Farmer John, I know you've brought it up before, but I like your idea of judging a book on what it offers and not on some prescribed set of literary standards. I think there's room in the world for both approaches, but I need to try it your way more often.

"Just keep writing whatever comes into your mind, and get mad pissed if anyone thinks you're a moron. Love you're style. "

Loved the dialogue:

Look-a-Locke's punishment for Dogen in the alternaverse: his son sucks at the piano and he has to live in L.A. (and speak English all the time).

The Rock's charisma is the only thing that makes ST in any way bearable. He's so damned likeable that I sat through the entire thing.

" if the Army or Navy sent promising youth to war at 14 and then commissioned them in their early twenties. Thus Jack is an accurate product of a system that has bred him to war and life at sea from just after puberty. He knows no other life and thus in many ways has become numb to many of its hazards and political…

Great film, great acting. I believed every second of it.

I loved Offside and that last scene, filmed in the van in real traffic during a real celebration of some kind is very cool and pretty amazing that they pulled it off.

Why would I be considered a troll? I've taken part in every book club discussion, Geek Love to present. Pretty rude assumption.

" there's going to be a whole lot of writing out there that won't speak to you. "

Jesus Christ this is weird. I didn't come over to whatever website your O'Brian fan club is on and start criticizing your favorite book. I'm just posting my reactions (admittedly from a single read, and I'm not the kind of person like Farmer John who posts eloquent, fully-formed analysis from the get go—I work out…

I eat natto with rice or in sushi. I don't see what the big deal is. It's slimy, but doesn't taste strong or strange at all.

Romanticized
Welcome, Todd.

" He'll describe boring events like days spent on a becalmed ship in long, drawn out passages that deliberately test your patience as a reader."

The more I think about it, the less I can forgive. Give most authors this many pages and this many words and they can bring to life dozens of well drawn, memorable characters. O'Brian manages to give us Aubrey and Maturin and Dillon, along with a few other barely memorable characters and that's it. I think my…

That's all nice to know, and I'm glad because it sounds like the series gets better.

Yes. Also, I'd like to apologize to Tobias for doing essentially just that in the first or second week of this feature.

You're here to do a JOB and that JOB is to follow PROCEDURE, asshole. Follow procedure and crimes get solved. Don't, and you can go fuck yourself with the dildo that your wife's gonna leave behind when she runs off with the fucking night manager of Taco Bell instead of sticking around with your broke, unemployed…

Dillon is Wharf!
The boat's carpenter is Scotty!
The poetry loving officer trainee is Data!
The cuckolded admiral is the husband of the blue alien that Kirk shags!

The Earless Commander!
So I assume Aubrey has had both of his ears shot completely off while escaping harm to any of the rest of his person by book twenty? That's a big problem with the first book of a long series. What are the stakes? Obviously, nobody very important is going to get hurt (though it was a bit sad…