The Architecture of the Legend of Zelda
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    • Ocarina of Time >
      • The Great Deku Tree
      • Dodongo's Cavern
      • The Forest Temple
      • The Fire Temple
      • The Water Temple
      • The Shadow Temple
      • The Spirit Temple
      • Fairy Fountains of Hyrule
      • Ganon's Castle
      • The Temple of Time
    • Majora's Mask >
      • A Thematic Unmasking of Majora's Mask
      • Clock Town and the Heart of Termina
      • Woodfall and the Southern Swamp
      • Snowhead and the Lands of the North
      • Great Bay Temple and the Western Coast
      • Ikana Kingdom and the Eastern Desert
      • On Spider Houses and Greed within The Legend of Zelda
      • Majora's Mask 3Ds — An Enumeration of Changes
    • The Wind Waker >
      • Outset Island
      • Dragon Roost Island
      • The Forsaken Fortress
      • Tower of the Gods
      • The Earth Temple
      • The Wind Temple
      • Ganon's Tower
      • Ancient Hyrule Castle
    • Twilight Princess >
      • Ordona Province and the Meaning of Twilight
      • Faron Woods and the Forest Temple
      • Cultures of Eldin Province
      • Lakebed Temple and the Lands of the Zora
      • The Arbiter's Grounds
      • Snowpeak Ruins
      • Sacred Grove and the Temple of Time
      • The City in the Sky
      • The Twilight Realm and the Palace of Twilight
      • The Hylian Architectural Tradition
    • Skyward Sword >
      • Skyloft and the Provenance of Legend
      • The Sealed Grounds and Intentions of the Goddess
      • Faron Woods and Skyview Temple
      • The Earth Temple of Eldin Volcano
      • Ancient Cultures of Lanayru Desert
      • Lake Floria and the Ancient Cistern
      • The Lanayru Sand Sea
      • The Fire Sanctuary
      • Sky Keep and the Isle of Songs
    • Breath of the Wild >
      • Breath of the Wild — Review
      • Ancient Sheikah Art and Architecture
      • Kakariko Village
      • Hateno Village and the Ancient Tech Labs
      • Lurelin Village
      • Tarrey Town and Modular Hyrulean Architecture
      • Stronghold of the Yiga Clan
      • Gerudo Town and the Great Desert
      • On Stables
      • Zora's Domain
      • Goron City and Death Mountain
      • Rito Village and the Wild's Frontier
      • The Fang & Bone — The Hunt Across Hyrule
      • Great Fairy Fountains of Hyrule
      • Monster Strongholds
      • Lodges: Unlooked-for Welcomes
    • Tears of the Kingdom >
      • Note to Wayfarers
      • Tears of the Kingdom Review
      • The Legendary Stormwind Ark
      • Lost Gorondia Rediscovered
    • Random Articles >
      • The Great Deku Tree: A Triumph of Aided Discovery
      • Are the Arbiter’s Grounds the Spirit Temple of Antiquity?
      • The King of Red Lions
      • A Bathhouse in Hyrule
      • The Mirror of Demise
      • To the Fishing Hole
      • The Stone Talus and Architectural Reverie
    • Riddles >
      • A Rough Guide to Riddling
      • Simple
      • Middling
      • Challenging
  • About the Author
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An Eye to the Future, An Eye to the Past

4/14/2025

1 Comment

 
Picture
The windswept shores of Acadia National park, Maine, U.S.A. Taken last month.
This post's title may make it seem as though I've gone cross-eyed, and, in a way, I suppose I have. My future eye is already looking to tie up loose ends as I finish my Ph.D. My dissertation is complete, defended, and in the final stages of edits. A major job interview within two weeks. Graduation in less than a month. And then . . . moving (again) to a different state, starting a new career, making new friends, seeing a new area, adding the introduction to a new chapter. In short: the relative unknown. My past eye has been digesting my graduate studies of the past four years: my wonderful friends, colleagues, mentors, and partner; my academic triumphs and travails; the new skills and mindsets I've acquired (not all of which are healthy, I might add); the things I've read, digested, researched, and published; and the places I've been as a result of attending conferences and presenting. In short: the culmination of four years of very difficult, rewarding, wonderful work. 

