Continuity is for Schmucks

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

- The body horror of Circe transforming the men into pigs was beautifully disgusting

- I loved how the existence of the gods was never fully confirmed or denied. Were the storms Poseidon’s wrath or just bad weather? Was Athena appearing to Odysseus with the face of the woman he let die or was he hallucinating out of guilt? Magic clearly existed, because we had a cyclops and a witch and shades of the Underworld, but there’s magic and then there’s divinity. Is everything they say about the gods true or are they just an excuse?

- The removal of the Nobody scene was necessary actually. In the poem, Odysseus gives Polyphemus his real name in a moment of hubris and this causes all the problems later on because now Poseidon knows the name of the man that disrespected him. In the film, the problems are caused by the Greeks breaking Xenia by invading Troy. Keeping the Nobody scene would have detracted from the root cause of all the problems.

- I could write an entire essay about how cleverly Nolan uses events from the Odyssey to make a point about today’s society:

The Trojan War was about trade routes and Helen was just an excuse — just as wars today are waged for oil and resources, and governments give excuses to their citizens to make it seem better.

“The people from the sea” are feared as an invasion of bogeymen threatening innocents, but they’re actually just desperate men trying to find safety.

The Greeks pillage an island and ask “why didn’t you just give us what we wanted? We’re the good guys!” while the village burns behind them, not realising that to the villagers, Greeks and Trojans are all the same.

- Whoever let Anne Hathaway freeze her forehead should be fed to Polyphemus

Also me, scrolling the tag for (1) minute: