“It’s really about trying to tell the story with something else than the screenplay and the dialogue. When you’re dealing with a genre movie and you’re working with types, you need to deal with them and tell the story in a very simplified and very effective manner. And I try to do it with design, gestures and colours. These things are the things that I lay down in every movie and I hope people notice that they’re there.” – Guillermo del Toro
I mean, yes, this is funny, but mostly I’m just struck by how AMAZING language and its capacity for evolution and elasticity is. This would be incomprehensible to an English-speaker living in any other time.
i’m reading a very manly 1950s account of a hunt for el dorado but i’m thirty pages in and the narrator has already described his traveling companion as “handsome” 4 times, “extremely handsome” twice, “exceedingly handsome” once, his voice as “quietly husky” and “a husky whisper,” his fingers as long and deft, his body as “tall and cat-like,” and his eyes as some variation of ice-blue at least three times.
just men being dudes. dudes being pals. it’s great. this is great.
“Ever since he had aimed that gun at my throat, I had liked him immensely. And now I liked him even better.”
oh my god
“I awoke when a beam of light fell across my eyes. Jorge had come into my room carrying a lighted candle.
‘I’m going with you,’ he said quietly.
‘I can’t pay you.’
He smiled. ‘I thought I was a partner?’”
OH MY GOD
according to apparently every adaptation of a search of el dorado, i think we can conclude that maybe the real el dorado was the homosexuality we found along the way
If space travel doesn’t involve sea shanties then I think we’ll have missed an opportunity.
You see though, for sea travel you want big strong people who are capable of managing rigging. For space travel you want small low-mass people who are technically educated, as they are called, nerds. Your space shanties are going to be less booming and more squeaky.
in so far as there will be space shanties, they’ll be filk
I call shenanigans on the big strong people; sailors were young and malnourished by modern standards, and climbing around the rigging is easier if you’re small and light.
Like, I am 100% in favor of shanties in as many situations as possible, but I’m having trouble coming up with a mode of space travel that would require multiple humans to move in concert, thus necessitating songs with a strong beat to move to.
Sea chanties were for providing a strong beat to move to. Space chanties might very well arise just because we’re bored, out there between point A and point B for so long.
(Also yes, @gdanskcityofficial up there has the right of it.)
Space shanties are for warp piloting. Under warp drive, human time perception and time as measured by crystal or atomic oscillators don’t match. Starship pilots listen to a small unamplified chorus singing a careful rhythm while keeping their own eyes on a silent metronome that the chorus can’t see, linked to a highly-precise atomic clock. How the chorus and metronome fall in and out of sync tells the pilot how to keep the ship safely in the warp bubble and correctly on course.
Depending on route, a typical warp jump can last anywhere from one to ten minutes, and most courses consist of five to fifteen jumps before a necessary four to six hour break to check the engines, plot the next set of jumps, and give everyone a chance to recover. A good shanty team, with reliable rhythm, a broad, versatile, and extendible repertoire, and the stamina to do 3-4 sets a day over the course of a voyage, is just as vital to space travel as a pilot, navigator, or engineering team.
Other reasons Shanties will experience a revival in the space age:
We will sing for any freaking reason, or no reason at all, and Shanties are FUN to sing.
Deep Space is a lonely place and recruiting people suited to long periods of isolation might be a good idea. People from Newfoundland/Labrador, for instance.
SPACE WHALES
THEY’RE DEFINITELY REAL I FEEL IT IN MY SOUL
“What Do We Do With A Drunken Sailor” is basically a revenge fantasy against your most incompetent co-workers and if there’s something humans love doing, it’s being petty.
Found a book that summarizes literature and literary figures in text form, and the Byron one might be the best thing to ever happen.
I’ve seen posts joking about how hard it must be to guess what internet culture is next going to find funny. As if to prove the point, here we see tumblr taking a break from Cask of Amontillado references to return to its intermittent habit of dragging Lord Byron.
just moving along like everyone else 