#whale weekly

[the-golden-vanity]

In the most recent episode of a history podcast I enjoy (Lions Led By Donkeys, Ep. 339: The Great Panjandrum), one of the hosts declared that it was time for gay people to stop categorizing themselves as different kinds of animal, and start categorizing themselves as different kinds of ships, like sloops and frigates. Now, I bring this question to the largest number of gay* people who like ships I can find: all of you.

*queer, non-cishet, LGBTQ, whatever umbrella term you prefer

Bonus points if you tell us why you're the kind of ship that you are!

[whaleweekly]

WE'RE SO BACK

[3meninaboat]

Moby Dick

Have you always wanted to read Moby Dick? Or maybe you didn't know you want to read Moby Dick BUT YOU DO. We are reading it together in time with novel over the next few years, one chapter at a time. We start TODAY! Join us! @whaleweekly

[plaguedocboi]

I think Ishmael Mobydick would really flip out if he learned how sperm whales sleep

[hotcinnamonsunset]

a whale of a good time🐋

[shattersaurus]

Old foes

Always been a sucker for whales

[my-name-is-not-kimmy]

[many-bees]

The thing you have to keep in mind about Moby Dick is that it’s an explicitly anti-racist text written by a white guy in the 1850s. So you end up with stuff like Ishmael spending an entire paragraph complimenting a Polynesian guy on his skull shape.

[even-in-arcadia]

neither alive nor dead but a secret third thing (at sea)

[kafkastan]

at the request of @fierifreak, here is a chart i originally posted on twitter that inexplicably did numbers (credit to OP of the blank graph in the corner!)

[monstercollection]

Today, almost three centuries after Melville wrote that you could no longer see whales from the shores of Nantucket, I sat on a beach just 80 miles from that island and watched a humpback whale breach the surface.

It’s such a common sight now that my mother-in-law was surprised that in all my years of coming here (and the few where I lived here) I hadn’t seen it before.

There is something so hopeful and remarkable about that.

Edit: I extremely bad at math, it was almost 200 years. In my defense I’d just hiked 5 miles to the beach and was very tired! I was also an English Major, we don’t do math!

[stjohnstarling]

We really don’t talk enough about the spleen these days. People used to talk about the spleen like it was the king of organs, Shakespeare wrote it verse, these days you’re lucky if someone even knows they have one. Moby Dick opens with Ishmael going to sea to drive off the spleen, what have you done for your spleen lately? I want to be complemented on the splendour of my spleen, just once. I want to taste splenetic delights.

[the-golden-vanity]

I can't be the first person to make this observation, but it's just struck me that Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick and Thomas Blanky from The Terror represent the opposite ends of a spectrum—"How well do you cope with losing your leg to a huge white beast that destroys hubristic seafaring men?"

[plaguedocboi]

I think Moby Dick artists could use how objectively crazy-looking whale eyes are to their advantage

[string-star-lights]

laid in bed last night thinking about how herman melville died before humans knew about whale songs, or how they sleep, or about whale falls, or that they can be gay… he would have loved them so much

[shattersaurus]

Old bones