Whispers from the Void

Noctua | personal blog | adult

[noctuaminima]

Whispers From the Void

I'm Noctua. I'm not a bot, I promise! This is a personal blog where I can yell into the void. Sometimes the void yells back. I'm longtime veteran of this here hellsite, this particular blog is an offshoot of my main blog. I hope this blog never finds you.

[ninakaina]

primer on ocean waves so i can explain to you and you can explain to others how nolan's odyssey was visually and technically underwhelming.

there are 2 main types of waves. wind waves and swell. wind waves (called chop when the period is short) are caused by present wind kicking up the surface of the water. this is where you see little whitecaps and generally pointy, uneven waves. swell is caused by powerful sustained wind whose waves have traveled a long way and developed into consistent self-perpetuating wave forms, and looks like long smooth waves; the energy is coming from the sea itself. swell is the thing that makes you feel like the entire ocean is heaving & is what throws ships around. the sea state is usually described as a combination of swell (the ground movement of the sea) and chop (the movement of the surface) so you might say we have a 4 foot swell (measured from the trough at the bottom to the crest at the top of a large heap of water) plus 2 foot chop (smaller waves closer together on top of the swell). swell is the hardest to get in photo or video in a way that shows its true size, especially if you're shooting on your phone for an instagram story from the bridge of a ship, but if you were say making a 70mm film adaptation of a story where the main character is being tortured by the ocean itself you would probably want to figure that out. because you generally need swell in order to get any kind of impressive motion going on*

*EXCEPT in storms, when the winds are so strong that the wind waves themselves "heap up" and can become mountainous without a preexisting ground swell (when the waves escape the storm or the storm ends these waves will sort themselves out and continue as swell). wind waves obviously behave differently and have different features in higher winds. the beaufort scale is the tool used internationally by mariners and meteorologists to determine wind speed in unprotected waters and describes the features of gale-force, storm-force, hurricane-force winds.

so for example when i'm driving a small work boat at my job, if i notice long streaks of foam starting to run down the backs of the waves, that's my cue to call in and consider ending operations for the day, because on paper my operational limit is sustained 30 knot winds (in that anything higher increases my level of risk). you can see how things get more impressive the higher the winds get, and based on this you can imagine the kind of things we'd expect odysseus to encounter. spindrift is when the wind is so strong that it breaks the surface tension of the water without interacting with any object and all the crests look like they're steaming, it's super cool to see. here's a really good video of the waves caused by "violent storm" winds so you can get a sense of what it might look like if the ocean was mad at you. we want mountainous waves blocking out the horizon.

here's a shot of a "storm" from the odyssey trailer.

so check the scale. this is literally described as a Gentle Breeze. like a Moderate Breeze if we're being generous. what else can you say. this is 2 seconds after a guy gets swept overboard by a wave. obviously the trailer doesn't represent the entire movie but i watched the whole three hours of that and i would say that the bigger seas occasionally got up to 3 foot swell with 2 foot chop, but usually just a 1-4ft chop on flat ocean. it's possible that it got up to force 6 but definitely not above that and im not sure it got that high, i mostly just remember confused seas with a lot of quick, smooth chop (this kind of behavior doesn't affect boats at all). occasionally it looked like they would try to use a powerboat wake to simulate swell but they shot way too close to the origin (and you can't get big swell that way) and just ended up with more sharp, confused-looking waves

as for the on-deck shots, the behavior of the ship and the conditions on deck were obviously totally inconsistent with the environment, but also comically inaccurate even for the conditions they were pretending to be in? so like first of all the ship was almost always rolling side to side, which IS the scariest and most dangerous type of motion especially in a boat shaped like that, but if you're in a storm you should be turning your boat to point into the waves so that you're pitching fore and aft instead of killing everyone on board. we should be seeing the prow dive into the front of a wave and have green water flood the front of the ship and then see nothing but sky a second later. in a ton of these "matt damon is wet and getting splashed with white water" scenes you can see the flat sea in the background and they often stop trying to make it look like the ship is moving at all from one shot to the next. the spray they throw at the crew is imo not enough to snatch someone off a deck like that, and it all looks like white water that comes from waves hitting the side of a boat and splashing up, but in a lot of cases the direction it comes from makes no physical sense. maybe that's poseidon idk. what you should see instead in this kind of situation is a whole wave breaking OVER the side of the boat and basically a solid wall of water sweeping people away, but you need big waves for that.

this is stuff that directors of maritime films work hard to perfect. even major directors like ridley scott (white squall), peter weir (master and commander), baltasar kormákur (adrift -- similar size ship to the odyssey btw), ang lee (life of pi) have developed and used strategies for showing us waves and storms that are exciting and impressive and scary. it IS understood to be an essential element of competence in this kind of film. of all these The Odyssey should be the most epic. it's The Odyssey. all maritime literature is descended from The Odyssey. but christopher nolan didn't seem interested in spending more than $100 of his thousand morbillion dollar budget on the main antagonist of the story.

there are a thousand adaptational and baseline writing decisions in the film that make it awful by any measure but people like to handwave all that on the basis that it's "visually impressive" and "exciting" But it's not that. this is the most obvious way that the DIRECTION of the film fails at one of its essential tasks. it's supposed to be a seafaring adventure but it's not because the sea is boring. there is no credit due for anything nolan did here. He showed you a gentle breeze.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell a story.

