“Moby”: Footnotes & Outrageous Spoilers

Notes: inspiration, messages from the universe, Elon, the novel, the ridiculous footnotes, the word count, Zoltar, and the sentence that I'm the only one likes. Of course, spoilers and confessions.

Massive spoilers top to bottom here. If you haven’t read Moby, this will capsize your boat…

#5 – Moby – June, 2024 (Part I)

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Moby Dick

Hang onto your hat. Are you ready? Are you sure? Because here it comes…

I hated the book.

Moby Dick bored me to tears. I read a huge chunk of it on a beach wondering if I had some teacher’s notes companion volume for the actual novel.

It’s incredibly dry and the plot is so sparse. No college student should be put through it. To make ninth-graders read it is unconscionable. The whole novel is one discursive whale discussion after the next. Way too much narwhal tusk oil lamp whale blubber Wikipedia and not enough Ahab and Very Angry Whale.

So, now you know why I tortured you all with footnotes. My intention out of the gate that this story would be as encyclopedic and discursive as possible without blowing the story completely apart. And, pretty obviously if you took Moby Dick in that snoozer of a class, was the fact that Moby was always intended to be an analog to Moby Dick.

For example, somebody was definitely losing their leg at the end. And a boat was going in the water, oh yeah it was. And the epilogue would explain how the narrator absurdly survived. (Absurdity from the novel: A passing ship plucked Ishmael out of the water! He lived to tell the tale! Honestly, no more absurd than a computer server in Moses Lake, Washington.) Neither Melville or I was constrained by logic or extraneous detail compassion for the reader.

Well, I’m not entirely telling the truth about the novel. I loved the idea of absolute mad obsession that endangers everyone aboard his ship, and the battle between nature and man’s entitled dominion over it is a second Venn diagram overlap. There are also significant themes related to orphans as well, which are, of course, highly relevant to this story.

And a reader is far more likely in my Moby than Melville’s Moby Dick to cry out into the next room, “This thing Adam wrote is really sad! The mother whale just died on the beach! What happened to Adam that was so terrible that he keeps doing this?

Names

If you didn’t notice, and you probably have, Noel “Muck” Muckraker is very similar to Elon Musk. In fact, I made an attempt in one of the very last paragraphs to get the two names lined up (at least in the browser environment.) Witness below:

I almost added “Muck” into his name above to make it crystal clear, but that was too much of a body blow hammer shot when there were bigger fish to fry at that point in the story, and might have been a massive distraction. Possibly it would have made for a good footnote. Simply never occurred to me. 😀

“Muckraker,” has a more interesting origin. You can anagram your way from Mark Zuckerberg → Muckraker. (No, not all of the letters. I don’t want to hear about it either. You try.) When I consolidated the two characters (I originally had an Elon and a Mark character,) I ended up with an amalgam of the two, which was all well and fine until somebody pointed out the missing letters.

But I wouldn’t have done the naming thing again. It was too “cute” in retrospect, too much Spielberg and not enough Melville. It bothered me, but once that name escaped into the Substack Wild after Part I, there was no walking it back.

I should have called him “Harold.” Harold the Whale.

Or Baha! I could have called him Baha! Yours to work out. (You’ve got this.)

Eona’s name was a better fit. Somewhere in the story the name’s two-part origins are broken out. Eona is a real name by the way and the etymology is as footnoted.

More on names: the chapter titles! Almost nobody (one person) has said a word about them! Each chapter title is an actual chapter title from Moby Dick, chosen because it best aligns with the theme of my Moby mini-chapter. It felt to me like AI might try to do something like that if it was told to leverage Moby Dick. Towards the end, I added a “can’t come up with a relevant chapter.”

Proof:

I thought this was kind of funny and one of many “plants” on the AI narrator here. I wondered if people would read this as a leftover editing artifact. Nope. Intentional. And completely lost on everyone which is a Me Problem, not a You Problem.

It’s also my one and only AI cheat in the story. I ChatGPT’d the chapter text to get the right chapter for that thematic section. If it gave me “The Symphony” one more time I was going to holler.

“Epilogue” I figured out for myself.

Hopefully, my AI confession isn’t causing subscription cancellations. Lighten up and strap in, you have no idea what is headed your way.

The Cliff Notes Version

Yes, it is very, very long. It may be the longest Substack serialized work that still had a reader left at the end. I’m proud of that.

But, many of you that gave up deserve an abbreviated version. Here’s what I got when I asked ChatGPT to summarize the entire story in three sentences…

It’s the greatest three sentences in the history of AI…

Wait for it…

$1.50 a month, Free Subscribers. You give more to street buskers. Actually, I bet some of you don’t. You know who you are. And so do I. 😠