Tag: Philosophy

Chapter 107: The Carpenter

Robin VanGilder3 Comments

Alright, let’s get back to business, shall we?

How does this go again? Excuse me if I take a moment to get my bearings. The last time I was writing on this subject, the very flames of hell were licking at my monitor from outside my lone apartment window. Now they have been replaced with the icicles of the holy fanfiction of one Dante Allighieri. No, but we have in fact had a rather mild winter this year, no snow down here in the Green River valley, though it is a little chilly tonight. It will… not quite freeze, reaching a mere 33 degrees.

But enough about the weather, let us move on to today’s subject.

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Chapter 106: Ahab’s Leg

Robin VanGilder4 Comments

Summer continues apace here in Pacific Northwest, and it has been awful, here in my little apartment.

This place was not designed to deal with this sort of heat. I get the radiant warmth from lower floors, so it is nearly impossible to maintain livable conditions without sitting directly in front of a fan at all times. And, over the past weekend, we had some awful wildfire smoke to boot! Ugh. The rains of fall cannot come soon enough.

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Chapter 105: Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?

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The last day of my vacation has come, and I decided to take advantage and write one more post, for now.

The damnable summer heat has finally abated, somewhat. The famous clouds of my homeland have returned, if not the more-famous rains. But I know that they shall, in the fullness of time. I can only hope we don’t suffer from awful wildfire smoke this year (knock on wood).

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Chapter 102: A Bower in the Arascides

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Guhh, it’s hot.

The one bad thing about living in this apartment, rather than at my parents’ place in West Seattle, is that it gets hotter and stays hot longer. We always had a nice breeze coming off the water, but now I’m inland! A who two or three miles from the Salish Sea, probably! Merely on a river valley… alas! Anyway, I’ll go turn my fan on and we can get to the business at hand.

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Chapter 101: The Decanter

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Alright, we got the big one outta the way, let’s keep moving!

I’ve been feeling energized lately. Maybe it’s just that the weather has cooled down a bit, but my creative juices are flowing again. And this chapter is a great canvas for my, shall we say, creative interpretations of this book.

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Chapter 99: The Doubloon

Robin VanGilder5 Comments

Hoo boy, this is a big one.

I’ve really got my work cut out for me this time ’round. This is a very important and fascinating chapter, and has been the subject of a lot of study and discussion over the years. It’s not hard to see why, there’s obviously a lot going on here, and I will do my level best to untangle it, and perhaps offer a bit of my own commentary on top of all the others.

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Chapter 98: Stowing Down and Clearing Up

Robin VanGilder4 Comments

Ahhhhh, my vacation is nearly over, but I managed to find time to do a bit more reading.

This chapter is a bit meatier, a hint at things to come, and it’s a really good one. We’re back into some classic Ishmael philosophizing here. I simply had to tear myself away from various JRPGs to get down to writing about it, before the specter of the work week comes once more to sap all of my creative energies.

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Chapter 96: The Try-Works

Robin VanGilder4 Comments

Okay, okay, I had my fun, let’s get back to serious business.

Honestly, I got most of the way into writing a big thoughtful analysis of the last chapter, but it really comes down to that little joke. That’s all ya need to know to unravel everything. I only get to do that once, I think, the inverse of my old post where I spun like 2000 words out of a one-paragraph chapter. Ah, that was a good one.

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Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand

Robin VanGilder2 Comments

Ahhh, time to get into some real gay content.

I mean, not really, but also, yes. Look, people love to post excerpts of this chapter out of context, to make it sound like Moby-Dick; or, the Whale is some sort of pornographic free-for-all. As you and I well know by this point, that is not quite the case. And yet, there’s only so much that context can really change for writing like this. Let’s dig in and squish our hands around in it.

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