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the first chapter of Moby Dick rewritten in tiresome modern idiom
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - it's none of your business how many - being mostly broke, and bored with the land part of the world, I thought I would sail around a little and look at the watery part of the world. I'm probably the most mentally healthy person you know. Whenever I feel my face getting grim; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself accidentally reading the ads in the window of funeral homes, and following funeral processions through traffic; and especially when I'm hangry, and only my extremely strong moral principles stop me from deliberately going out in public and methodically slapping people's earbuds out - then I know it's high time to get to sea, ASAP. This is my substitute for getting in fights. I'm too mentally healthy to kill myself; I quietly and considerately put myself on a ship and sail myself away instead. There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone feels exactly the same way, and if they don't, they're lying.
You think I'm lying? Exhibit A: a city. Go to your local coastal city. Everyone is looking at the water. They drive over from other neighborhoods just to come to the water. They make a day of it. They're not doing anything, they're just staring at the ocean. Why? Is it because they all work office jobs? No! Here come more of them! They cram themselves up to the edge of the water and stare at it. WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT. Perhaps the ships themselves all packed together, each one with several compasses on it, creates some kind of critical mass - all of the small compass-magnets on all the ships in the harbor combining into one really big magnetic field - and the people get sucked into the field and trapped there. That's science.
Exhibit 2: the countryside with lakes in it. Every path you follow in the countryside brings you to some water, such as a stream. There is magic in it. If you take your standard fool with ADHD dissociating in the middle of a supermarket and put them outside and give them a shove, they'll automatically lead you to water (if there is any nearby) (try it). Another good experiment to try is to get lost in the great American desert in a caravan supplied with a metaphysical professor! Try it in the great American desert at home!
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are a match made in heaven. Married forever. That's science.
Here's an artist who wants to paint you the dreamiest, most enchanting landscape. What does he put in it? Trees, meadow, cows, a cottage with smoke coming from the chimney, obviously. He will probably put a path in it and make lots of triangular mountains in rows and have them be different shades of blue (naturally.) But there's gotta be a stream in it. Go visit the prairies in June, and wade for forty miles through knee-deep through tiger lilies. What's missing from this picture? Water!
If Niagara Falls was made of sand instead of water, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why would a guy given a handful of cash have trouble deciding whether to buy a coat (which he needed) or go to the beach? Why are all the best, healthiest, sexiest and most mentally healthy people obsessed with the sea? (You get me.) When you were first on a boat, did you not succumb to VIBES? Consider ancient Persia. Consider ancient Greece. They understood about vibes, and also gods.
SURELY ALL OF THIS IS NOT WITHOUT MEANING.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all! You get me! You understand it now.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I get weird, don't you dare imply that I buy a ticket and get on a boat. I have never had money in my life. How dare you. Anyway I don't go as a passenger - that's bougie, and something boring people do. Passengers never have a good time. And although my C.V. is incredible - I go to sea SO MUCH, you guys, I have lots of experience - I don't go as a boss, or a cook. That sounds like far too much work. Hard work. Disgusting, respectable, bougie, and far too responsible. I can literally only look after myself. Do not ask me to look after ships or shit. In fact, I have only a vague idea of what a ship is. There's so many different kinds of ships - don't get me started and DO NOT GET INVOLVED. Also, I'm allergic to glory.
It's kind of attractive to go as a cook. I mean, I'm allergic to glory and there's some glory attached to the position of the ship's cook, but, like, you're not management-track and so it's still credible. But I don't really want to cook (say) roast chicken. I really fucking love to eat roast chicken. I'm one of the best at doing it actually. I really appreciate when people go out of their way to butter, season, baste and roast a chicken for me. Picture a roast chicken and I am Looking Respectfully at it. Maybe something more, maybe I'm worshipping it. Don't make this weird. If you want to get weird about my relationship with roasted chicken, why aren't you getting weird about the ancient Egyptians? They ate roasted hippos (look it up) and the pyramids were basically pizza ovens. So it's pretty hypocritical to think that I'm being weird about roasted chicken when I've never made mummies out of chickens or built a religious pizza oven dedicated to honoring them: check and mate, haters.
Anyway - I like to go to sea as a manual laborer. A simple sailor. Salt of the earth⦠er⦠sea. Yeah, true: as a job it sucks. They make you jump around, order you around, treat you like shit. They expect you to jump around the boat like a grasshopper. And yes, at first, this sucks. It's degrading, especially if you come from a middle-class family. Worse, it's awful if you've already had some kind of professional job before signing on to be the dirt on the boss's boots - like, if you went to college and worked as a teacher and actually got kids to pay attention to you, really feeling this connection to work/teaching/identity or some shit, and now you are just literally the scum on this captain's boots, in the lowest possible job in the world. It hurts! It hurts your dignity. But the hurt, and also the dignity, both wear off in time.
