Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
In the depths of the oceans live monsters beyond our limited terrestrial imaginations. Creatures so superlative they expand the bubble of our very categorisation of "life". Fish with transparent bodies, sharks with lifespans akin to oaktrees, jellyfish with in-built lighting but no eyes. It would seem the marine world isn't governed by the same rules which apply on land, and biological creativity has been allowed to run riot. There exists a negative correlation between altitude and diversity. In the air only a few body-types are viable: lozenged torsos, two wings, scrawny legs. On land we have more variation, and under the sea moreso still. Maybe its just an easier environment for life to exist, or maybe its just had longer to develop its hard to say. One of my favourite animals is the whale; ever since childhood they have enamoured me with their enormity and elusiveness. To me they encapsulate the two-fold love of the natural world I have always held strongly: that of fear and beauty. The whale in its many species are known for their size, the largest animals that have ever lived on Earth (of which we have scientific records for). They are so big as to be biospheres in and of themselves, with hundreds of smaller fish living and dying at the whims of the great whale who is their home. Little dentist-fish who live in her mouth, sucklers which roomba across her whale-hide hoovering up algae build-up, hitchers which use her as a bus to find food, or indeed to feed on her bywaste. When a whale dies and her corpse sinks to the seafloor her body becomes a reef for bottom-feeders; indeed there are several confirmed species which can exist only on whale-corpses and need them for their survival. They blur the line between a "being" and a "place".
Right now I am sailing across the Norwegian Sea: as I type I am at the northernmost latitude I have ever been (64 degrees), albeit still substantially south of the Arctic Circle. Here the sky is different. The sun is weak, and the clouds strong. All day feels like early evening, the midday light making you feel drowsy and ready to finish work. As we sail up the coast of Norway the blue-blanched peaks of the fjord-mountains track left to right across the bleary horizon, blending sky, land and sea into one. It is that time of year for weather, low pressure pools sweeping their way from Southwest in conveyor belt lines. A day after it had left England one such storm thundered across to these Norse skies too. Fortunately relatively sheltered from the long fetch of the open Atlantic gyre, we nevertheless were placed dead centre of high winds gusting 60kts. I luckily don't have a proclivity to seasickness, but the telltale grey-green faces became commonplace below decks as shipmates hunkered down. The frigid waters were thrown into frenzy as sharp gusts skimmed the surface pulling and pushing the fluid into a heaving mass. Wisps of white water whisked off from the wave crests drawing pale lines across the black water. Great round waves formed all around, rolling into eachother like a thousand turning wheels; each one taking its turn to buffet the hull without mercy. Seastorms like these have a seemingly limited number of factors: wind speed, swell duration, water depth; but despite this no two storms are the same. For instance here we had no wave crests, no crashing white horses like off Kanagawa, just rapidly rolling hills of saltwater from here till the curvature of the Earth. The seastate lasted nigh on twenty-four hours and, as sailors do, life went on as normal. I was standing on the portside of the bridge when the engineer spotted her off our port bow. "Whale!" went the cry, and the interested few stared in the direction he was pointing. As I mentioned before the light here is dim and confusing, playing off the rolling waves in somniac patterns. It was hard to make out anything out there. Most gave up after a minute, but I kept looking until there, a splash of white water. The splash was much like the other little maelstroms kicked up by the winds, but after staring at this sea for so long I knew this one was not like the others... Again a splash seen. but this time the wave beneath it began to gleam and distort like melting plastic. The smooth back of a whale gliding effortlessly under the surface, his dappled skin streaked with streaks of frothing water. Up he came and down, his curving form melding perfectly with the round waves, matching them in shape and speed, in strength and beauty. Just a brief encounter it was, and after that he disappeared again into the deep, but every whale sighting never fails to make my day. The storm quite rapidly subsided after that, tracking onwards towards the pole leaving us in more pleasant seas. I don't know if the whale helped it move on, but there's no room for belief in "coincidences" at sea.
Maybe the whale was caught in the storm just like us, or maybe he revels in it. Maybe he'd followed the storm since its inception, navigating by the wind. Maybe he even was the master of the storm, the weather preceding him as a herald. Maybe the storm and the whale are one and the same, inalienable facets of one another. Whales hold the crown as the undisputed emperors of the oceans, no sea-creature comes close to their majesty. They hold a symbolic place analogous to the ocean itself as giant unknowables. Not malicious but not magnanimous, not scary but not docile. They hold the properties of wild emperors, just as lions are like kings on land. And when you enter the realm of the emperor, it is only proper to respect his authority.
