4 ms·

Off topic I know, but what's with the tonnes (nearly 70?) bullet points? It's like the author had a normal piece of text and semi-randomly decided where to spli

by n4r9 3y ago

Off topic I know, but what's with the tonnes (nearly 70?) bullet points? It's like the author had a normal piece of text and semi-randomly decided where to split it into bullets, losing context and structure along the way. Some of the items are sequential, others are standalone. Some are paragraphs, others are tiny addendums to the previous point. Cochrane sounds like a very unique character, but after the first few bullets I just wants to go and read his Wikipedia page.

AlbertCory 3y ago
+1 to that. tl;dr This needs a whole series of novels. Oh wait. There already is one: https://www.soundingsonline.com/features/the-real-jack-aubrey https://www.soundingsonline.com/features/the-real-jack-aubre...
- usrusr 3y ago
  So that's where both Stephenson and Disney got the first name of their concurrently written Jacks from (I assume that both Shaftoe and Sparrow were already public when BBC writers created Harkness who is basically the same character as the other two)
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    "Jack" - a great name for a pirate or sea captain. "Morris", "Herman", "Nigel", "Cuthbert" - not so much. Follow me for more fiction advice.
  - saghm 3y ago
    I always assumed that at least one of them was inspired by the Billy Joel song
- syncsynchalt 3y ago
  Hah, I was thinking this sounded a lot like "Lucky Jack". I remembered that O'Brian had drawn on a lot of captain's logs for the novels but still based a lot of him on a single captain, but I wasn't sure if this was the man until your comment.
webel0 3y ago
> all of the above is sourced from Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf by Donald Thomas Thats pretty much what they did. I do sort of like the idea of sharing less-than-perfectly-polished writing. But it does make for an odd read.
macintux 3y ago
FWIW, I found the layout entertaining.
- usrusr 3y ago
  I think it's a really nice example of form matching content: a very long list of roughly equally improbable events. No prose could ever express the sheer quantity of it all like that seemingly endless list of bullet points. I kind of expected the last bullet point to be "wrote and published his own own biography, few other sources remain"
- zharknado 3y ago
  Agreed, it kind of reads like an overly long and insanely impressive CV passed along in a blasé sort of way. It paints Cochrane as someone who was a lot more interested in doing things than convincing people what cool things he had done, which by the raw facts seems plausible haha.
paxys 3y ago
It's sadly becoming more and more common because too many people aren't used to reading stuff longer than a Tweet at a time. Put a regular paragraph of text in from of them and they will just close the browser tab and move on.
- Hedepig 3y ago
  I mentioned in another comment, I enjoyed the structure and found it much easier to process. This is despite mostly reading long form articles and never having been a huge twitter user.

by n4r9 3y ago

AlbertCory 3y ago

+1 to that. tl;dr This needs a whole series of novels. Oh wait. There already is one: https://www.soundingsonline.com/features/the-real-jack-aubrey https://www.soundingsonline.com/features/the-real-jack-aubre...

usrusr 3y ago
So that's where both Stephenson and Disney got the first name of their concurrently written Jacks from (I assume that both Shaftoe and Sparrow were already public when BBC writers created Harkness who is basically the same character as the other two)
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  "Jack" - a great name for a pirate or sea captain. "Morris", "Herman", "Nigel", "Cuthbert" - not so much. Follow me for more fiction advice.
- saghm 3y ago
  I always assumed that at least one of them was inspired by the Billy Joel song
syncsynchalt 3y ago
Hah, I was thinking this sounded a lot like "Lucky Jack". I remembered that O'Brian had drawn on a lot of captain's logs for the novels but still based a lot of him on a single captain, but I wasn't sure if this was the man until your comment.

webel0 3y ago

> all of the above is sourced from Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf by Donald Thomas Thats pretty much what they did. I do sort of like the idea of sharing less-than-perfectly-polished writing. But it does make for an odd read.

macintux 3y ago

FWIW, I found the layout entertaining.

usrusr 3y ago
I think it's a really nice example of form matching content: a very long list of roughly equally improbable events. No prose could ever express the sheer quantity of it all like that seemingly endless list of bullet points. I kind of expected the last bullet point to be "wrote and published his own own biography, few other sources remain"
zharknado 3y ago
Agreed, it kind of reads like an overly long and insanely impressive CV passed along in a blasé sort of way. It paints Cochrane as someone who was a lot more interested in doing things than convincing people what cool things he had done, which by the raw facts seems plausible haha.

paxys 3y ago

It's sadly becoming more and more common because too many people aren't used to reading stuff longer than a Tweet at a time. Put a regular paragraph of text in from of them and they will just close the browser tab and move on.

Hedepig 3y ago
I mentioned in another comment, I enjoyed the structure and found it much easier to process. This is despite mostly reading long form articles and never having been a huge twitter user.