Over a decade ago, I went to a concert with my mother. The headline was Rufus Wainwright. I’m sure we presented quite a sight; the Grande Damme in Furs trotting smartly along with a skeletal giant loping languidly after her. I’m almost 2 meters tall, but in those days I barely weighed 12 stone, and could sidle between gate bars in some places. Mercifully, we had tickets, and no sidling was needed.

In the lobby of a tastefully modern (and therefore artless) theater, we discussed nothing of importance, and pointedly did not drink fancy, overpriced cocktails with the many homosexual men who milled about us. My mother has been a teetotaler since she was a child, and I was On Good Behavior. We were there for the music.

Opening for Rufus was a woman I’d never heard of: Anaïs Mitchell. I can still see her clearly: her floral sack-print dress was thin; almost as thin as her. It hung loosely around her, obscuring rather than revealing. Her voice, too, was thin; a warble, like a small bird. Far too thin and reedy for pop music, but then again she had no popular songs to play. Instead, she wanted to play a few songs from an Opera that she had just completed! A Depression-era reimagining of the Tale of Orpheus titled Hadestown. I sighed and rolled my eyes and resigned myself to boredom.

Like a lone bird on a frozen January morning, her delicate, thin voice crossed the icy, judgmental silence of hundreds of drunk hollywood queers to pierce our hearts. Nervously tapping her foot to keep time, alone with a single guitar up on that big stage, she called and returned to herself through How We Build The Wall and Our Lady of The Underground and The Wedding Song.

She sang of the dead, and of desperation. Of lean, hard people going through lean, hard times. There was too much emotion for her little larynx, and I could hear that the songs hurt to sing. All alone, tiny on that huge flat stage, she filled the air and our hearts with the song of a bird who forgot to fly south and was dying in the cold.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to hold her delicately in a cage of my arms and lie to her that everything would be alright, that wounds close, and bones knit, and tears dry, and no one will ever hit you again. It was not and is not my place to do this, but that was my urge. She was a tiny bird that had been broken, and her song was one of pain.

I purchased the album immediately and listened to it over and over and over. It became a part of me. I learned Our Lady of The Underground and performed it for a crowd of friends. I sat with a bottle of gin and sang Why We Build The Wall when Trump was elected. One oppressively hot august day, I sang Nothing Changes very quietly to myself, swallowed poison, and tried to die. When I was courting my wife, I sang her The Wedding Song; it was and is the truest expression of my heart yet set to music.

Perhaps, now that I have said all this, you can imagine the breath and depth of my joy when I saw this:

She made it! She did it! Others will hear the music! I’m so happy for her!

I’m so glad. It’s beautiful. I hope it runs for a thousand years. Thank you, Anaïs.

[stillnotmollified]

some of you weren’t around for the fan fiction dot net purge of 2002 (when they banned explicit content and mass-deleted thousands of fics) and the livejournal purge of 2007 (when they deleted hundreds of blogs, disproportionately targeting queer & kink content) and it shows

this kind of policing is why ao3 was created

remember, kids, the three laws of fandom are:

- don’t like; don’t read

- your kink is not my kink

- ship and let ship

[swordscomic]

B is for Broadsword

[lactating-deactivated20220703]

“make friends” who am i doctor franking stein

[werewolf-transgenderism]

on my slides for my class about Frankenstein today

[apathetic-revenant]

favorite bits of the cast interviews in the LOTR special features:

Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Elijah Wood and Viggo Mortensen all taking the piss out of Orlando Bloom for going on about a cracked rib too much, while Orlando Bloom desperately tries to wriggle out of talking about it (special mention to Elijah Wood’s “oh it hurts, babes, and I can’t ride the horse, babes” and Viggo Mortensen’s “they can be very fragile, elves, especially the…Mirkwood strain…”)

Ian McKellen commenting that “they never did find any suitable underwear for Gandalf…”

Dominic Monaghan going on and on about how Viggo Mortensen apparently had a crush on one of the Rohirrim extras (who like a lot of the Rohirrim extras was a woman in a fake beard) while Vigoo Mortensen just mutters “one could perhaps say something about Mr. Monaghan’s…proclivities…”

Dominic Monaghan’s imitation of John Rhys-Davies ordering food at a restaurant for the whole cast. “You have partridge? BRING THE PARTRIDGE!”

John Rhys-Davies talking about an incident with the Lothlorian boats and saying “if an elf and a dwarf are in a boat…and…the boat goes under…let us say that the blame was not placed on the elf” while Orlando Bloom splutters “he’s a big guy, man!” 