So what if some old bastard sea captain orders me - ME! - to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, compared to the shit in the Bible, compared to the shit in the news, compared to the shit everyone else has to take. Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ainβt a slave? Tell me that. We're all just serfs under capitalism, right, so why not just be honest about it: I prefer the honesty. Anyway, however the old sea captains may order me about - slapping and punching of course - I have the satisfaction of knowing that it's the same experience everyone else on Earth has, but more honest. Everyone else in the world is being served the exact same way. Either in a physical or a metaphysical way - sometimes people get the shit beaten out of them in person, sometimes online, sometimes emotionally, it happens to you in EVERY JOB, you sign on to get pushed around and slapped in the teeth: so the point is that when you're a sailor, it's a clean and honest slap. All the workers of the world share the same universal slap to the face that gets passed round, one slap passed all 'round the chain, like paying it forward, but it's a slap; and we should all accept this Universal Slap as the price of living, and then offer each other healing back massages, brother to brother, and slap each other and then kissed the places we slapped, and be happy.
I could examine that but I'm not going to.
Anyway: I always go to sea as a sailor. I've said that already. You're welcome. BUT THE POINT IS, they pay you. If you're a passenger, they don't pay you, at least, not that I've ever heard of [citation needed] (do they pay passengers?? Is there a job I can get where I can be a passenger and get paid?? Look this up.) Yeah so passengers have to pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (That's Adam and Eve. You get it.) But BEING PAID. GETTING PAID IS THE BEST. NOTHING COMPARES TO GETTING PAID. EVERYONE LOVES THAT SHIT. Which is surprising, since we also apparently believe that money is the root of all evil, and isn't there something in the bible about "no rich people can get into heaven," right? And yet it's universal, literally everyone loves payday. Ah! How cheerfully we send ourselves to hell.
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor (I've said this already) because it's FRESH AIR AND EXERCISE. Okay so think about ships. Normally, bosses stand on the "bridge" thing, and because we're sailing a boat, the nose is going into the wind and the butt part of the boat is at the back. That's how wind works. But if you think about it, winds usually go in one direction more than other directions (unless the men have been eating beans and farting: it's Pythagoras, look it up) SO if you're a boss standing on the boss-deck, the wind is blowing FROM the sailors TOWARDS you, and YOU ARE ACTUALLY BREATHING THE AIR THAT SAILORS ALREADY BREATHED. The boss THINKS he breathes it first, but he doesn't. He gets the air at the BACK of the boat and sailors get the air at the FRONT. So it's better to be at the front of the boat (sailor) for health reasons. This is a metaphor for life and work, etc.
But I have smelled the sea lots of times as a paid sailor and WHY I should decide to go on a whaling expedition - ok so you know how there's an invisible police officer of the Fates who has me under constant surveillance, who secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way? YOU get me. You know him. "The poor FBI agent tasked with reading my search engine history" YOU GET ME. Anyway, "Ishmael, why, after having a perfectly well-reasoned, and very smart of you, part-time job as a spontaneous random sailor, did you decide to escalate that to joining a WHALING EXPEDITION, which is worse in every way?" Well, ask my fucking secret FBI agent, he can answer better than anyone else. Including me. You get me. Also, obviously, this was predestined, part of the Universe's Grand Programme for its talent show, which was all scheduled way before our time. The concept of sending me on the whaling voyage comes in as a kind of interlude or solo between the main performances of the Universe's great talent show. I bet it was advertised llike,
"PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBROILED IN ONGOING LEGAL DISPUTE.
Whaling voyage by some guy called Ishmael.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."
Like a commercial break in between the big acts. A filler episode. Lightens the load for everyone else. Though I can't explain why the stage managers - the Fates - chose such a shitty role for me, a WHALING VOYAGE of all things, when it feels like others were given magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces - it seems a little unreasonable at first. Why doth Ishmael get shat upon, etc. But then I think about all the circumstances, the plot points and motivations that were cunningly presented to me under various disguises - FBI agents, bouts of random hanger, gay awakenings, you get me - and you can see that actually, I was set up. And worse, between them all, these Fates and Circumstances conspired to make me believe it was all my own choice and good judgment. Is Free Will an illusion? Are my decisions bad? We will NEVER know because I, Ishmael, am just a little guy that the Universe plays head games with.
