This Man Thought He Would "Sail About a Little" ...

August 14, 2014 2:11 PM

...You Won't Believe What Happened Next
posted by neroli (26 comments total)

... well played.
posted by penduluum at 2:12 PM on August 14, 2014 [5 favorites]

TL/DR
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:18 PM on August 14, 2014 [10 favorites]

tl:dr
but it did seem just a little more than vaguely familiar
posted by From Bklyn at 2:19 PM on August 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Ah, came in to type TL,DR. Genius.
posted by Erasmouse at 2:19 PM on August 14, 2014

I have long thought that formatting literature in a more familiar blog-friendly format, broken up by block quotes and headings, would make it more readable to a modern audience.
posted by 2bucksplus at 2:20 PM on August 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think this is what the 'longreads' tag is for...
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 2:21 PM on August 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Which Example Of Whiteness As A Locus Of Man's Propensity For Obsession Are You?? Take Our Quiz
posted by saturday_morning at 2:23 PM on August 14, 2014 [14 favorites]

From hell's heart I click at thee...
posted by Ian A.T. at 2:24 PM on August 14, 2014 [15 favorites]

Thaaaaaaaat's great.

There's also a really fun Call of Cthulhu scenario which is an homage/parody/form of Moby Dick. A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat, by Greg Detwiler.
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:27 PM on August 14, 2014

That's still such a good opening paragraph.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:28 PM on August 14, 2014 [10 favorites]

This Essence We Found In The Inglorious Bowels Of A Sick Whale Will Amaze You
posted by theodolite at 2:30 PM on August 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

Moby Dick! come for the tedious whaling details, stay for the completely unprompted reveries on muscular male beauty!
posted by The Whelk at 2:31 PM on August 14, 2014 [7 favorites]

This is a clever joke but it was sort of anticipated by Buzzfeed's list of seven fantastic ways to distinguish between sense and nonsense, wasn't it?
posted by kenko at 2:38 PM on August 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

Years ago, I took the GRE English Lit subject test in a room full of people mostly taking subject tests in other areas. About halfway through, there was a set of questions based on the "sperm-squeezing" chapter...and I just lost it. The tension of the test-taking combined with the delight of that passage led to one of those pursed-lips crack-ups that sounds like a long raspberry. The people at other desk gave me incredulous and annoyed looks, I tried to compose myself, and be polite to those other people working out physics problems or whatever. Then I went back to "let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness" and loudly lost my shit again.

God, Moby Dick is great.
posted by neroli at 2:48 PM on August 14, 2014 [7 favorites]

I found it doubly annoying because it is something I never liked, dressed up like something that annoys me now.
posted by Megafly at 3:18 PM on August 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

I was hoping for an interactive gallery on all the reasons why a whale is a fish.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:32 PM on August 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

I've been playing Assasin's Creed: Black Flag, the first game in the series that I have had any interest in. It's a good game. For me the parts spent on land is something that I have to get through, to get back on my boat:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

Moby Dick is great, and I've thought that they could/should have included it in-game, in it's entirety, as collectable pages--the existing game offers a side activity of gathering what feels to be a endless amount of lesser period-styled writing. (The time periods wouldn't match up at all, but even so.) And not really as a joke either, unless you consider tricking gamers into enjoying Melville a joke.
posted by danny the boy at 3:41 PM on August 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

The thing in that book that I never could figure out was what was the deal with that "pivot-hole" Ahab kept putting his pegleg in, 'cause it seems like having one leg fixed in place would make it way harder to keep your balance as the ship rocks back and forth, while conferring basically no benefit.
posted by aubilenon at 4:04 PM on August 14, 2014

I pictured it less as a deep hole that locks him rigidly into place, more like a little divot to prevent the tip of his peg from skittering around all over the deck.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:15 PM on August 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

This will not Melville
posted by hal9k at 4:41 PM on August 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

Honest question, is this unabridged? I am presently trapped in a work situation where I have to look busy (staring at a screen counts, somehow) for the next month and I've always meant to read Moby-Dick.
posted by psoas at 5:24 PM on August 14, 2014 [6 favorites]

psoas: At first glance it appears to me. When I was in your shoes I got a text copy of Moby Dick from Project Gutenberg (here it is in HTML, here in completely plain text), put it into a Word doc, and formatted it to look more or less like the documents I was expected to be working on (Times Roman, etc.).
posted by kikaider01 at 6:00 PM on August 14, 2014 [6 favorites]

Best use of dick tag.
posted by capricorn at 7:01 PM on August 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

Is this something I would have to be a dick to understand? Because I understand.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:43 PM on August 14, 2014

Pardon my language, but that's the best goddamn opening chapter of a book in the known universe.
posted by marxchivist at 9:01 PM on August 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

They made Starbuck a man? This is the worst BSG fanfic I've ever read.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:06 AM on August 15, 2014 [7 favorites]