove Sharpe into a personal hell from start to end.

[indefenseofseagulls-deactivated]

bernard really said We doing character development! dawg experienced ego death and rebirth stuck in a chimney

[e-merald-terror]

I will die by on the hill of this book being the low point in both his career and personal existence. At the end of Trafalgar, he had everything: a promising new regiment; the woman of his dreams; and all that gold. By the opening of Prey his wife is dead (together with a baby son); his new Regiment sidelines him as Quartermaster (probably because of all the day drinking he begins to do); and all of his money has disappeared (probably inherited by the family of Lord William Hale as one final insult).

So like any reasonable man he decides to return to his childhood home, only that 'home' is a child abuse factory, one that hasn't seemed to have changed at all in the twenty odd years. Complete with an overseer who sells children to chimney sweeps (and other things...). One self affirming murder later and you'd think that would be the end of the horrific childhood flashbacks.

But that would be far too easy. Instead, he gets shipped off to Denmark, betrayed and stranded. Captured by the enemy and forced to relive a second set of childhood trauma by climbing his way through a chimney. Something that he in the distant past (at the bold age of like 6) he escaped by plunging himself into the cramped slums of London. Because life as a street urchin was better than that fate. And 20 odd years and after all his wildest dreams came true (even if they were quickly ripped away) he is once again forced to face the hell of a chimney flue.

I'll stop here for the sake of spoilers, but the rest of the book doesn't go much better for him.

[indefenseofseagulls-deactivated]

Breaking my silence. Does anyone want to discuss the Chimney Scene in Sharpe's Prey (2000)

[e-merald-terror]

Every boody day of the week, that whole book gnaws on me in its ability to shove Sharpe into a personal hell from start to end.

[ponkothepenguin]

Reading Moby Dick is so fun because every couple chapters I get to react to something ridiculous Ishmael says. Buddy what the FUCK are you talking about

[e-merald-terror]

The whale phrenology is probably my favourite expression of this. Mostly as my favourite children’s book also went off about it. Which makes two books too many which spend way too long measuring the skulls of whales.