Submarine Highlights (live right now!!!!)
My friend Lily clued me into these guys, it's a team of scientists doing live color commentary as a robotic submersible explores the bottom of the ocean. They don't really know what they're going to see and you can hear their enthusiasm as they find, for instance, a whale carcass, or when they compete to correctly identify a tiny little octopus. They broadcast the dives live on YouTube, and it's a little bit like watching baseball in that there's a lot of mellow chatter between events, and you can tune in for the whole thing or just have it going in the background and then shift your focus when you hear the voices get excited.
I was going to post a highlight reel (and I will do that too), But I just realized that they're live now (Thursday November 14, 11ish). so here's a link to that: [https://nautiluslive.org/]. It's ongoing for an unspecified time-- if it's on now just click over and let it go in the background. Otherwise here's the highlight reel from a few years ago. It's like watching a year long homerun montage, it's a good entry point but not representative of the reality of the game:
They get a pretty nice team together for each dive, and different commentators have their specialized interests, which they'll zip in and spiel about when an opportunity presents itself-- a crab head, a siphoniphore head, a benthic zone head. Still, most of the commentary is like "wowwwwwwwww...". Occasionally they'll ask the driver of the robot "can we go left a little bit" or "can we zoom in", occasionally someone's mic isn't on and they're like "Terry your mic's not on. I don't think your mic's on Terry."
I imagine that it's between 2 to 5 people clustered around a monitor inside a van somewhere, communicating by radio to 2 other groups of 4 or 5 people in different vans, located elsewhere. Everyone has been working for months leading up to this moment and they're very excited to be there, but they're also too good at their job to hoot and holler like Dick Vitale when something actually happens. Also you feel like they've been awake for 40 hours by this point and probably jetlagged and insane, eating whatever calories are available at the nearest 7-11 to wherever they parked. Some of these guys might have actual friendships and some are just work friends, but the baseline is respect, for every voice that scratches through the radio.
The archive of full dives is here: [https://www.youtube.com/@nautiluslivediverecordings1064]. If you have 2 monitors at your work station, this is a really nice thing to have on. You can mute it and treat it like a screensaver, or keep the sound on for a calming patter. I recommend messing around a little to try and find the right music to go with it. That will vary by listener of course. I like these Clicks & Cuts comps-- [Clicks + Cuts, YouTube] but anything on Mille Plateux is going to work great [Mille Plateaux, Bandcamp]. "Larry Heard Mix" is another great search term if you like deep house, and you could make the case that the benthic zone is the deepest house this planet's ever had. Here's a mix chosen at random: [Tribute To Larry Heard, YouTube]. I know some of you are going to read this and come away thinking "I gotta look up a Dick Vitale reel later", so here's that too :) [Dick Vitale Best Calls Of All Time, YouTube]. Sorry for crossing sports references in this post. OK, I've got the live stream, the Larry Heard mix, and the Dick Vitale reel going all at once right now, it's pretty nice. Remember you can adjust the volume on the video until you get a blend you like.
Please be aware that as is the case with most science activities, almost nothing happens for a long time, and then what happens is pretty slight. I don't have to remind the readers of this newsletter that we are not here for the greatest hits. The greatest hit is simply being alive on this big blue marble.
Peace everyone :)
If someone sent you this video because you like deep sea videos and/or deep house audio, you may enjoy other things I've written as well. And if you enjoy this newsletter as much as anything you regularly spend $5 a month on, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is Pleasant Realms, an email newsletter about mostly non-stressful YouTube videos. Sorry for any typos, I'm rushing to get this out while the submarine's still broadcasting!!!
There’s a not too dissimilar kind of peace-state video that’s on the tv in rooms in intensive care sometimes. It’s a continuum of scenes from nature, featuring babbling streams and sunny meadows, where an occasional deer or rodent ambles by. Absolutely no humans in evidence, and no disturbing animal drama (such as big fish gulping small, or death battles between scorpion and praying mantis). Needless to say, these video streams are well-edited. At night, the scene shifts to the stars, and in deep night to deep space.
I watched a lot of this one night while staying over in a chair in my mother’s ICU room the week she died.
I was staying over while visiting my son in Queens one night, and he left a similar feed on the living room tv while I was getting to sleep on the couch-sofa there. The submersible was scanning along closer to the bottom than in your linked compilation here, and the pattern was even more low-key. It was a pretty amazing background for transitioning to sleep.