There is wisdom everywhere but this EarthBound Essay by Bookwarm is all about the pursuit of wisdom and where it can be found.
Essay
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and…
Here we are at the end of the EarthBound series; on the one hand a final chapter, but also a part of something bigger.
I’ve also tried to avoid simply singing the game’s praises, but I have to say, as a video game experience, the final boss fight of EarthBound, and what comes after, is unique and mesmerizing, a fitting end to this long journey, so it’s well worth the time to play it.
When perhaps you begin to doubt yourself and despair, darkly wondering if this place, of all places, would not receive you, Ness and his friends are let into the living room. It is to put you in the position Pokey was in that fateful night, when he thought his little brother was lost, and he pounded on the door of the one friend he might have to help him.
Now, on to Magicant, this place opened up within Ness’ mind, perhaps preexisting there and unlocked, or perhaps created by the Sound Stone and the eight Your Sanctuary locations.
I never bothered to look it up or found out or anything, but why do you think they selected “EarthBound” to be the English, western name for the game?
With the eighth sanctuary, Fire Spring, today we’ll complete the final note in the Sound Stone’s melody. Thus today’s will be a highly musical episode, so I could wish I were more knowledgeable on that subject, but at least I can play some clips of the songs under discussion and you can decide for yourself how far to go with my amateur musicology.
In terms of historical and literary precursors here, EarthBound’s Lost Underworld clearly owes something to conventions established in the Hollow Earth sci-fi subgenre, starting back with Jules Verne again, his Journey to the Center of the Earth, and to Arthur Conan Doyle, with his Up-esque plateau of un-extinct dinosaurs in The Lost World.
Like a great tapestry, vertical and horizontal threads have met and become intertwined, creating a huge, beautiful image.
That’s pretty germane to where I’m at right now with EarthBound, actually. Because Ness, where we left off, he’s about to be in a world of his mind’s creation. It’s sort of his dream or his imagination, and we’re going to see how he returns to the waking world, to real life, at the end of that.
Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, Overcoming Shyness, and EarthBound.
The implication is all too plain: the kind of excellence represented by Dungeon Man’s total surrender to game-making and -playing is limiting if there is a goal beyond it. Brick Road’s narrow expertise is arrested by its own greatness.
The kraken (/ˈkrɑːkən/)[1] is a legendary cephalopod-like sea monster of giant size that is said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. Authors over the years have postulated that the legend originated from sightings of giant squids that may grow to 13–15 meters (40–50 feet) in length. The sheer size and fearsome appearance attributed to the kraken have made it a common ocean-dwelling monster in various fictional works.
Serialized specially for The Well-Red Mage, based on the podcast by Wesley Schantz
The greatest mnemonic devices for me, though, aside from the Sound Stone, are museums themselves, or libraries, or any of these new media which reproduce them and all they contain digitally–these treasure-houses which do not hoard up but freely pass on invaluable memories, the stories of events and artifacts we tell one another, transmitting them and their mass of meanings and interrelations from one generation to the next just as we hand down the books and heirlooms themselves.
First, why Stoic Club? It’s a reference to the respected school of philosophy, arguably as important as Plato’s or Aristotle’s strains of the inquiring spirit of Socrates, whom the Stoics also laid claim to as their model.
What is it actually measuring when we have a number that measures IQ?
Rules are best thought of as the constraints within which freedom, fun, meaning become possible, fun being the exploration of those latent possibilities in things.
The City: a space within which infinite stories might take place.
In this, it represents the curious paradox whereby something good in itself becomes terribly disfigured by attracting too much popularity, when beautiful or desirable places are destroyed by the masses of people attracted to their life-changing potential.
‘This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.’
This too, elation and lightness, easy come, easy go, is how friendship feels, along with a mysterious voice in the night, or that person who’s always there, that helping one another to set out on life’s adventures even if it means that your paths should diverge, still establishing a bond living in memory–all this is part of friendship.
As far as character traits, playing in other people’s shoes also lets you temporarily let go of some of the things that you normally in real life are, your personality, and see the world in a different way.
Serialized specially for The Well-Red Mage, based on the podcast by Wesley Schantz
“A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.”
…it struck me on playing through this time that Paula is the only one of your four friends you don’t play as independently prior to their joining the quest.
Aristotle comes to the point where he says friendship is sort of the best model for what genuine truth-seeking and genuine ethics would look like.
Socratic is a term which gets thrown around a lot in education circles, but I still think it can be a helpful one for distinguishing a kind of philosophical ideal–a community of learners pursuing truth in honesty, sincerely, in friendship and with courage…