Elijah Wood talking about how the hobbit actors shared a trailer with Ian McKellen and sometimes they would hear inarticulate bellows of protest from his side when they played loud music in the mornings

Viggo Mortensen talking about how, while filming with those same boats, Kirin Shaw (Elijah Wood’s scale double) started telling him “if the boat tips over…save yourself…I can’t swim.” 

Elijah Wood describing how Sean Astin would try to direct the helicopters to land while they were on location, while the other three hobbits were screwing around and throwing pinecones at each other

Christopher Lee recounting how he had so much trouble going up some steps in Orthanc with his long robe that he stopped in the middle of the scene and said, “I cannot get up these goddamn steps, Peter.” 

Viggo Mortensen mentioning that he left a weekend rehearsal and went walking down the street still swinging his sword around, and promptly got the cops called on him

[lesbianpervinca]

[i-am-darth-feanor]

I swear I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe

[quarra]

My fav LotR extra is Peter Jackson and Christopher Lee talking about how Peter was trying to coach Lee to be more vocal during his death scene, and Lee straight up was like, “That’s not the noise people make when they die to a knife in the chest. It’s *this* noise,” and while he’s demonstrating, Peter remembers that Lee was a special forces guy in WWII and back away slowly and lets him do this thing.

[noctuamagna]

I was listening to the audiobook version of Lord of the Rings on my way home from work yesterday. The story was at the Council of Elrond.

The narrator had just finished explaining "Anduril, the Flame of the West, forged from the shards of Narsil, Elendil's blade that broke under him when he fell."

At that moment, a car cut in front of me suddenly. It had out-of-state vanity plates.

The plate proudly read ANDURIL.

[wizard-council-museum-clerk]

Obviously that was Aragorn, son of Arathorn. "There is the plate that was broken and is forged again." or something.

[latexbones]

ネズミ

mouse

2017.11.13

[teaboot]

*Sprays u with a can of "Serious String"* [you are gently covered by a loose, aerisolized tangle of high-tensile polymer weave]

[teaboot]

Fuck my baka life

[maaleaidahar]

The most powerful valar and his most loyal maia

[merilles]

Pocket Aragorn and Arwen ❤️✨

[tekiltaari]

OMG! I need a deck of playing cards with this and other couples, canon or otherwise ♥️♥️♥️.

[veni-vici-vetinari]

I just saw a reblog of that ask about your url, and it reminded me: ik the point of that line is "I came, I conquered, because I am Vetinari", but the Latin is far closer to "I came, I conquered, I Vetinar-ed" which is hilarious because it implies that to Vetinar is a verb.

"What have you been doing recently?"

"Oh, yk, just Vetinaring about the place. You?"

It brings me joy

I know the Latin phrase uses ‘Vetinari’ as a verb and that would be the mot à mot translation, I just tried to rephrase it to make it easier to understand.

I wasn’t sure if the person asking was familiar with PTerry’s shenanigans XD, but I do agree that it’s insanely hilarious

[starleaguerecruit]

Possible interpretation: "I came, I conquered, I brought my unique approach to the situation, I did what only I could have done."

He Vetinared the fuck out of that war.

[boybeetles]

You know technology literacy is dying because I saw this meme with 76k likes

F11 the full screen button? You’re scared of the full screen button? F10?? It opens the menu bar???

[boybeetles]

Computers are so scary what if I accidentally hit F12 in a steam game and it takes a screenshot. What if I press shift + F12 while in word and accidentally save my document 😖

[yetanothergreyjedi]

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

If you had to learn what the F keys on your computer do through me reblogging this post, then I'm glad you did. Computer literacy is not a skill that gets taught anymore, and it is absolutely one that needs to be taught in order to be learned. Don't ever feel bad for not knowing something, but ☝️ don't ever stop learning learning about your environment, the tools you use, and especially the people around you

[headspace-hotel]

Never stop learning+ Never stop sharing what you learned

[toodrawtothink]

Still one of the best animations I've ever done. Took just under a week and was equal parts fun and challenging. So here are some process passes! The full version had too many colors so I had to do some compression T0T

As always, no ai.

[sexboobomb]

I want to learn more exclamations that aren’t strictly just religious stuff. “Jesus Christ” this, “oh my god” that, nah I want something fresh.

What are some of y’all’s favorite exclamations that aren’t about god?

[sexboobomb]

first submission and we're already off to a fantastic start. absolutely love this one thank you

[sexboobomb]

ok its time for the challenge round now we want nominations that arent about sex either actually

[mbrainspaz]

had a friend who used to make new ones up on the spot. The only one that stuck with me was 'good golly jelly beans'. If something catastrophic happens I go for 'that's not ideal.'

[foldingfittedsheets]

@chekhovs-tantrum

Absolutely not letting you leave these in the tags.

[yoritsukikawa]

Tyto inexspectata

Sulawesi golden owl/ミナハサメンフクロウ

150mm×150mm

acrylic gouache

2026