Platypus of Truth

I really did beat it, you know; The Legend of Zelda . -not in 1987, but in 2018. I might blame those old lithium batteries that deleted your game at the worst possible moment. That happened to me in grad school. I guess I've been waiting more than 30 years to see the end of the darn thing. Simple as it was, I liked it. The Legend of Zelda , the original NES version, will always be the ur-video game for me. If A Link to the Past  is Aeschylus, Sophocles is Ocarina of Time , and Twilight Princess is Euripides, then this is the Homer from which they all sprung. There's a magic and a wonder in the raw simplicity of its design, in the inevitability of its limited digital vocabulary, the steady drone of its music, that has as much power to enchant today as it did 30 years ago. Zelda is now its own Neo-Platonic mythology with endless branches and variations still leading young souls up the ladder of wonder to the primal unity of Virtue. Still, the highest does not stand without

The Funeral Let us now speak of those things we do not speak of. Let there be five-minutes' honesty in this family. We shall speak all the good we did not say because we were offended, or because it hurt too much to temper evil or offer it the slightest justification. Let us speak the evil we do not speak because it is always the understood foundation of all our interactions; Banquo's ghost at every Thanksgiving meal. Let us dare to make confession before the Dead and this casket be a holy altar where only family may sing to one who knows the place beyond us where no shadows fall. For we are family, and we will have Five-minutes' honesty At this time or never.