Whales, bro. Whales.
My most delightful Gentlewomen and Gentlemen! I'm kinda cutting it close today, yeah? If you're thinking I'm going to miss my Wednesday post, freaking BAD NEWS for you, buddy boy McGeezer man person! I've still got this crap–I'm going to finish this post by midnight Arizona time! [For all you lovely ladies out there, please excuse my insolent outburst of cro magnon rage.]
Sincere moment: I don't really know how to earnestly talk about things I am passionate about. Notice how I couldn't even just type that out, I had to say I was going to be sincere so you'd understand and then I could point to it in a terrible excuse for a joke. Ha-HA! So freaking I'm just going to say some stuff and you best be entertained. Or, at least... inquisitive...?
I love whales. I think they are beautiful creatures full of mystery and wonder and I literally spent five hours between yesterday and today reading all about whales on wikipedia. Our lovely friends, the cetaceans, have been unfortunately reduced to something of a gimmick because Sea World is all like SHAMU–which is not as entertaining or glamourous when s/he poops in the tank right next to your table while you're eating corn dogs. Until my hours of research–did you know there's one whale that is completely alone because he can only sing at 52 hertz–I hadn't really thought about whales since I was a youngling in Elementary school. We were learning the concepts of how to measure properly–a delightful exercise to try with a group of twenty eight-year-old kids–and our last project was to measure 100 feet, the rough average size of a blue whale. The asphalt was not a very good representation of the blue whale, but I remember thinking how cool floating around in the ocean as the world's biggest mammal would be.
Baten Kaitos. Before I bash it six ways from Sunday, let me say I love this game. Mizuti is the best, and I wouldn't trade the Amazing Masked Wizard for anyone else, except maybe for Lyude (future cosplay/my costume for All Hallow's Eve sometime in the future). The game was in fact one of my favourites on the GCN, but from the beginning to the end, you are taunted with the legends of the Old Earth where there were great oceans ruled by the wise and powerful whales. Being kind of a huge gamer, that's normally a tip-off that you are going to be rewarded with an ending cutscene with whales frolicking through fields of potted petunias and everyone you've ever talked to screaming about how happy they are the whales and oceans have returned. Problem? You see one whale for like fifteen seconds. All these dopey little fluffballs you've met–called Greythornes–gather once you beat Malpercio and turn into a whale that just kinda floats there for a bit. I just wanted two things out of the game: to be Gibari and to see some whales. Anti-climax, AHOY!
But what actually made me do my recent research into whales–did you know that baleen whales have two blowholes and toothed whales only have one?–was playing Dishonored. The game is an amazing piece of art, the world is incredibly detailed and the story is full of intrigue and weird twists of fate. But the main source of income for the town is whaling. I think to make it seem less morally ambiguous, the whales (which look mostly like Sperm whales to me–perhaps an homage to the fact that Sperm whales were the primary targets of the whaling industry in the 1800s) are depicted as ferocious creatures with weird tentacley things protruding from their lower jaws. So like Moby-Dick on steroids... Actually exactly like Moby-Dick on steroids. You don't get much of this from just playing the game, but the books and journals you can read flesh out this whaling economy, and it just caught me harpoon, rope and drouge.
And so I did some research–did you know what to do with a drunken sailor?–to better understand whales and the old-time whaling culture.
Right beauties they are.
tl;dr Cutter like whales. He wrote this post just before the deadline he set for himself which no one is probably going to enforce. He thinks you're cool. He is disappointed by Baten Kaitos's lack of majestic sea-deer.