For a while my friends had a band called the tricky dicks.

The logo was Nixon riding a white sperm whale.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Legs out for Captain Ahab.

Writing? Queequeg-Ishmael yaoi shows up on Google Images, this stuff is way beyond just dark corners.

Where 👀👀👀

(Asking for a friend)

There are also a few, more recent companion books that give a lot of historical context to both Melville and whaling, etc

Why Read Moby Dick? By Nathaniel Philbrick

Ahab's Rolling Sea, by Richard J King

This sort of advice would be more useful 200 pages ago... but anyway it's always good to search for an annotated edition. I read Norton critical edition,* it was really good, had diagrams showing what the different parts of the boat are called, a glossary, supplementary essays, and throughout the text all sorts of footnotes (some of them maybe too explicitly interpretative, but oh well). But I believe even the slightly more modest but still seriously prepared editions such as Oxford World Classics would do the job.

* a critical edition means the editors didn't just reproduce an existing text, but worked off the most "original" materials available, such as the first edition or the author's own manuscripts

Here's a History Channel special about the story that inspired Moby Dick. I've never read Moby Dick, but there were things discovered in a journal well after the book came out that are pretty wild.

Cheers dickhead, online resources are key when youre reading those old nautical tales!

It’s one of the very small number of books to defeat me. The narrative part was okay but every other chapter was full of wildly inaccurate “natural history” descriptions of whales and their lives and I just couldn’t take it.

I've had it on my reading list for over a decade... One day I'll get to it. Does it still hold up?