One of the ways the Universe tricked me into starring in this performance and then mocking me for it was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself (whaling expeditions usually contain whales.) Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then of course, if you have a whale, you have the wild and distant seas where the whale rolls around with his body-the-size-of-an-island; the dangers and nameless perils of the whale; whales are also found in interesting places I haven't seen; this all tipped me over the edge. Maybe normal people could've resisted, but I am tormented with an everlasting itch for obscurity. I hate everyone else's oceans. I want the forbidden seas.
You know The Horrors? Of course you do. You might be surprised that I, the most mentally healthy person you've ever met, a person who is self-aware enough to go to sea when they're at their fucking limits, a guy who likes fresh air and manual labor and normal things, is familiar with The Horrors. Well, you'd be surprised. I know what's good, I'm an extrovert. But I'm still quick to perceive The Horrors. And how I deal with the horrors is a very extroverted thing: I'm social with them, if they'll let me. It's smart to be on good terms with The Horrors. You should always be on good terms with your permanent neighbors. That's how extroverts deal with The Horrors, and I recommend it.
I think that's enough explanation for why I welcomed the whaling voyage. The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild figments of imagination that pushed me into doing it, the whales came marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah. They marched into my innermost soul in endless processions and occupied it, you see, I was quite helpless under this occupation - I consented to the haunting and the whales marched in to haunt me - and amidst them all was one grand shrouded white phantom, like a snowy mountain in the air.
You get it.
You know how it is, with whales.
(read the actual first chapter of Moby Dick here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm)
So due to other Moby-Dick bookbinding reasons I was remembering this post and then I of course also remembered I have the power to do uh. this.
illustrations (including cover) from the Rockwell Kent edition (1930)
the truly important thing to remember when typesetting a tumblr post is matching the seriousness of the text (you get it) and i think Ishmael would approve and MAYBE just maybe when i finally typeset the whole darn brick i'll pick up the vibes from this post and this typeset and just CONTINUE it in the actual text so thank you @elodieunderglass for this beautiful nonsense
I was going more for "the modern influence of the translator superimposed upon the traditional forms of the original" but your interpretation is MUCH funnier
You, a literary sophisticate: the modern influence of the translator superimposed upon the traditional forms of the original
Me, a clown: herman melville LIVES and has invented an elaborate fake backstory to give himself free rein to write the gay horse racing stories he has always dreamed of
My in-development mystery game The Museum of Everything is set on a gigantic space museum. I realised that as an entire orbital community, it would need some kind of medical facility.
So, here's the on-board doctor's office. The resident sawbones, Dr Herring, has worked hard to make it feel homely and welcoming. Apparently I can't make a single game that doesn't have creepy taxidermy in it, let's not unpack that too much.
One frustrating thing with this background was that I was really happy with it... and then I realised that for story reasons, I needed two beds so I had to make the room bigger. This had the happy consequence of giving me MORE space for creepy taxidermy.
The Mona Lisa is missing! Sleuth through a sprawling space museum, read the past through psychic abilities and unravel an interstellar art c
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Another entry into the category of "conceptually cool game design decisions that are in practice completely insane but in the early days you could just do it anyway", aka my favourite type of game design.
had a bad low blood pressure moment last night and messily asked my partner for saltines and water before realizing i should probably ask for the Blood Pressure Medication I Need To Take. while they went to go grab it though i still had water and crackers so in a daze i took a swig of water but didnt swallow and then tried to cram 2 saltines in my mouth. full of water. in bed. with mouth full of water
I always thought Reddit was a place where people could share things they created.A few days ago I posted one of my original paintings. People loved it. We had wonderful conversations about art, emotions, and how everyone saw something different in the same sunset.
About two hours later I was permanently banned from r/MadeMeSmile for βself-promotion.β
I accepted that different communities have different rules.But then something even stranger happened.Soon afterward, a moderator from r/pics started going through my account. Not just the new postβmany of my older painting posts disappeared as well. One after another. Then I was permanently banned there too.
Maybe it was the same moderator. Maybe it wasnβt. I honestly donβt know.
What surprised me wasnβt even the ban itself. It was realizing how much power individual moderators have over what millions of people are allowed to see. One decision can erase years of posts from a community and instantly cut off your ability to participate, even if those posts had been happily sitting there for months or years.Iβm not saying moderators shouldnβt have rules. Communities need moderation.But it does make you wonder where the line is between protecting a community and allowing a single interpretation of the rules to completely reshape what people can share.
