Beautiful tattoo work...and video game reveries

- 2 minutes read - 272 words

Legend of Zelda-themed tatoo:

Link

I wrote in a previous entry that I thought Elyse Luray-Marx was an ideal woman (still think she is, but married :) ).

I think that Zelda is certainly a Platonic ideal of a woman, er, elven woman - er 8-bit-video-game-elven woman.

When kidnapped by an evil machinating wizard (Ganon), Zelda had the Triforce of Wisdom broken into several pieces that were hidden in several dungeons throughout her kingdom (Hyrule). The only way these pieces could be reunited was by a cutting display of wit and and flash of elven steel.

And it would truly be a most munificent (Thanks Sid Meier’s “Civilization” for that 25-cent word) leader that chose to hide the Triforce of Wisdom not of Power – because power is always overcome by wisdom (a fact apparently lost at the Pentagon).

There was something wonderful and blissfully innocent about the days when video game technology was too weak to render action as “real-life”. Instead we had glyphs that were rich enough to trigger our imagination, characters that were noble and good, and rich fantasy worlds that - to this day - call us back like sirens. Heck look at the still-popular game Nethack - the enemies and characters were “@“s and “$“s.

Even today, I own Legend of Zelda for my GameBoy Advance, and plan on picking up Super Mario 3 (landmark!) and playing those games again and again. It’s hard to imagine that 10-20 years later kids are going to want to visit the nihilistic festival that is Grand Theft Auto or Doom when their Playstation 10’s will be delivering “real adrenal cortex feedback”.