Thoughts ⇌ Jason

Chef's hoodie

I asked Chef what his hoody text meant in the photo below, and he told me "All fish are scum". He then tried to explain it, but I had trouble grasping the meaning.

Weeks later, I then asked Gemini, and ended up with this transcript which I still struggle to understand, but it gets me a little closer.

The parts I find interesting are:

This is actually using a form of "leet speak" that I learned as a kid growing up on the Internet where a combination of letters and numbers are used to sound like a fancy 1337 ("elite") h4x0r ("hacker"). But Chef's hoodie saying is the equivalent for the cyrillic (Russian) alphabet. It's cool to see that even growing up across on opposite sides of the world there are still parts of our upbringing that are the same.
The saying itself, what it means, and where it comes from, don't have any connection to me, and it's cool to see things so different/foreign even when parts of them are so familiar.

Kayaking day 2

Another day of kayaking! This one had an even more spectacular set of penguin exposures. I don't have a good picture or video of it below, but there was one point where we went into a little cove (it was only big enough for two of us at a time) where there were literally penguins surrounding us, so close that I could have reached out with my paddle to several of them.

But these penguins were just going about their daily routines, sleeping, chasing each other around, or for several of them: bathing. Splashing in the shallow water like it was the greatest thing in the world.

I sat there for several minutes just soaking in the "penguin-ness" and trying to imagine myself being one of them.

Today was a more "normal" Antarctic weather day with low flying overcast clouds.

From further out.

On the second half of this kayak trip (just Jason, Mike, and I were on kayaks with Chef and Doug on the dingy), we got to spend some time up close and personal with some icebergs. I couldn't capture it here but one of them in particular had these incredible blues. So deep they felt ultraviolet at one point.

We had to be careful though, because a significant danger from icebergs is that the slightest provocation can cause them to suddently and catastrophically invert. This can be due to melting under the water making them top heavy but just waiting to "reset" and crashing down on you in the process.

We didn't see any do this, but it's a constant danger.

One thing I did experience was using my pole (I described last post) to push icebergs out of the way of Ice Bird. This gave me a real physicality to just how incredibly massive and dense these icebergs are. And hard. Basically chunks of steel, sharpened by nature and ready to take out their cold anger on anything around them.

This ice ad some beautiful color to it. I'm not certain, but I think this is from an algae that grows on the surface of the ice/snow. In these pictures, it just looks dirty, but in person it was much more of a subtle ochre or perhaps sienna.

The water was exceptionally clear throughout Antarctica with visibility of 10-15 feet. And there was very little fauna growth under the water as well, a few species of kelp I could see from time to time, but almost no barnacles or other types of growth that you're used to under the water line.

Cruise ship

One of the cruise ships we saw while down there, they had dingy's ferrying people to the penguin beach but we kept out of their way. Cool paint scheme though!

Ridiculous

It just doesn't come through on camera (try opening the full size for just a taste) but these ice formations are optically mesmerizing. Layers of detail and pleasing organic flows make these mountains pleasing to look like for hours. But you get jaded because they are all around you all the time.

Scenes like these are when I wish I had some huge mirrorless DSLR sensor with some fancy glass.