The funny part?
I wasnβt advertising anything in those posts. I wasnβt posting prices or asking anyone to buy anything. I was simply sharing my original paintings because I enjoy discussing art with strangers from around the world.
Anywayβ¦
Hereβs the painting that apparently caused all the trouble. π¨
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My scorching hot take on Christopher Nolan Presents Homer's The Odyssey is Tom Holland having his mind blown while filming this, then going back to Marvel to and being all "Why did no one tell me that you can, like, have a finished script before you start filming and a cinematographer who has all the shots planned before filming instead of figuring it out in post, has anyone else heard about this?" is pretty funny
my general opinion on what people should be "allowed" to portray and what topics they should be "allowed" to explore in fiction is that you can make whatever art with whatever themes you want but i'm also allowed to think the way you handled it was tasteless and should've been done differently. my negative opinion on your handling of sensitive topics is the price of admission for publicly showcasing your work. this is not a pro-censorship stance because i am not The Government
this is getting really popular so iβd like to add the important caveat that your criticism of a work is no more unassailable than the work itself. just as one is entitled to be critical of something someone else is entitled to disagree with that criticism. i add this because some of you pretend to give a fuck about thoughtful analysis and then when someone points out flaws in your argument you declare that all criticisms are valid. this is untrue. the status of a hater is no more sacred than that of a liker. get off your high horse and engage in the thoughtful discussion you pretend to believe in or perish by my blade
I know we make jokes about the proverbial asexual pervert who has written hundreds of thousands of words of smut on ao3, but also shoutout to the aces who arenβt perverts. to the aces who skip the sex scenes and wince at sex jokes and awkwardly leave the conversation when your friends start talking about sex. your boundaries arenβt childish and fuck anyone who says otherwise.
Even folks on the pro-porn side of the aisle often talk like it's the presence of narrative that makes porn an art form, as though the erotic needs to be explicitly justified in order to elevate it from the mere mechanical production of arousal, and it always makes me feel like maybe we're not quite as "pro" as we think we are.
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#people want to treat their own bad behavior as if it was as inevitable as the weather #and then when the people they're assholes to are like 'actually fuck you' and stand up for themselves #they get all pearl clutchy about how they have a ~right to express themselves~ and how other people ~just can't handle the truth~ #toddlers (via @shesgonnachangetheworld)
Recently I volunteered to drive my friend's 6 year old daughter to school for the duration of her summer school program. My friend's work schedule just wouldn't allow it, and I was more than happy to help.
So every day I'd pick her up and we'd enjoy some time in the car together. She is a friendly and curious child. And also the most stereotypical girliest girl you can imagine. Her favorite color is "pink", followed closely by "rainbow". Her last birthday party was princess themed. Her favorite animal is a unicorn. She chooses her own outfits, and it's frilly tutus and sparkly tights every single day. Ironically her parents are both gnc and lament that they have no idea where she gets this from.
Anyway, in my car I listen to my music collection on shuffle. It's a large and eclectic selection, so I make sure to skip any songs that are inappropriate or I think she just won't like. No matter what we're listening to though, she doesn't really seem to care.
One day my attention drifts a bit, and then I suddenly realize we're halfway through a Korn song. I skip it, and suddenly the girl speaks up and says "Can you go back? I liked that song."
"You like Korn?" I ask.
"I love Korn" she says with emphasis. She reasserts her love even after I confirm I'm not talking about the vegetable.
Well, I decide that Eaten Up Inside is not really inappropriate even though it's pretty grim, so I allow it. I'm pretty sure she's lying about loving Korn since I'm confident she's never heard it at home. Her mom is mostly into pop and dance music and her dad almost exclusively listens to video game soundtracks. Later that day, I confirm with her parents that's she's never heard Korn as far as they can tell, and we all have a chuckle.
Over the following weeks, however, her love proves consistent. Anytime a Korn song comes on shuffle, she make a positive comment. No other songs merit any recognition. Keep in mind, I have thousands and songs, and only 5 of them are by Korn. After the 4th time, she asks directly if I have any more songs by Korn. I technically still have one she hasn't heard, so I switch over to that. After that day, I play the closest thing I have to metal playlist, because that's what the princess girly girl wants.
Other than Korn, the only songs she ever heard over the course of the month that got compliments were Rob Zombie's Dragula ("it's great!") and Carry on My Wayward Son by Kansas ("that one was ok"). I guess she craves growly lead singers and electric guitar solos.
You can never judge a book by its cover.
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