| Good evening, all, Stormwind Ark article up and running. Please let me know if you see any egregious mistakes; I was sick for a bit, and my mind still seems somewhat foggy. (Getting better, I hope.) Life goes on: dissertation, applying for jobs (among my least favorite activities), work, scholarship, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum. Despite the list, I love it all. Hope you're all well, Talbot |  Dusk at Lake Xiang (湘湖), near Hangzhou, China. (I took this photo . . . in 2013? The last decade seems just a small ripple in a greater lake.) |
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Hey, all,
I'll be doing a Q&A with Linktober's Creator Con on Saturday, June 15. The time hasn't been decided yet, but I've opted for a slot in the late morning or early afternoon, EST. If you have any questions for me that you'd like me to know up front, please submit them here: https://forms.gle/gvt6WRzLrsDe48EEA If it's a simple question or you just want to hang out, no need to prepare anything in advance! Hope to see you there. Best, T  Sundown by George Inness (1884) Hello, all,
It's been a while, hasn't it? I've been as busy as I've ever been this semester, which has left precious little time for Zelda. (I have been spending my scant free time reading Hesse and Eliot and playing Oracle of Seasons/Ages.) All that being the case, I have finally finished my Tears of the Kingdom review (which has kindly been helped along by a few of my friends). The review is very long, but I'm happy with it. The game took me a long while to complete, and the review took a commensurate amount of time. I have tried to approach the game fair-mindedly, with a clear eye to the game's excesses, failings, and achievements. You'll have to be the judge of my judgments, of course. Unrelatedly, I was looking into some statistics for my website to see what was being read. The most popular articles for the past month were the Shadow Temple (278 unique views), Gerudo Town and the Great Desert (156 views), Monster Strongholds (140), A Thematic Unmasking of Majora's Mask (123, which surprised me), and Zora's Domain (105). This has always been the case, but Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild articles always seem to sit at the top. In eighth place, we have Twilight Princess (The Palace of Twilight), and yet farther down are the Arbiter's Grounds. No sign of The Wind Waker or Skyward Sword at all, and no mention of riddles! I'm not sure what this says, but I hope that's of slight interest to anyone. Also, this year for Linktober's Zelda Creator Con, I was considering doing a Q&A session where people could pop in and . . . ask me questions. Let me know if there's any interest in that. I hope you're all well. - Talbot  San Antonio Missions, Texas — Mission San José Howdy, folks,
I realized about a year ago that the riddles needed some love. They had been in autopilot for a while, and so I decided to reorganize them with a close friend. Most remain in the same place, many have moved, and some have been rewritten. They have all, I hope, been made better. The balance between beginning, middling, and challenging is more even, and I hope the reformatting is helpful to those of you who engage in the riddle-game. As always, let me know if you have any guesses, and I'll help you along or tell you if you're correct! Hope you're all enjoying Tears. - T
 More and more I feel like these three absurd apes building a trestle table: I have vague pretensions to understanding or knowledge, but then I realize my primate fallibility and wonder just what my trestle table is for: is it a firm foundation for understanding, a platform for greater knowledge, or just a nice place to sit and eat bananas? Ultimately, it's a bit of all three. I really do view humanity and its work as important (at least for humanity, and perhaps also for the universe), but I also think we need to remind ourselves of our apish history and sensibilities. This has the happy result of achieving two things: it allows us to laugh at ourselves while simultaneously bringing us a sense of true awe as we witness just what we've accomplished in spite (or perhaps because?) of our limitations. We seem quite jumped-up little creatures, and yet we've managed skyscrapers, DNA, and depictions of three apes building a trestle table. And, really, is there more we could do? Probably not.
Why this little reflection? Well, I am a reflective person, I suppose, and lately I've been particularly perplexed at the state of human knowledge and epistemology. We seem to simultaneously know so much, and yet so precious little. We also seem to not know how we know what we claim to know. Questions like these seem to trouble few people, likely as they open the floodgates of bottomless skepticism or aimless navel-gazing, but they are worth thinking about. Buddhism holds that ignorance is one of the Three Poisons, and this valley of confusion might be a necessary journey for most of us. As we get along our path, it might behoove us to remember the above image. "What am I but an ape building a trestle table?" This is all to say: I've completed a new article on the Great Fairy Fountains of Hyrule, and it is . . . as vibrant as the Great Fairies themselves. And I will say no more. Good night, sweet dreams, and happy waking. - Talbot
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