Reading about gamming captains balancing awkwardly on their crowded boats, hands in their pockets for nonchalant bravado, while doing that very same balancing act on the swaying NYC subway…I’m just like them for real… 🐋

Still in: Wacky characters, florid prose, portents of doom, action sequences, factual inaccuracy/exaggerations Out: Philosophical digressions, metaphysical musings, info dumping, Cetology (so like 70% of the book) 🐋

Whose management style would you respond best to? - Starbuck (fierce whispering) - Stubbs (mean and confusing jokes) - Flask (yelling) - Ahab (phrases so unholy they’d sully your gentle ears) 🐋

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Enjoyed the names of the legendary whales: Rinaldo Rinaldini Timor Tom New Zealand Jack Morquan (king of Japan w a cross shaped spout) Don Miguel (Chilean)

Unfortunately intensely relating to Ahab as he indulges in his obsessive nightly doomscroll of nautical charts 🐋

Love the indulgence of devoting a whole (long!) chapter to a single color, plot be damned. The popular modern day novel could never 🐋

Sure, you may not “get” why we all got swept up in Ahab’s crazed mania for Moby Dick, but have you considered: its whiteness “stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation?” 🐋

Moby Dick, his reputation precedes him… - he’s “ubiquitous” (can be in 2 places at once) - can teleport across the ocean - is immortal (aka ubiquitous in time as well as space) - studded with ineffective harpoons - will about-face while being chased and smash your ship to bits - horribly white 🐋

Look, you don’t read Moby Dick for the plot. You read it to discover what bizarre and unpredictable alleyways Melville’s mind will go down next…what phrases he’ll turn to perfection, what metaphors he’ll stretch to hell, what fanciful whaling lore he’ll drop, etc 🐋

Wish I had the sober competence of Starbuck, or at least the easy good humor of Stubbs, but unfortunately, of all the internal monologues, I relate most to the twisted and overblown fixation of Ahab’s 😔 🐋

Ishmael makes manning the masthead seem so dreamy. No thoughts, head empty, just watching the rolling sea that’s also kinda your soul and ignoring any whales that go by 🐋

I must’ve been paying less attention than I thought to Cetology because I don’t get why Captain Sleet felt the need to “pop off stray narwhals” from the crow’s nest, nor why he considered them “vagrant sea unicorns” 🐋

Flask’s sad dinnertime existence is a good illustration of why manager track can be fairly unappealing even in today’s corporate world 🐋

Just for fun — I happened to be on Cape Cod this past Xmas, so here’s a landscape in the vicinity of what Ishmael might’ve seen when he set out on the Pequod 🐋

I get where Ishmael is coming from with his “whales are fish” insistence, it’s like how my brain rebels against the notion that strawberries/blackberries etc are not technically berries 🐋

Try Pots…this place has everything: - Hosea Hussey (great name) - a sinister entrance - 2 enormous pots of perpetual(?) chowder - cows wearing fish heads as shoes - a “no harpoons in the bedchambers” policy based on a Prior Incident 🐋

I need to refer to Earth as “this terraqueous globe” more often 🐋

Queequeg appreciation post (1 of infinity): - shaves w his harpoon - uses harpoon as an eating implement - is “George Washington cannibalistically developed” - throws an annoying guy 360deg in the air to teach him a lesson, then saves his life minutes later A grand and glorious fellow indeed 🐋

What if I knit my own phone pocket…a brioche knit in contrasting colors…watch this space

Ebey’s Landing

Always enjoy a day trip to Port Townsend

An oceanside sunset

People in gridlines

New thing that floats my boat 🪻☕️

Plants catching the light 🌿✨

A week by the sea 🌊

Keeping a toddler entertained on a long car ride is akin to a battle of wits with a madman

I know a street planter hates to see me coming

Portals

New entry in my blog of things that float my boat

🧵 Thread of koan-like photography wisdom from “Education of a Photographer”

Gowanus, right before the fireworks

Prospect Park walk

My personal top 10 movies of the 21st century ballot (in no particular order) 🎥

Wrote up my toddler’s art setup on my new blog of things that float my boat: jinjin.leaflet.pub/3ls5yjvjxks2g

Getting weird with it

Boobledink

Really blows my mind how much you can change a pic when you shoot raw

THAT RAZZLE DAZZLE! THAT JAZZ AND PIZZAZZ! THAT SHIMMER AND GLIMMER! THAT HINT OF SIGHT AND GLINT OF LIGHT! THE PIERCE OF THE GAZE; THE FIERCENESS OF RAYS! YOUR EYES AND SURPRISE! THE RODS AND THE CONES; THE GODS AND WHAT'S SHONE! GLASS PRISMS AND VAST -ISMS! IMAGES RENDERED AND VISIONS SURRENDERED!

I love pictures…is there anything better than a good eyeful of sight, that razzle dazzle bounce of lightbeams playing upon the shimmering cones of the ol’ retinas

A few photos from Dumbo

Started La Bête Humaine, a book where Emile Zola dares to ask: what if railroads were super sinister and gothic

Random shots of last week. Experimented with shooting raw and pushing the sliders in Lightroom, you can really go nuts with them then

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Having (too much?) fun with Lightroom’s clarity and grain sliders

Blogs for Bluesky!

Small scenes from this week’s commutes

It’s an honor to be art directed by a 20 month old

Potato-lookin kiwi