I've also been revisiting this website quite a lot, as I tend to do when feeling sentimental.
I've had quite a few people want to cite my work, and I never have dates for them. So, as with everything in life, I had the unconscious bubbling-up of a desire to look at when I first began to publish things. Tracking dates down required quite a bit of triangulation between my website, Google Drive, older hard-drives with Microsoft Word documents, my journal, and my memory. The first thing I wrote (Water Temple, Ocarina of Time) was in July of 2013. It's now April, 2025. Almost a dozen years. Of course, after I found that out, I was interested: What about the timeline for the rest of my writings? Can I put a date to everything? Well, not to go into too much detail, but, mostly: Yes. I can put a solid date to all but one or two things—and even then I have a rough idea. So, if you open up most any article now, you should see a date at the top. Hopefully that's helpful to someone. Mostly, it was fascinating and meaningful to me, and I spent a happy afternoon today tracing the development of my thoughts and writings over time. Someday, I'll go back and edit my early articles; they can be rough in all sorts of ways. (One is always critical of one's past writing.) For now, though, I'll continue exploring Gorondia and putting myself in a cavelike frame of mind.

I hope you're all well, wherever you are,

​Talbot
Picture
Sunrise at Acadia, Dawning of a New Day
1 Comment

November, Already?

11/2/2024

2 Comments

 
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
Picture
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.)
2 Comments

Linktober Creator Con Q&A

5/3/2024

2 Comments

 
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
2 Comments

Tears of the Kingdom Review

3/31/2024

7 Comments

 
Picture
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
7 Comments

The Great Reshuffling

6/21/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
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
0 Comments

Once Again Upon Us

5/11/2023

6 Comments

 
Well, a new Zelda game is once again upon us. Tears of the Kingdom (as is news to no one at this point) drops tomorrow. Already the reviews are rolling out, but I'm avoiding them like lice. (A good review is like a good stew: it takes a lovely simmering of a good many things over a long period of time.)

To mark the occasion, I just finished the article on Hyrule's Lodges, which is now up. Happy reading, and happy playing. 

​- Talbot
Picture
Sencha tea in a gaiwan -- a spring afternoon
6 Comments

Monster Strongholds

3/5/2023

8 Comments

 
Picture
West Lake, Hangzhou, China. Taken by me.
Well, it's been a while, which is par for the course. Life goes on, with me feeling like butter scraped over too much bread. Welcome to modernity, eh? But, overall, I'm as content as a clam doing what I'm doing. Life is continually interesting, and I've no complaints. (And what good does complaining do, anyway?)

New article up on Monster Strongholds in Breath of the Wild, which leaves me with just two (???) more articles left. I realized the other day that I've been writing about that game for SIX YEARS now. That's sobering. And Tears of the Kingdom (a name I don't love) comes out very soon, which means even more content about which to write. I was hoping to have one game done before the next came out, but that's highly unlikely, given that I still need to write a probably-vast article about Hylian architecture. But, first, Lodges! 
                                                                - T
8 Comments

Human Projects and Apish Sentiments

9/26/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
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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Looking for Cool Safflina . . .

8/6/2022

2 Comments

 
Summer has felt a small eternity, full of comings and goings. I haven't been home in about two months, which has taken something of a toll on me, though the travels have been joyous and meaningful. School begins soon, and it should prove a busy semester. Trying to get through some personal projects before then, including a (short) essay on the Great Fairy Fountains from Breath of the Wild. Otherwise, just a few new riddles and some new headings for the website! 

Summer is always an odd time for me, torn as I am between the doing of things and the reflecting on them. On one hand, I desire to be "out and about" in the world, as I have been for the past two months; yet, on the other, I desire to curl up under a tree and read poetry, doing nothing but loaf around. And the closer we get to autumn, the stronger the second pull will become, until activity comes largely to a halt (as it moves to more mental landscapes). Hope you're all well, and surviving the current heat. 

​- Talbot

Picture
At the MET's Cloisters in New York
2 Comments

Long Ways to Go Yet . . .

2/4/2022

4 Comments

 
Picture
On a lake in Wisconsin in a long-past summer.

The semester is now duly underway! I must say that my brain is not naturally built for linear regression (or statistics more generally). But, as with all things, I'll give it a go and try to pick up and master what I can.

I hope things are well with you wherever you are. We are in month 7,832 of winter here in New England, and I am beginning to feel the siren-call of springtime. I want little more than to open my door and feel a warming breeze . . .

On a more germane topic to our purposes, today I sat down for a bit of reflection on this website, and revamped the "About the Author" section. I don't know if this section holds value at all, or if it is just an exercise of the ego-self, but there you have a bit of a window into what I'm up to here: my process and person.

- Talbot
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    The universe of The Legend of Zelda is replete with multifarious architectural oddities, beautiful and resonating structures, and ineffably-mysterious temples hidden in the remote corners of the world. It is my hope to explore said places, shedding light upon some of their salient features, and fulfilling the goals laid out by the introduction, the main goal of which is to help people understand and appreciate the unspoken, yet deeply-felt, allure of these locations and structures.

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