#ishmaels

[plaguedocboi]

Nature really went off with sperm whales. A 70-ton predator with teeth the size of a banana but it only eats squishy prey that it doesn’t even chew, it just schlorps them down whole like a vacuum cleaner. Big giant fat head full of goop. Tiniest fins in the world. Strong enough to smash a ship to pieces and smart enough to figure out how to do so but its first line of defense is just to shit everywhere. Possibly the most complex language in the animal kingdom and it creates sounds by blowing air through its internal right nostril (it uses the left one to breathe) into its giant fat head. It’s the loudest animal on the planet and might have the capability to create a beam of sound so loud it can shake your organs apart but they don’t seem to use that to hunt or fight. They’re highly flammable. We used them to make candles.

[saranilssonbooks]

A bit of Moby-Dick oceanography context:

Up until the mid 1870s, it was generally accepted that life could not exist below a depth of 550 meters. This is why some of Ishmael's whale theories are so off and why Ahab pictures the sea floor as a vast wasteland of bones and shipwrecks. 🌊

[teaboot]

Reading Moby Dick and the whole opening is wild. "I'm Ishmael. Sometimes being a person makes me want to scream, so whenever I feel I can't hold it in anymore I run to the nearest shipyard and sign up for some hard manual labour on a random ass boat where nobody cares who I am. After a few months I'll settle down and get back to business. Everyone does this sometimes, it's probably normal. Anyhow, I'm at the pier."

[l4zyd3m0n]

[rosesvorfreude]

the experience was slightly original, ahab

[sinclairenthusiast]

various limbus

[beannibun]

[ LCB Fanart ] Gates of Hell

Returning from the gates of hell

[akakris10]

AKA my "bad-ends deserve good endings too" AU. They are not redeemed villains so much as they are domesticated scrunklies

[thelostpretzel]

bitch i mean beach volleyball

[quinnonimp]

have u drawn ishmael beforeeeee pleaseee if u have can i see her? can i see my girl

sorry no BUT i have now just bc u asked 🤙

[ratlesshonret]

Heathcliff Buys a Pepsi

[natalieironside]

So I'm reading Moby-Dick finally, and it's very interesting. I'd seen a lot of quotations from it over the years and I was broadly familiar with the plot and most of the characters but you lose . . . everything outside of context. Let me explain.

Whenever westerners quote Confucius, they always say it like "Confucius said, '[some mystical metaphor that doesn't make a lot of sense]'" and they just leave it at that like that's all there is. Gives people the idea that Master Kong was some kinda goddamn wizard instead of a moral and political philosopher. If you actually sit down and read the Analects, most of those quotations are bookended by other quotations or little explanatory anecdotes that make it make perfect goddamn sense.

The way people talk about Moby-Dick is also like this. If you've ever seen a quote from Moby-Dick and thought "what the fuck is this shit," it needs to be put into context. When somebody delivers a monologue replete with quakerly thee'ing and thou'ing talking about how whales are actually God because whales could be a metaphor for God and (as everyone knows) all metaphors are true or some similar words and you think ". . . What the fuck am I reading," there's a better than even chance the character being addressed is just as baffled as you are

[wuthering-tempest]

dads and the pet they didnt want

[lights-on-the-ridge]

happy pride to these two whalers i guess

[wamija]

Eye of the storm